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The end of Airplane.dev

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Re: The end of Airplane.dev

#111

Post by neilv »

hoherd wrote: post #48
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.

It's probable that he was legally bound by a confidentiality agreement.

Probably you want to avoid signing an agreement that could necessitate actively lying to someone else.

If already under such an agreement, find a way not to lie.

Being proactive can help. The first example that comes to mind was when a highly-placed colleague (who I trusted, and with whom I had a good rapport) asked me directly whether I knew whether of anyone in the department who was job-hunting. I didn't know of any, but I told them I generally couldn't answer that question, as a matter of policy. Because that's the kind of question for which we can anticipate a hard conflict someday, between betraying a trust, and lying to someone else. And that's an easy conflict to avoid.

"If I knew, I probably couldn't tell you." is a useful phrase.

Re: The end of Airplane.dev

#112

Post by joeblubaugh »

rubenfiszel wrote: post #63

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…

your product is really cool and i think you made a good decision by going OSS - it reduces the risks your customers take by migrating to the product.

Re: The end of Airplane.dev

#114

Post by peter_l_downs »

jerrygenser wrote: post #104
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…

> - By 2023, with slowing growth, it's likely that Airtable was no longer able to raise additional funding. Best case was likely a down-round. 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 inv…

You’re right, the point I was trying to make but should have said more explicitly is that they raised at an inflated valuation that would make any subsequent “up” round more difficult to raise in the future, even if the growth trajectory improved.

Re: The end of Airplane.dev

#115

Post by joeblubaugh »

tshaddox wrote: post #89

> He then explained that the Airplane product would be shut down, but that most of us would be getting “extremely strong” offers from Airtable. However, we’d have to do interviews for leveling purposes, and the financial details wouldn’t be made available to us until later. That's a layoff, right?

I went through an acqui-hire with the same structure - ironically, it was to be part of Ben's group at a different company.

In our case, they genuinely wanted the whole engineering team, so the interviews were pretty friendly, and our offers were fair. I'm not sure that was the case here, and I'm sure that came through in the tone of the conversation.

Re: The end of Airplane.dev

#116

Post by mooreds »

epolanski wrote: post #25
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.

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?

> Quite baffling that success is measured in how much you raise.

It's a proxy for size of company, and often one of the two public ones (the other being the number of employees you can count on LinkedIn). It's not perfect, of course; there's always a Zapier which raises 1.3M and then grows sustainably. But for VC funded companies, this lets you compare them, if not perfectly.

I think everyone would agree that revenue, ARR, and profitability are all more important. But those metrics are rarely shared for private companies.

Re: The end of Airplane.dev

#117

Post by swyx »

digging wrote: post #49
danenania wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

> It’s important to understand who is actually in charge before assigning blame to anyone. But also, > It could also be considered poor form for a founder to make this public if that’s what happened. I mean, they asked the CEO what was going on and he didn't seem to give good explanations. Especially if it wasn't his decision.

maybe he knows the actual explanation that would be satisfactory is also the one he is contractually or professionally bound not to give.

Re: The end of Airplane.dev

#118

Post by swyx »

motleyfool wrote: post #107

extremely ironic that the founders wrote a blog post entitled "How to gain conviction to work on a startup idea for 10+ years" https://www.airplane.dev/blog/how-to-gain-conviction-to-work...

let those among us who is without sin cast the first stone

Re: The end of Airplane.dev

#119

Post by tommoor »

As a customer and one of those early adopter and champions of Airplane this really was particularly frustrating to experience.

I was also surprised at how poorly the shutdown was communicated, a single email went out and there was never any followup. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a reasonable percentage of their customers that were shocked on March 1st to find out they could no longer login to the product.

Re: The end of Airplane.dev

#120

Post by yowlingcat »

mring33621 wrote: post #84
semanticc wrote: post #51

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?

assume it's worth zero sadly, founders who are hiring don't want to hear that and typically don't want to compensate fairly for the high probability that their precious offering of equity is worth zero

I think that's a simplification. The upside is that there is clearly a functioning capital market for valuing and capitalizing high growth, early stage companies where you can make a lot of money very fast. The trade off is that if you don't want the high risk part of committing to a high risk asset, you shouldn't join the company in the first place. For this reason, most people shouldn't join most startups. Some people, of course, make a career from doing this well.

For those people, there's a blend of two things: 1) you think you know something the market doesn't -- it may be something cultural, the product-market fit, maybe you're just really impressed with the people and the momentum you're seeing, maybe you have really deep expertise and insight from previous experiences with the industry 2) you just plain enjoy it more, so the high risk premium is worth it to you overall over a more boring job where with a lower ceiling on rewards and career growth but higher risk-adjusted earnings

Working at a startup is often a mixed bag: an unpredictable, fast-paced, exciting journey full of variety and autonomy, with great highs and often even greater lows.

Most people are neither looking for that nor prepared for that day to day. Others believe they are open to it, but out of a desire to find the positive parts while avoiding the negatives, are fundamentally incompatible with doing what would drive success. I've never seen these kinds of folks achieve much consistently at startups.

It's the people who lean into rather than away from the risk that are instead the ones I've seen most success. They survive the notoriously high attrition and harsh pressure to deliver in high-risk situations without playbooks. They both can scale the company and hang onto leadership roles at scale. This, again, should not be and definitionally is not most employees.

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