101–110 of 155 posts
I'd say given the startup's shutdown being offered a signing bonus and a job at another company was the best outcome for the employees.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's why I never use Supabase.
supabase is open source…
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".
There's no chance the investors were happy with this- if a company had years of runway they almost certainly advised them to tough it out. Even a downround would be preferable compared to a total writeoff
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…
The author stated they had millions if not 10s of millions in the bank and a bit of runway. And they had already done layoffs. Based on this, they were not under pressure to raise or do a down-round.
Separately and related to a sibling comment, the fact that Thrive Capital invested in Airplane and Airtable means they can now have a positive "tombstone" for Airplane by saying it was an "exit" while receiving a bunch of their original investment back.
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.
Clace also works great for running simple web apps locally. Building and deploying a web app should be as easy and common for backend engineers as creating a CLI app is.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I don't have all the early context, but my understanding (vaguely) is that Heap went through two different incubators, and after one Ravi came on to be cofounder at YC where Heap raised its seed round.
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 did I not know you were an original cofounder at Heap?
If the sole purpose was to get the CEO they could have just made him an offer he can't refuse, stick some other new CEO into airplane and call it good. Would effectively be a risky, but free bet on a growing company.