Maybe Pratchett was onto something when wrote this:
"Mention has already been made of an attempt to inject a little honesty into reporting on the Disc, and how poets and bards were banned on pain of - well, pain - from going on about babbling brooks and rosy-fingered dawn and could only say for example, that a face had launched a thousand ships if they were able to produce certified dockyard accounts. "
> In 2004, TextDrive bootstrapped itself as a hosting company through crowd funding: customers were invited to invest money in exchange for free hosting for the lifetime of the company.[39] TextDrive and, later, Joyent repeated the money-raising procedure a number of times in order to avoid the venture capital market.[40][41][42] and began to flounder, suffering from an absence of leadership and plagued by reliability issues, with users leaving for other hosts.[42]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyent
They took money from people and failed to uphold their end of the bargain.