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The end of Airplane.dev

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Re: The end of Airplane.dev

#141

Post by jeremyjh »

tommoor wrote: post #119

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.

It actually hasn't been shutdown yet, so that moment will still be coming. My theory is there is no one left to even turn it off and it will continue to run until it's hosting bill is past due and the servers are shutdown.

Re: The end of Airplane.dev

#142

Post by cx42net »

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…

You have a massive acquire opportunity here ...

Re: The end of Airplane.dev

#143

Post by tommoor »

jeremyjh wrote: post #141
tommoor wrote: post #119

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.

It actually hasn't been shutdown yet, so that moment will still be coming. My theory is there is no one left to even turn it off and it will continue to run until it's hosting bill is past due and the servers are shutdown.

It's gone, the sign-in page is there but it doesn't function

Re: The end of Airplane.dev

#144

Post by jeremyjh »

tommoor wrote: post #143
jeremyjh wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It actually hasn't been shutdown yet, so that moment will still be coming. My theory is there is no one left to even turn it off and it will continue to run until it's hosting bill is past due and the servers are shutdown.

It's gone, the sign-in page is there but it doesn't function

That’s interesting - it works for me accessing app.airplane.dev. Scheduled jobs are still running too. I’m using Google authentication. Today there is a pop up message that everything will be shutdown over the course of the month.

Re: The end of Airplane.dev

#145

Post by Eridrus »

nylonstrung wrote: post #103
fishnchips wrote: post #64

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".

This was more likely a 0-0.1x return. 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

Probably 0x for everyone except the last round investors who would get basically all the cash in the bank due to liquidation preferences, which is probably 0.66-0.84x return IMO.

Re: The end of Airplane.dev

#146

Post by Eridrus »

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…

> Why not hire in a new CEO from the outside?

The fact that both founders with the company were done with it points to the business not going well/not being in a position to go well.

Clearly all the investor interests were very important in making this deal happen, but the root of it is that the individuals with the most investment, knowledge and leverage decided they did not want to pursue the opportunity any more, and the best deal they could scrounge together was an acqui-hire.

If the company had been cash flow positive, or on a path to that soon enough, they probably would have found a new CEO, but if they're just burning down investor cash, it makes sense to wind it down if nobody with power believes in it any more.

Re: The end of Airplane.dev

#147

Post by Eridrus »

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?

If the product is being shut down, it is definitely not a big acquisition.

The only way to be sure it's worth something is if a secondary market exists for the shares. This is only going to be true for later stage companies, not early stage ones though.

I think the best advice on the topic of early stage options is this blog post: https://www.benkuhn.net/optopt/

The TL;DR for me is: Be more picky about the company than the specific comp package. When you're there, find as much as you can about the revenue growth and retention metrics (assuming B2B), and quit after your cliff if it doesn't look like it is going well enough to justify the valuation.

Re: The end of Airplane.dev

#148

Post by Rapzid »

codezero wrote: post #130
Rapzid wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fuck over their customers? Yeah, I'm sorry you can't see that. > There are so many reasons it's not easy or straight forward to open source the software of a startup that failed I'm guessing zero effort was made to continue service for existing customers. If there were efforts made that failed, they would have mentioned it for PR. > All that said: please, don't use new software or tools, avoid startups and steer cl…

> Yeah, I'm sorry you can't see that. "Fuck over" to me implies malicious intent, if it doesn't to you then that may explain why we have differing points of view. > Apparently you don't need to be to have a founder perspective. How many startup founders have you worked closely with in your career when the company they ran was < 50 employees?

This is a bit late but yes, I believe you can "fuck over" people with a number of motivations that aren't necessarily "malicious".

For example I may be in a life boat with 5 other people and instead of adhering to rations I eat all the food or drink all the water. Because I can't control myself, I lack empathy, or I'm just incredible self-centered. Whatever the motivations I think many may describe what I did as "fucking over" everybody else.

Re: The end of Airplane.dev

#149

Post by naijaboiler »

dustingetz wrote: post #16
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

That’s the answer right there

Re: The end of Airplane.dev

#150

Post by htrp »

morgante wrote: post #54
SmellTheGlove wrote: post #47

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”

The early stages of many companies are pretty nebulous as you're exploring different ideas/positioning and building the basics. It's reasonable that someone joining <1 year in would be considered a co-founder if they had founder-level commitment.

do you get the $ or the equity as well?
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