[HN Gopher] The end of Airplane.dev
___________________________________________________________________
The end of Airplane.dev
Author : bhyolken
Score : 298 points
Date : 2024-03-06 18:16 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (yolken.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (yolken.net)
| renewiltord wrote:
| Very interesting. I didn't know the cofounder quit earlier.
| That's rough.
| simonw wrote:
| "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 huge
| risk to me.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| It's a danger of all SaaS. If you can't run it yourself, you
| can't fully prevent this from happening.
|
| Of course, the benefits of taking on this risk may often be
| worth it. Smart bets don't always pay out.
| simonw wrote:
| Escape hatches can work. I took a bet on Mapzen a few years
| ago - when they shut down my employer had features that
| depended on their WhosOnFirst API. Because the data behind
| that was openly licensed we managed to migrate off it to our
| own (MySQL spatial table-based) solution before the shutdown.
|
| It was still a big pain, but it would have been a whole lot
| worse without that escape hatch.
| aidos wrote:
| 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.
| sauwan wrote:
| 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.
| buremba wrote:
| I think even for SaaS products, the enterprise customer
| contracts should include statements around making the
| source/infra code available under an open license. That would
| help companies gain confidence in a way that they can always
| hire the ex-employees and continue using the product.
| rdtsc wrote:
| > These colleagues had all been at the company for a while and
| all had legitimate reasons for resigning unrelated to the revenue
| slowdown
|
| Obviously not familiar with the particulars, but people don't
| always say why they are moving on. There is not much of an upside
| to revealing any negative issues, so it's usually presented as
| "really wanted to stay, but just found a new exciting
| opportunity". If all of the sudden 4 people in a few month period
| "really liked the position, but just found new and exciting
| opportunities", something else is going on.
| throwaway632 wrote:
| Legitimate _excuses_ for leaving. 99% chance what caused them
| to leave was they saw the writing on the wall and took on a
| better opportunity.
| epolanski wrote:
| The fact that it was veterans leaving isn't just a writing on
| the wall but probably straight up first hand knowledge.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Yes, one must always be sniffing around the books and
| squinting at the numbers, especially in a startup.
| siliconwrath wrote:
| I always think of this article in these situations:
| https://randsinrepose.com/archives/shields-down/
|
| It's an apt metaphor.
| amerine wrote:
| I love posts like this. I wish more employees would share tales
| like this.
| peter_l_downs wrote:
| 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 in September of 2022
| [crunchbase]
|
| - Tech company valuations fell off a cliff over the course of
| 2021-2023 [memory]
|
| - 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 investors probably exerted significant pressure,
| particularly given the departure of the other founder and several
| key employees, to wind down the venture.
|
| - An acquihire is a reasonable way to end the company, return
| money to investors, and give employees some sort of payout and a
| high likelihood of remaining employed.
|
| Just my opinion, but if I were the author I would consider that
| maybe the remaining founder actually did a decent job of looking
| out for their team. Signing bonuses of $50-75k is not life
| changing money, but a job and a signing bonus is a hell of a lot
| better than nothing.
| danenania wrote:
| 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 charge before
| assigning blame to anyone.
| stevage wrote:
| If that were the case, why wouldn't the CEO say so?
| setgree wrote:
| 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.
| Euphemistic wrote:
| Polite way to say that. Self-preservation almost always
| outweighs transparency regardless of the whether the
| truth is good or bad
| vertis wrote:
| I've had some very close relationships with C levels at
| some big and medium companies. I've caught them lying in
| varying degrees more than once.
|
| Sometimes though the job demands it. They're potentially
| not allowed to disclose something which leaves lying or
| saying nothing as the only other options. This works well
| until someone already knows the truth -- has their own
| source of information.
|
| I didn't take offense, I just learned not to take what
| they said at face value. It's not a bad lesson in
| general. C level executives often learn to be ruthless,
| depending on the org, they can end up in real internal
| power struggles as well.
