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The end of Airplane.dev

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Re: The end of Airplane.dev

#71

Post by mndgs »

neilv wrote: post #41
neilv wrote: post #29

> Several people on the team confronted the CEO, but he denied that there was an acquisition brewing. If there actually was an acquisition brewing at that time, and it's true that the CEO denied to employees that there was, that's one way to spoil any existing culture of honesty and goodwill.

Another angle: If a CEO denies to employees that an acquisition is in the works, to retain employees, but there actually was an acquisition in the works, and an acquisition happened, and it included employees' stock becoming officially worth $0 (or some other arguable financial harm)... could that constitute legally actionable fraud?

Or, if it really was an acquihire, then you don't run around telling this to employees, not to scare them off .. (certaily this was a clause in the LOU/SPA)

Re: The end of Airplane.dev

#72

Post by pavlov »

morgante wrote: post #32
solatic wrote: post #11

> 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 C…

The company was burning money and growing slowly. Most of the original investment was likely based on the strong founding team. In that situation, they'd probably just want their money back.

Which seems to be what happened here?

Airtable and Airplane shared a lead investor. After the CEO of ’plane left, the remaining team soon got rolled into ’table and investors got tens of millions back.

Re: The end of Airplane.dev

#73

Post by arcanemachiner »

pritambarhate wrote: post #17

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.

Even a lot of the open source stuff is runs by companies listed on Crunchbase with millions of dollars of VC backing. That software isn't gonna maintain itself if the cash runs out.

Open source may be safer than proprietary software in that regard, but it's still not a guarantee. Still far preferable IMO.

Re: The end of Airplane.dev

#74

Post by vertis »

setgree wrote: post #55
stevage wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that were the case, why wouldn't the CEO say so?

I probably would have in their shoes, but that is one of many reasons I am not CEO. Bosses tell polite fictions that preserve relationships.

I've had some very close relationships with C levels at some big and medium companies. I've caught them lying in varying degrees more than once.

Sometimes though the job demands it. They're potentially not allowed to disclose something which leaves lying or saying nothing as the only other options. This works well until someone already knows the truth -- has their own source of information.

I didn't take offense, I just learned not to take what they said at face value. It's not a bad lesson in general. C level executives often learn to be ruthless, depending on the org, they can end up in real internal power struggles as well.

Re: The end of Airplane.dev

#75

Post by peter_l_downs »

fishnchips wrote: post #64
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…

> return money to investors Do the investors care? If they're not making 100x return on an investment, will they truly care about 0.5x return? My feeling is that most would just say "OK, you have a good team, you have money in the bank, pivot and go wild".

Yes, they care, although this of course varies. Remember that in this situation: one of the founders had already left, another was "giving up", and other key employees had left. Tech companies were laying off like crazy, and your chance of getting your money back via another round was about 0%. Would you be willing to subsidize a bunch of jobs in a bad-trajectory company with disinterested/absent leadership? Or would you instead think to engineer an outcome like this where the employees get a job offer and a bonus, one of your other investments gets a chance at top talent, a serial entrepreneur founder remains happy with you, and you get some money back?

Depending on timing (and here it was just over a year between the round closing and the acquisition), you may be able to easily re-deploy the capital you get back as another investment included in the same fund, and get another shot at a 100x return.

I'd be curious to hear what others think (particularly actual VCs, not just pretend ones like me) but this seems like a very rational outcome to me.

Re: The end of Airplane.dev

#76

Post by gherkinnn »

pritambarhate wrote: post #17

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.

Look at the mess Vercel created with their Next.js app router.

Re: The end of Airplane.dev

#77

Post by dustingetz »

fishnchips wrote: post #64
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…

> return money to investors Do the investors care? If they're not making 100x return on an investment, will they truly care about 0.5x return? My feeling is that most would just say "OK, you have a good team, you have money in the bank, pivot and go wild".

seed investors might write off a $500k check if their model is to write 30 of them and carry the fund with a 100x-er (and many investors are not so cool with losing), but $32M is not that model. A recent comparable example is Pitch - https://twitter.com/unamashana/status/1745417095809307080

Re: The end of Airplane.dev

#78

Post by datavirtue »

SmellTheGlove wrote: post #47
mgummelt wrote: post #21

One factor that no one seems to have noticed is that both cofounders, Ravi and Joshua, have already built fairly big companies. Ravi was the co-founder at Heap (he took over my co-founder spot after I left), and Joshua was the CTO at Benchling. Both of those companies have raised >$100M. After that success, the prospect of continuing to run a middling company in the shadow of Retool isn't very appealing.

How does one take over a co-founder role? Is it a job title now? If he took over for you he didn’t actually found the company, right? I’m not asking this sarcastically. Trying to understand how this works because I’ve always taken “co-founder” to mean “I was one of the people that started this company from day 1”

You can buy the "co-founder" title. That's how Elon Musk is associated with Tesla.

Re: The end of Airplane.dev

#79

Post by datavirtue »

throwaway632 wrote: post #20
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.

Yes, one must always be sniffing around the books and squinting at the numbers, especially in a startup.

Re: The end of Airplane.dev

#80

Post by popcalc »

kbar13 wrote: post #70
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why I never use Supabase.

supabase is open source…

So was ngrok until they abandoned it completely for their cloud hosted v2. Over-engineered JS frameworks might last for a couple weeks in that state if you're lucky. Meanwhile, Rails + Postgres/SQLite need just a couple security fixes per year and they'll keep chugging indefinitely.

https://railslts.com/

The culture that has birthed these mongrol JS frameworks worships shinyness and novelty. These are naturally temporal qualities. It's why for almost no one does it make sense to buy a mid-range Mercedes/BMW. You always lease because you know it will fall apart after the warranty period.

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