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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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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
Founder of windmill.dev, the open-source alternative mentioned at the end. This market is tough, our customers are both very demanding and hard on price. We are doing very well because we kept the team very small but I cannot imagine the pressure to deliver when having raised 20x what we did. I love what I'm doing and I feel very fortunate for the opportunity to build a startup in a domain that I cherish, devtools, a…
For my shop this was not really a big deal - we did not leverage Airplane's apps or workflows, we just used it to productionize some scripts that support edge cases in our platform and the migration for that is not too bad. Of course, I didn't feel that way when I got the email on Jan 3rd.
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.
What's Airplane's best alternative to build internal apps? Windmill and Retool were mentioned but I'm not convinced of them. Any guidance will be appreciated.
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.
No, but you can maintain it yourself, or hire people to, or worst case you can at least run it and accept the bugs. You're not going to just get in one morning and find out they've turned off the servers and all the stuff you had in their system is gone.
> However, we'd have to do interviews for leveling purposes, and the financial details wouldn't be made available to us until later. "Everyone has to re-interview for their job" is a terrible thing to do to people, IMHO. You could instead have deal clauses about retaining the employees for some period, and how the leveling and compensation maps. If the acquiring company isn't willing to do that, then I think that tel…
"I already have it."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I always think of this article in these situations: https://randsinrepose.com/archives/shields-down/ It's an apt metaphor.
>>> The departure cost is always exponentially higher. And yet no one is going to give you a substantial salary rise unless you sign a resignation letter. All that questions about the reason why someone wants to leave during recruitment or exit interview are a ceremonial, and people are answering with polite bullshit. Yes, I'm looking for a new job to get more experience, to grow, to get new challenges. Not because I…
Indeed. There is no upside to provide any criticism or leave on a negative note. It's the other side of the coin why companies don't provide feedback after interviews, there is no upside for them. Same here. What if some coworkers start another company, or the winds change, etc. It's always better to leave on a positive note regardless of reasons.
Of course when 20% of the team leaves in 3 months "to get more experience and jump on an exciting new opportunity" it would be silly not to read between the lines.
Why was the employees' common stock worth $0? Liquidation preference for the outside investors? Related: How can a regular employee joining a startup know beforehand that there isn't a high chance of their equity (which is probably a significant part of their total comp) being worthless even if a big acquisition is made?
But so long as you sell for less than your total raise, common shares will be worth nothing even with liquidation preferences of 1x.
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Quite baffling that success is measured in how much you raise. Company burned more money than it made and winded down, impact on customers have been ultimately negative. Where's the success?
The success is in convincing the investors to give money. The subsequent execution might or might be another success.