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Airtable acquires Airplane

airplane.dev

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Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#81

Post by Rapzid »

senderista wrote: post #68
Johnny555 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My company had a significant product based on an early stage startup's product -- before we signed a license with them, we negotiated a code escrow agreement with the company. And it was good that we did because about a year later they got acquired by a company that didn't want to continue selling the product we used, but we got the source code so were able to maintain the product. We picked up a couple of the develo…

How many businesses have the in-house expertise to maintain a defunct codebase? And for how many of those that do is it actually an optimal use of resources?

This is a story about successful CYA, not a recommendation to go balls deep on any hawt sAas that comes your way.

But also, a lot of companies have engineers that can.. Engineer. Often it's more an availability issue than expertise.

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#82

Post by wgyn »

I think super highly of the Airplane team and what they've built. Startups are a tough journey, especially so over the last year. There's never a good way to shut down so the criticism isn't surprising and perhaps fair. But I doubt anyone's walking to the bank with glee. The best they can do is to try and do right by their team, their customers, and their investors. I hope they take another crack at it again in the future.

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#83

Post by Johnny555 »

swyx wrote: post #63
Johnny555 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My company had a significant product based on an early stage startup's product -- before we signed a license with them, we negotiated a code escrow agreement with the company. And it was good that we did because about a year later they got acquired by a company that didn't want to continue selling the product we used, but we got the source code so were able to maintain the product. We picked up a couple of the develo…

woudl love to learn more - what startup was this? why could they not have gone out to market to compete with you instead of letting you whitelabel their product?

It was a pretty low level product near the bottom of our infrastructure tier and we built everything on top of it. It worked well for our specific use case, but apparently not a general enough need to succeed on its own. It's not like we took their product, added a new skin and sold it as our own.

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#84

Post by Johnny555 »

Redoubts wrote: post #60
Johnny555 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My company had a significant product based on an early stage startup's product -- before we signed a license with them, we negotiated a code escrow agreement with the company. And it was good that we did because about a year later they got acquired by a company that didn't want to continue selling the product we used, but we got the source code so were able to maintain the product. We picked up a couple of the develo…

> we negotiated a code escrow agreement with the company. really curious of the terms of that

Me too, only a few people in the company knew the terms of the agreement, apparently it was the only code escrow agreement that company made and it was protected under NDA. I don't think we paid a premium for it, but signed a longer term licensing agreement.

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#85

Post by Johnny555 »

senderista wrote: post #68
Johnny555 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My company had a significant product based on an early stage startup's product -- before we signed a license with them, we negotiated a code escrow agreement with the company. And it was good that we did because about a year later they got acquired by a company that didn't want to continue selling the product we used, but we got the source code so were able to maintain the product. We picked up a couple of the develo…

How many businesses have the in-house expertise to maintain a defunct codebase? And for how many of those that do is it actually an optimal use of resources?

When we took over the codebase, it was 50-50 whether or not we'd really continue with it long term or just fix a couple important bugs and work on porting to something new. Then we managed to hire a couple of the core devs from the product and decided to keep it.

We were lucky that they did a good job with the escrowed code and had everything we needed to build the software on day one.

>And for how many of those that do is it actually an optimal use of resources?

That's impossible to answer -- depends on how hard it would be to port to another product to fill the need (assuming you can find such a product), or write a new system from scratch to do what that product does.

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#87

Post by tianzhou »

dvdhsu wrote: post #66

I have a lot of respect for the product and the folks at Airplane. And I (even as a "competitor") find it sad that such a great product is being shut down. My best guess is that they were running out of cash. This to me is pretty surprising... because it's actually not hard to make a SaaS business profitable. You just have to build a great product, and be disciplined at hiring. It's weird that they seem to have done…

Our startup evaluated Airtable, Retool, and Airplane, and settled on Airplane. We liked the Airplane because it's developer-friendly. But the way they throw all customers under the bus is sad.

Hope the acquisition works out. I used to work for FileMaker, and from the business perspective, their products are complementary to each other.

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#88

Post by cuffe »

ijustlovemath wrote: post #80
dvdhsu wrote: post #66

I have a lot of respect for the product and the folks at Airplane. And I (even as a "competitor") find it sad that such a great product is being shut down. My best guess is that they were running out of cash. This to me is pretty surprising... because it's actually not hard to make a SaaS business profitable. You just have to build a great product, and be disciplined at hiring. It's weird that they seem to have done…

If they released the customer's data in some sort of specified format, would you support importing their workflows into Retool?

we'd love to make the migration as easy as possible and would definitely be open to building an import tool. In the meantime if you're migrating feel free to email me at jamie at retool.com and I'd be happy to help import

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#89

Post by antisthenes »

xyst wrote: post #59

Buy out competition. Phase them out. Migrate customers to your product. Bump prices across all tiers. Pump your P&L. Sell stats to vulture capitalists for Z funding round. Rinse and repeat. Eventually IPO. Founders cash out equity. Retail investors left holding the bag and leadership handed off to B-school flunkies. Product eventually circles the drain. Gets picked up by some private equity and guts it for pieces and…

No need to bash on B-schools. There are plenty of grifters and unremarkable people at A-schools who got in there with money and a white-sounding name.

The rest is accurate.

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#90

Post by debarshri »

Johnny555 wrote: post #55
swyx wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if everyone was as blanket-critical of early stage SaaS as you we would get a lot less innovation (or at least challengers to keep incumbents honest). someone needs to be discerning of team/product quality, someone needs to take risks to solve pain for their stakeholders. there are good startups that are good partners, there are startups that give a good try and dont make it, and there are plain bad startups. don't t…

My company had a significant product based on an early stage startup's product -- before we signed a license with them, we negotiated a code escrow agreement with the company. And it was good that we did because about a year later they got acquired by a company that didn't want to continue selling the product we used, but we got the source code so were able to maintain the product. We picked up a couple of the develo…

This is more common practice than you think. But it is common in enterprise realm not in SaaS realm where you just self signup and it is Product-led upsell.
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