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Clockwise acquired by Salesforce

getclockwise.com

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Re: Clockwise acquired by Salesforce

#31

Post by paxys »

moomoo11 wrote: post #25
paxys wrote: post #24

Salesforce has lost half its market cap in the last ~year. Spending time and money to acquire a calendar scheduler shows just how badly they have lost the plot. I know this is an HN meme but can someone look at https://www.getclockwise.com/overview and explain why an internal team couldn't build this in a couple of weeks? And it's not like Salesforce is lacking engineers - they employ 83,000 (!!) people globally.

Clockwise has thousands of companies using it already. Buying the company gives them those customers. They shut it down presumably so they can do something with those customers they bought. Making software is easy. Don’t kid yourself. If you’re a swe you’re an expense line item. Getting distribution is hard.

How does shutting the product down get them any customers?

"Hey you've been paying for this calendar thing for a while, but won't be able to any longer. Go use one of their competitors instead. BTW have you tried our CRM?"

Re: Clockwise acquired by Salesforce

#33

Post by oystersareyum »

singron wrote: post #29

I used to work at Clockwise and am (was?) a common shareholder. I'm happy that many employees got to get a job at Salesforce. I'm sure it was tough to swallow some pride and recommend Reclaim, who was our strongest competitor in the space (or at least the one we talked about the most). Reclaim was acquired by Dropbox a while ago, although Dropbox wanted them to continue to run and develop the product there. I also ap…

> If you are looking to start a new company in this space, I'll gladly offer my services to talk you out of it.

Why is it so rough etc.?

Re: Clockwise acquired by Salesforce

#34

Post by paxys »

Eufrat wrote: post #28
ares623 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the Clockwise founder mates with anyone in Salesforce?

Probably. The Clockwise folks were from a startup that was bought out by Salesforce before they left to do this. IMHO, the problem with Clockwise is that there was never a compelling product or a moat they could build with in the space. It was trivial for Google or anyone else to just implement similar enhancements.

Yeah, that would explain it.

Re: Clockwise acquired by Salesforce

#35

Post by mushufasa »

paxys wrote: post #31
moomoo11 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clockwise has thousands of companies using it already. Buying the company gives them those customers. They shut it down presumably so they can do something with those customers they bought. Making software is easy. Don’t kid yourself. If you’re a swe you’re an expense line item. Getting distribution is hard.

How does shutting the product down get them any customers? "Hey you've been paying for this calendar thing for a while, but won't be able to any longer. Go use one of their competitors instead. BTW have you tried our CRM?"

To be fair, Salesforce IS a CRM and can offer people project/time/calendar/team collaboration features, even if it's not a DIRECT competitor to a modern wave of time management startups.

Re: Clockwise acquired by Salesforce

#36

Post by apparent »

paxys wrote: post #24

Salesforce has lost half its market cap in the last ~year. Spending time and money to acquire a calendar scheduler shows just how badly they have lost the plot. I know this is an HN meme but can someone look at https://www.getclockwise.com/overview and explain why an internal team couldn't build this in a couple of weeks? And it's not like Salesforce is lacking engineers - they employ 83,000 (!!) people globally.

Typically when a company is acquired and the product is swiftly shut down, the value sought was the team. Although Salesforce has plenty of engineers, they may not have a team that does what the Clockwise team does.

Re: Clockwise acquired by Salesforce

#37

Post by apparent »

dozerly wrote: post #23
pjc50 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other than directly cancelling a competing product, it's usually to acquire the staff. Bit like the football transfer market, but you can buy Marcus Rashford separately without having to buy the whole of Man U.

Yea, until they leave as soon as they can because working at Salesforce is nothing like a startup These acquihires seem so ineffective to me unless the acquiring company is truly attractive to the acquirees talent.

That's what the vesting period is for, to ensure the team sticks around for long enough that the acquirer can figure out who is most valuable and make it attractive for them to stay.

Re: Clockwise acquired by Salesforce

#38

Post by edoceo »

oystersareyum wrote: post #33
singron wrote: post #29

I used to work at Clockwise and am (was?) a common shareholder. I'm happy that many employees got to get a job at Salesforce. I'm sure it was tough to swallow some pride and recommend Reclaim, who was our strongest competitor in the space (or at least the one we talked about the most). Reclaim was acquired by Dropbox a while ago, although Dropbox wanted them to continue to run and develop the product there. I also ap…

> If you are looking to start a new company in this space, I'll gladly offer my services to talk you out of it. Why is it so rough etc.?

Starting a company, that can get PMF, raise funds and grow is like 2% success rate. Then exiting for upside is like 2% of that previous 2%.

The number of problems, the type of problems, the scale of the problems. Oof.

Re: Clockwise acquired by Salesforce

#39

Post by JumpCrisscross »

paxys wrote: post #24

Salesforce has lost half its market cap in the last ~year. Spending time and money to acquire a calendar scheduler shows just how badly they have lost the plot. I know this is an HN meme but can someone look at https://www.getclockwise.com/overview and explain why an internal team couldn't build this in a couple of weeks? And it's not like Salesforce is lacking engineers - they employ 83,000 (!!) people globally.

> Salesforce has lost half its market cap in the last ~year

They're also at record revenue [1].

[1] https://investor.salesforce.com/news/news-details/2026/Sales...

Re: Clockwise acquired by Salesforce

#40

Post by [deleted] »

paxys wrote: post #24

Salesforce has lost half its market cap in the last ~year. Spending time and money to acquire a calendar scheduler shows just how badly they have lost the plot. I know this is an HN meme but can someone look at https://www.getclockwise.com/overview and explain why an internal team couldn't build this in a couple of weeks? And it's not like Salesforce is lacking engineers - they employ 83,000 (!!) people globally.

[deleted]
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