In a blog post Dziuba wrote that he was leaving the company “mostly because I’m going to be a father in March and need some stability, but also because I’m tired of the fight.”

Earlier this month Dziuba restarted his blog, Uncov, which generally mocks startups and entrepreneurs. The blog was shut down just a few days before Pressflip (then called Persai) originally launched.

In July I reviewed Pressflip and gave it a thumbs down, saying “Pressflip is far from launch ready, and under normal circumstances we’d add a page on Crunchbase for them and move on until it became interesting or went into the deadpool.” I also noted that it was much harder to build a startup than it was to simply criticize them, and wondered if Dziuba and his cofounders would have what it takes to keep fighting:

Pressflip/Uncov is a perfect illustration of The Man In The Arena quote from a 1910 Theodore Roosevelt speech given in Paris. It’s awfully easy to criticize the work of others but incredibly difficult to build something unique yourself. The Uncov guys are now in the arena, and failing. We’ll see if they have what it takes to take their hits and keep fighting.

I guess we now know the answer. At least for Dziuba, the answer to whether he has any fight left in him for Pressflip is a resounding no.

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The search results aren’t very deep compared to established blog search engines, there’s no RSS for the future search results that I can find and the training feature isn’t intuitive or explained clearly anywhere. Pressflip is far from launch ready, and under normal circumstances we’d add a page on Crunchbase for them and move on until it became interesting or went into the deadpool.

Persai/Pressflip has some notoriety because the founders, Ted Dziuba, Matt Kent and Kyle Shank, previously wrote a blog called Uncov, which focused primarily on tearing apart startups and the entrepreneurs behind them. Uncov has now been taken down, although a review is here) It was a blog that, while overly harsh at times, provided a good counterbalance to much of the sometimes overly positive coverage of startups. And, it was extremely funny.

But Uncov was just a hobby for the Pressflip founders as they raised small amounts of angel financing and worked away on their startup. Perhaps the workload from Pressflip became too much, or perhaps they realized that the startup they were building was turning into exactly the kind of thing that they would tear apart clinically on their blog, but they shut down Uncov just a few days before Persai first launched.

Pressflip/Uncov is a perfect illustration of The Man In The Arena quote from a 1910 Theodore Roosevelt speech given in Paris. It’s awfully easy to criticize the work of others but incredibly difficult to build something unique yourself. The Uncov guys are now in the arena, and failing. We’ll see if they have what it takes to take their hits and keep fighting.

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