| digging wrote:
| > 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.
| dustingetz wrote:
| Airplane and Airtable share a lead investor, Thrive Capital who
| led both Airplane's Series B and also Airtable's Series D
| fishnchips wrote:
| > 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".
| peter_l_downs wrote:
| Yes, they care, although this of course varies. Remember that
| in this situation: one of the founders had already left,
| another was "giving up", and other key employees had left.
| Tech companies were laying off like crazy, and your chance of
| getting your money back via another round was about 0%. Would
| you be willing to subsidize a bunch of jobs in a bad-
| trajectory company with disinterested/absent leadership? Or
| would you instead think to engineer an outcome like this
| where the employees get a job offer and a bonus, one of your
| other investments gets a chance at top talent, a serial
| entrepreneur founder remains happy with you, and you get some
| money back?
|
| Depending on timing (and here it was just over a year between
| the round closing and the acquisition), you may be able to
| easily re-deploy the capital you get back as another
| investment included in the same fund, and get another shot at
| a 100x return.
|
| I'd be curious to hear what others think (particularly actual
| VCs, not just pretend ones like me) but this seems like a
| very rational outcome to me.
| dustingetz wrote:
| seed investors might write off a $500k check if their model
| is to write 30 of them and carry the fund with a 100x-er (and
| many investors are not so cool with losing), but $32M is not
| that model. A recent comparable example is Pitch -
| https://twitter.com/unamashana/status/1745417095809307080
| (which Thrive also invested in, followed up by Tiger)
| submitedit wrote:
| Was 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.
| peter_l_downs wrote:
| 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.
| submitedit wrote:
| The disappointing part was we didn't even get to see the
| experiment take place before shutting down prematurely. Our
| sales numbers were still quite solid and there were many
| paths for us to push forward. As a fraction of our investors'
| portfolio, Airplane's investment was small. I imagine they
| would have much more preferred us to continue working hard
| than to return the bit of capital. In the end, only a few
| employees chose to join Airtable.
| peter_l_downs wrote:
| > I imagine they would have much more preferred us to
| continue working hard than to return the bit of capital.
|
| You imagine incorrectly, as revealed by your lead
| investors' decision to allow an acquihire by another one of
| their portfolio companies.
| alalani1 wrote:
| Could you share sales numbers to give us a sense of where
| the company was at?
| billiam wrote:
| 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.
| ore0s wrote:
| I was curious about this article. How much of the AI hype was
| demoralizing to his perception of the company's future?
| Attempting to read between the lines, maybe he was down no more
| than just no-code. He might have thought AI would outperform in
| the same space where internal tools platforms (Airtable/Retool)
| currently live. Following that thought, perhaps Airtable/Retool
| may be looking to pivot away fast from low-code/no-code into
| AI-first connections to internal knowledgebases & databases.
|
| https://www.airplane.dev/blog/no-code-has-no-future-in-a-wor...
| duxup wrote:
| The title made me think this was an announcement by the company
| and it took me a minute to realize it was someone's personal
| experience there. I suspect the context of HN and the title
| confused me a little.
|
| I do find commentary on the level of "interest" and behavior of
| various individuals interesting when it never mentions the actual
| fundamentals of the business (making any money?).
| solatic wrote:
| > 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 CEO from the outside?
|
| I appreciate that the author can't actually get inside the
| founders' heads, but something still smells fishy here.
| mgummelt wrote:
| If revenue was stalled, the investors would have written it off
| and deferred to the founders.
| morgante wrote:
| The company was burning money and growing slowly. Most of the
| original investment was likely based on the strong founding
| team.
|
| In that situation, they'd probably just want their money back.
| pavlov wrote:
| Which seems to be what happened here?
|
| Airtable and Airplane shared a lead investor. After the CEO
| of 'plane left, the remaining team soon got rolled into
| 'table and investors got tens of millions back.
| marcinzm wrote:
| 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?
