Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The end of Airplane.dev

yolken.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 155 posts

Re: The end of Airplane.dev

#11

Post by solatic »

> To me and others, it seemed like the CEO was tired of the startup grind and simply giving up. Ever since his fellow co-founder quit, he’d been running both the technical and go-to-market sides of the company, and it was clearly very draining. We felt that he wanted a less stressful position with a lower risk payday, and this kind of deal was the best way to achieve that.

Where was the board? Why not hire in a new CEO from the outside?

I appreciate that the author can't actually get inside the founders' heads, but something still smells fishy here.

Re: The end of Airplane.dev

#12

Post by gkapur »

I empathize for the co-founder who was CTO and became CEO. I imagine some of the challenges come from the fact that there was a big chunk of equity owned by the original founding CEO. As the remaining co-founder, I can imagine feeling like I was climbing a grueling uphill battle to just get back to the most recent $300 million (!) valuation and a large amount of the upside of that battle was going to someone who abandoned me/the team. That said, I'm not privy to any equity adjustment that happened after the original founding CEO left.

That said, the after-the-fact communication feels lacking. It sounds like your CEO could have at least explained things in more detail after the fact (ie. Why he felt a pivot would be necessary to get to where the business needed to go.)

Such is life, I guess. I'm wishing you and the team the best for the future!

Re: The end of Airplane.dev

#13

Post by peter_l_downs »

submitedit wrote: post #9

Was a former employee at Airplane. We were quite disappointed and surprised by the sudden choice to shut the company down. In many ways, we had good metrics, customers that liked us, a lot of runway, and a great team. In the end, the decision came to our CEO. While he never gave a clear reason why, it was pretty clear that he burned out and tossed in the towel.

Even if Airplane had been cash flow positive, slowing growth and a demotivated CEO and departure of key employees at an early stage is a tough pill for investors to swallow. See my other comment, but I find it highly likely that your investors were pushing for a way to wind things down and return as much of their cash as they could get, and an acquihire is a fairly employee-friendly way to do that.

Re: The end of Airplane.dev

#14

Post by aidos »

simonw wrote: post #3

"On January 3, the acquisition and product shutdown was publicly announced. As expected, customers were shocked and upset. Many had been using Airplane for critical workflows within their organizations, and they now had to replace huge chunks of internal tooling before the final shutoff on March 1." Building things on an early-stage no-code platform like this without at least an open source escape hatch feels like a…

Totally. We’ve tried Retool in the past and it wasn’t for me, but I’ve also looked at both airplane and windmill not long ago but decided the risk / reward just isn’t there.

Sucks to be a customer on the other side of this now.

Re: The end of Airplane.dev

#15

Post by danenania »

peterldowns wrote: post #8

Very clear and well-written article. I think that the author is likely to be correct that the CEO was overwhelmed by going alone. One thing not mentioned at all, though, is what the investors in Airplane might have wanted to happen. Seriously, ctrl-f for "investor", it doesn't show up even once. In addition to the CEO being overwhelmed and tired, it's very important to realize that: - Airplane raised a $32mm series B…

Right, and another factor to consider is what percentage of the company was owned by investors. After a series B, they may have owned a majority. Apart from exerting pressure, it’s possible that this decision was made 100% by the investors and the founder(s) had no choice. It could also be considered poor form for a founder to make this public if that’s what happened.

It’s important to understand who is actually in charge before assigning blame to anyone.

Re: The end of Airplane.dev

#16

Post by dustingetz »

peterldowns wrote: post #8

Very clear and well-written article. I think that the author is likely to be correct that the CEO was overwhelmed by going alone. One thing not mentioned at all, though, is what the investors in Airplane might have wanted to happen. Seriously, ctrl-f for "investor", it doesn't show up even once. In addition to the CEO being overwhelmed and tired, it's very important to realize that: - Airplane raised a $32mm series B…

Airplane and Airtable share a lead investor, Thrive Capital who led both Airplane's Series B and also Airtable's Series D

Re: The end of Airplane.dev

#17

Post by pritambarhate »

Lesson for all of us (customers of SaaS companies): never depend of VC backed non profitable companies for critical components of your infrastructure or business processes. Always build on tried and tested open source software.

Re: The end of Airplane.dev

#18

Post by submitedit »

peter_l_downs wrote: post #13
submitedit wrote: post #9

Was a former employee at Airplane. We were quite disappointed and surprised by the sudden choice to shut the company down. In many ways, we had good metrics, customers that liked us, a lot of runway, and a great team. In the end, the decision came to our CEO. While he never gave a clear reason why, it was pretty clear that he burned out and tossed in the towel.

Even if Airplane had been cash flow positive, slowing growth and a demotivated CEO and departure of key employees at an early stage is a tough pill for investors to swallow. See my other comment, but I find it highly likely that your investors were pushing for a way to wind things down and return as much of their cash as they could get, and an acquihire is a fairly employee-friendly way to do that.

The disappointing part was we didn't even get to see the experiment take place before shutting down prematurely. Our sales numbers were still quite solid and there were many paths for us to push forward. As a fraction of our investors' portfolio, Airplane's investment was small. I imagine they would have much more preferred us to continue working hard than to return the bit of capital. In the end, only a few employees chose to join Airtable.

Re: The end of Airplane.dev

#19

Post by simonw »

datadrivenangel wrote: post #7
simonw wrote: post #3

"On January 3, the acquisition and product shutdown was publicly announced. As expected, customers were shocked and upset. Many had been using Airplane for critical workflows within their organizations, and they now had to replace huge chunks of internal tooling before the final shutoff on March 1." Building things on an early-stage no-code platform like this without at least an open source escape hatch feels like a…

It's a danger of all SaaS. If you can't run it yourself, you can't fully prevent this from happening. Of course, the benefits of taking on this risk may often be worth it. Smart bets don't always pay out.

Escape hatches can work. I took a bet on Mapzen a few years ago - when they shut down my employer had features that depended on their WhosOnFirst API. Because the data behind that was openly licensed we managed to migrate off it to our own (MySQL spatial table-based) solution before the shutdown.

It was still a big pain, but it would have been a whole lot worse without that escape hatch.

Re: The end of Airplane.dev

#20

Post by throwaway632 »

rdtsc wrote: post #5

> These colleagues had all been at the company for a while and all had legitimate reasons for resigning unrelated to the revenue slowdown Obviously not familiar with the particulars, but people don't always say why they are moving on. There is not much of an upside to revealing any negative issues, so it's usually presented as "really wanted to stay, but just found a new exciting opportunity". If all of the sudden 4…

Legitimate excuses for leaving. 99% chance what caused them to leave was they saw the writing on the wall and took on a better opportunity.
Post reply on HN