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?
The end of Airplane.dev
51–60 of 155 posts
Re: The end of Airplane.dev
#52> 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.
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Re: The end of Airplane.dev
#53While I can't vouch for Ben's time at Airplane, I worked adjacent to Ben at Segment and can say his reputation there was unimpeachable and his work was top notch, so it doesn't surprise me that he'd publish something so thoughtful and informative.
As an Airplane customer, Ben was the man, always super helpful when we had questions. When we heard Airplane was shutting down, everyone's first thought was "can we hire that Yolken guy?"
If you are at a large company, he'd love to decompress there for now!
Re: The end of Airplane.dev
#54One 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 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.
Re: The end of Airplane.dev
#55Earlier 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…
If that were the case, why wouldn't the CEO say so?
I probably would have in their shoes, but that is one of many reasons I am not CEO. Bosses tell polite fictions that preserve relationships.
Re: The end of Airplane.dev
#56"On January 3, the acquisition and product shutdown was publicly announced. As expected, customers were shocked and upset. Many had been using Airplane for critical workflows within their organizations, and they now had to replace huge chunks of internal tooling before the final shutoff on March 1." Building things on an early-stage no-code platform like this without at least an open source escape hatch feels like a…
Totally. We’ve tried Retool in the past and it wasn’t for me, but I’ve also looked at both airplane and windmill not long ago but decided the risk / reward just isn’t there. Sucks to be a customer on the other side of this now.
Why not windmill? It's open source, no? I'm only peripherally aware of it, so just curious what people who have dug in on it more think.
Re: The end of Airplane.dev
#57Was 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.
Even if Airplane had been cash flow positive, slowing growth and a demotivated CEO and departure of key employees at an early stage is a tough pill for investors to swallow. See my other comment, but I find it highly likely that your investors were pushing for a way to wind things down and return as much of their cash as they could get, and an acquihire is a fairly employee-friendly way to do that.
Don't know any particulars but the real problem here is the misaligned incentives that come from the rather incestuous relationship between founders, investors, and their friends in most companies steroidally pumped-up by VCs. What about the customers and what they want? VCs typically over-rotate on founders they talk to and obsession with comparable companies. Reading between the lines here the real story of a fire sale to Airtable (in some trouble of its own) might have to do with burnout but also machinations with another portfolio company from a lead investor.
Re: The end of Airplane.dev
#58One 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?
> Company burned more money than it made and winded down
As far as I can tell that applies to neither Heap nor Benchling which were the companies OP cites as successes.
Re: The end of Airplane.dev
#59> 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…
If you need to bring in an external CEO to do a large pivot at an early stage company then you may as well just invest the money in a new company. If the original team was there then there's an advantage of having everything in place for that pivot but if it's all brand new then why bother?
Re: The end of Airplane.dev
#60This underlines what a shame it is that we so rarely get to read postmortems on startups from people without a strong motivation — whether social or financial — to paint a rosy picture.