"A quarter of the company's value walked out the door," a tipster says, and suggests that Cselle might take some of Xobni's engineering talent, including one of the founders, with him. Bonforte, formerly an executive at Yahoo, had a reputation there for being either loved or hated. At a large company, management can shuffle employees and executives around to make up for personality mismatches. At a startup, there's no room for such errors of judgment.