Ryan Carson over at DropSend has been chronicling his attempts to sell his company. I admire his transparency, as an entrepreneur it's fun to read along at home. His name dropping accounts of failed acquisitions though may be breaking some sort of unspoken rule.

A commenter on TechCrunch mentioned how it should be fair game, since most companies are just interested in getting details on competition rather than making a serious acquisition offer. The cynic in me would like to agree, but I still think it may be best to turn the other cheek.

We've had both at Emurse, the serious and the not so serious. Hell, we've had a company bring in a team of engineers with notebooks to hear us describe how we do certain things. I guess we just figured if they're going to rip us off, they'll do it no matter what. You just have to be smarter and faster in the places where you can. If you're innovating and people are copying, we figure that means we're in the drivers seat.

But are faux pas and failed deals worth burning bridges with inappropriate name dropping? At least in our case, absolutely not. Everyone we've talked to has led to interesting and beneficial relationships. Even visiting the company with the note taking engineers, we found a cultural environment we could relate to and a host of intelligent thinkers.

As an entrepreneur, I'm grateful for Carson's posts. Then again, I'm not someone looking to talk to him about a possible acquisition. Actually... maybe we should... I wonder how much traffic his blog gets ;)