Greg Duffy, the founder of smart-camera startup Dropcam, says it was a "mistake" to sell his company to the Google-owned Nest for $555 million in June 2014.

Duffy's regret came in response to a blistering quote from Nest CEO Tony Fadell, who told The Information as part of a lengthy Nest exposé that "A lot of the [Dropcam] employees were not as good as we hoped ... unfortunately it wasn't a very experienced team."

The Information story centers around Nest's recent product and management struggles, including several delayed launches and employee turnover.

Duffy calls Fadell's jab "blatant scapegoating" and "insulting to the team," in a post on Medium.

He also hints that Dropcam's revenue was larger than smart-thermostat company Nest's. When Google parent company Alphabet released its Q4 earnings earlier this year, it reported $448 million in revenue for its "Other Bets" category, which includes subsidiaries like Nest, its hardware lab X, and its high-speed-internet service Fiber.

Duffy writes: "[I]f you knew what percentage of all of Alphabet's 'other bets' revenue was brought in by the relatively tiny 100-person Dropcam team that Fadell derides, Nest itself would not look good in comparison."

He also wrote this on Twitter after the earnings:

Thought for a second that Alphabet had released Dropcam's revenue. Then I saw the operating losses and figured it out! "Other Bets" ;)

Duffy's post says that the leadership at Nest "seem to be fetishizing only the most superfluous and negative traits of their mentors."

That appears to be a knock at Fadell, who has been often compared to Steve Jobs, under whom he worked at Apple.

Here's the part where Duffy calls selling to Nest a mistake:

Just before we were acquired, Dropcam was in the middle of a record year of sales, had a 4.5-star bestselling camera on Amazon, was rolling into large brick-and-mortar retailers with huge merchandising support, had innovative new products imminently launching, still had most of its financing in the bank, and our investors and team actively didn’t want to sell (it was my mistake to sell — but that’s a story for another day).

You can read his entire response to Fadell here and The Information story here [paywalled].

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/dropcam-founder-calls-decision-sell-154948087.html