Cofounder here. Since you guys are speculating, I thought I'd jump in and try to answer a few questions and help where I can.

tl:dr it's a really hard business because matching developers to companies who are willing to pay for your services to find those developers is extremely hard work. Mostly the companies have some issue that makes it hard for them to find people, which is why they hire you in the first place.

First off: mark242, you're right about some of what you say, but not all of it. The truth is that the "talent war" isn't really as bad as a lot of people make it out to be. The real problem is that there's a huge disconnect between what developers want and what companies want. To give one example, a lot of our really highly talented developers really only want to work remotely. For some, there are family obligations, and for others it's just preference. But most SV startups don't really want to hire remote workers. And the ones that do, well they honestly don't have nearly as hard a time finding people who want to work for them. And as such you're right, they don't really care to pay any company 20% of first year salary to do their recruiting for them.

What we'd hoped to accomplish, and fell short on in the end, was a way for developers with non-traditional backgrounds find gainful employment. In Silicon Valley, where I suspect you are, this really isn't that big of a deal. Every company out there is looking at Github before they're looking at, for instance, college degrees. But here in the middle of the country, this is still a huge problem. If I'm a developer without a CS degree or significant experience, it doesn't matter that I've been writing code since I was 8 years old. So, Open Source contributions were the first logical place for us to look for a more objective measure of ability. The system was far from perfect, but it was a start.

So who's paying 20%? Non-sexy companies, or large companies that can't really handle all of the recruiting work and would rather pay money than spend time, and companies that have something they're up against--maybe a bad location, or a specific need, or whatever. This isn't the case always, but it is often enough to make it a damn hard business.

And who among developers are looking for jobs? Folks with specific needs, or who are in weird locations, or who have something working against them, like a lack of experience or a desire to switch technologies or whatever.

So those two things don't link up too well. Developer Auction and other similar sites will probably figure that out soon enough. So if you're going to do recruiting for a company you're going to have to reach out to developers who fit, unsolicited, because those are the ones who match the positions you're hiring for. Only rarely will your existing pool of mostly misfits match up with your existing pool of misfit companies. And keep in mind I don't mean misfit in a derogatory fashion. I mean, literally, that they don't fit very well.

So that's what's hard, and we just didn't have enough time or traction for those two things to match up often enough for the business to be sustainable. Some others, like the ones I recommended, probably do, though I do wonder how long they'll keep it up. Some, I'm sure, will be making the same announcement we did very soon.