| gkapur wrote:
| I empathize for the co-founder who was CTO and became CEO. I
| imagine some of the challenges come from the fact that there was
| a big chunk of equity owned by the original founding CEO. As the
| remaining co-founder, I can imagine feeling like I was climbing a
| grueling uphill battle to just get back to the most recent $300
| million (!) valuation and a large amount of the upside of that
| battle was going to someone who abandoned me/the team. That said,
| I'm not privy to any equity adjustment that happened after the
| original founding CEO left.
|
| That said, the after-the-fact communication feels lacking. It
| sounds like your CEO could have at least explained things in more
| detail after the fact (ie. Why he felt a pivot would be necessary
| to get to where the business needed to go.)
|
| Such is life, I guess. I'm wishing you and the team the best for
| the future!
| pritambarhate wrote:
| Lesson for all of us (customers of SaaS companies): never depend
| of VC backed non profitable companies for critical components of
| your infrastructure or business processes. Always build on tried
| and tested open source software.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| That's why I never use Supabase.
| kbar13 wrote:
| supabase is open source...
| popcalc wrote:
| So was ngrok until they abandoned it completely for their
| cloud hosted v2. Over-engineered JS frameworks might last
| for a couple weeks in that state if you're lucky.
| Meanwhile, Rails + Postgres/SQLite need just a couple
| security fixes per year and they'll keep chugging
| indefinitely.
|
| https://railslts.com/
|
| The culture that has birthed these mongrol JS frameworks
| worships shinyness and novelty. These are naturally
| temporal qualities. It's why for almost no one does it make
| sense to buy a mid-range Mercedes/BMW. You always lease
| because you know it will fall apart after the warranty
| period.
| arcanemachiner wrote:
| Even a lot of the open source stuff is runs by companies listed
| on Crunchbase with millions of dollars of VC backing. That
| software isn't gonna maintain itself if the cash runs out.
|
| Open source may be safer than proprietary software in that
| regard, but it's still not a guarantee. Still far preferable
| IMO.
| gherkinnn wrote:
| Look at the mess Vercel created with their Next.js app router.
| mgummelt wrote:
| 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.
| epolanski wrote:
| 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?
| playingalong wrote:
| The success is in convincing the investors to give money.
|
| The subsequent execution might or might be another success.
| beezle wrote:
| A shame that is what constitutes "success" in the business
| world today.
| marcinzm wrote:
| > 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.
| epolanski wrote:
| You are right I might have interpreted the message in a bad
| way.
| rmnoon wrote:
| How did I not know you were an original cofounder at Heap?
| mgummelt wrote:
| I was only there for a few months!
| typeofhuman wrote:
| "fairly big companies" != "amount raised"
| vasco wrote:
| Do you know how Heap is doing these days? I see many
| similarities to the article we're commenting on.
| SmellTheGlove wrote:
| 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"
| morgante wrote:
| 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.
| datavirtue wrote:
| You can buy the "co-founder" title. That's how Elon Musk is
| associated with Tesla.
| rbranson wrote:
| While 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.
| LewisJEllis wrote:
| 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?"
| axus wrote:
| If you are at a large company, he'd love to decompress there
| for now!
| neilv wrote:
| > _However, we 'd have to do interviews for leveling purposes,
| and the financial details wouldn't be made available to us until
| later._
|
| "Everyone has to re-interview for their job" is a terrible thing
| to do to people, IMHO.
|
| You could instead have deal clauses about retaining the employees
| for some period, and how the leveling and compensation maps. If
| the acquiring company isn't willing to do that, then I think that
| tells you that you're selling out the employees to a worse
| environment.
|
| Re-interviewing is one reason I wouldn't sell to Google, at least
| not without checking with the employees first. "So, uh, if we
| were to get acquired, how would people feel about having to do
| especially jerky re-interviews for their jobs, if, uh, it paid
| really well?"
| neilv wrote:
| > _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.
