What an 'Accumulated Deficit' actually represents....
Retained Earnings/(Accumulated Deficit) is an account that all earnings and or losses get cleared out to, and as such keeps a running balance (from the beginning of time) of the sum total of net earnings/losses (less the impact of distributed shareholder dividends).
If your were to look at the balance sheet of WalMart, for example, you would see a Retained Earnings figure of about 80 billion (it would have been even higher, but gets reduced every fiscal quarter that WalMart pays their substantial dividend to shareholders).
It is not uncommon for companies, in their early stages, to rack up a series of losses. So any capital chewed up during that period reduce the balance in the Retained Earnings account (or in this case, increase the negative Accumulated Deficit balance).
As crazy as it might sound, being able to purchase shares of an OTC stock (such as Bitzio Inc) with a high Accumulated Deficit balance sometimes provides a substantial benefit to the new shareholder. This is the case because the new shareholders are the beneficiary of any value that was brought to the business (both hard assets and I.P. assets) while the capital was being deployed, and the accumulated deficit was being generated.
As always, simply my opinion.
BTZO
