From Searchme CEO Randy Adams' letter to Mike Arrington:
"You are correct, we haven’t closed the financing. We knew when we started the company that to compete with the likes of Microsoft, Google and Yahoo,it was going to take at least $100 million, half to build the back end across thousands of servers and half to get distribution (maybe more with Microsoft spending $100 million on Bing advertising alone). What we didn’t plan on was the terrible downturn in the economy which made it impossible to raise another $50 million to get distribution (mainly through toolbar deals). In this economy nobody wants to invest that kind of money in a company that is pre-revenue, even if the net result is potentially a multi-billion dollar company."
So wait a sec... this company raised $46 million to compete with Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo!, knowing full well it would take at least $100, they still have no revenue, and it's actually news that they're going offline.
Can I see what your investor pitch looked like?
High burn...check.
Big, successful competitors...check.
No revs after $46 million in... check.
And here I am trying to go up against big dumb job boards that everyone thinks should die, trying to raise $2 million, and on the verge of generating some revs after $550k in...