This is sad. We're in a similar space as Val Town (which technically made us competitors) but I've always appreciated the care they had for the craft and the values they drove forward as a company like their transparency (even their investor updates were public).

Steve and Tom also individually have some of the best blogs out on the web.

I wish them all the best with whatever comes next. I'm pretty sure they'll all do great things.

I'm really sad about this. Val Town is a beautiful collection of ideas, but I get how building a sustainable business on top of those ideas (not-quite commodity hosting, since people need to commit to the Val way of building) is extremely hard.

I'm definitely looking forward to seeing the code in February when they open source it.

I've spoken to Steve a few times and he gave great advice.

I'm sorry to hear this didn't work out for him, but there's no doubt that he'll get the next one (or maybe the one after that).