| neilv wrote:
| Another angle: If a CEO denies to employees that an acquisition
| is in the works, to retain employees, but there actually was an
| acquisition in the works, and an acquisition happened, and it
| included employees' stock becoming officially worth $0 (or some
| other arguable financial harm)... could that constitute legally
| actionable fraud?
| mndgs wrote:
| Or, if it really was an acquihire, then you don't run around
| telling this to employees, not to scare them off .. (certaily
| this was a clause in the LOU/SPA)
| hoherd wrote:
| It's probable that he was legally bound by a confidentiality
| agreement.
| rvcdbn wrote:
| "software is a force multiplier" well maybe that's the point. I
| am a superstitious b*tch but maybe the Universe doesn't want our
| force to be multiplied any more!!!!
| stevage wrote:
| It also struck me as rather cowardly for the CEO to drop this
| bombshell from his home office rather than flying across country
| to be with the team.
| dudeWithAMood wrote:
| I'd say given the startup's shutdown being offered a signing
| bonus and a job at another company was the best outcome for the
| employees.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Airtable acquires Airplane_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38861271 - Jan 2024 (158
| comments)
| semanticc wrote:
| 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?
| pm90 wrote:
| You don't know. Its a gamble. Sometimes it pays off. Most times
| it doesn't.
| mring33621 wrote:
| 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
| dcre wrote:
| This 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.
| rubenfiszel wrote:
| 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, and have grown to love demanding customers as people
| that care about our product. But if I wasn't passionate in it and
| its technical challenges, I think there are easier opportunities
| out there to make a successful startup and can easily imagine how
| disappointing this segment is with the track records they had as
| founders.
| vladsanchez wrote:
| What's Airplane's best alternative to build internal apps?
| Windmill and Retool were mentioned but I'm not convinced of them.
|
| Any guidance will be appreciated.
| carabiner wrote:
| I really hope this trend of non-informative, common noun names
| for software comes to an end. Airplane, seriously? Why not
| Skateboard or Plywood or Shovel? I guess I have noticed it's a
| signal that the actual product is yet another boring productivity
| tool.
| czhu12 wrote:
| I'm always puzzled by stories like this:
|
| Why not just cut staffing to a minimal number of people -- go
| back to existing customers, and renegotiate existing contracts
| down (due to reduced support), and try to balance out the revenue
| with costs to get back to some level of profitability.
|
| 2-3 person indie hackers that bring in 400k in revenue are
| considered wildly successful. I have to imagine airplane.dev was
| bringing in enough revenue to support a team of 10 - 15 people
| who could forever be a thorn in the side of companies like
| retool. Maybe there could even be an exit one day for the people
| staying behind.
|
| Even the founders could leave, just hand it off to a group of
| employees who are still interested in working on the problem,
| will have more control over the company, get better work life
| balance, etc. Rather than just scrapping it all
|
| I'm sure it isn't this easy, since that seems to never actually
| happen, but can anyone illuminate me on why?
| Havoc wrote:
| If the sole purpose was to get the CEO they could have just made
| him an offer he can't refuse, stick some other new CEO into
| airplane and call it good.
|
| Would effectively be a risky, but free bet on a growing company.
| warthog wrote:
| Thanks for the clear explanation. Had wondered at the time why
| this would happen.
|
| Not to play the blame game but sounds like it comes down to
| cofounders just losing interest in their own company. Rest was
| just a side effect.
|
| Unfortunately this is becoming more and more common. The cult of
| the irrational, warrior founder/CEO who takes the startup journey
| as literal life or death is even rarer.
|
| What is even more weird to me is that I know founders who sleep
| 2-3 days in the office trying to make their startup work and
| grow, year after year.
|
| They are hiring for people like you. They always get rejected for
| some reason.
|
| Yet Silicon Valley natives get their way easily with great
| engineers like the ones in your team. I don't mean to offend
| anything, I have been just really curious what makes great people
| like your team go with founders who give up eventually. Cos I
| used to think you can sort of sense a founder who is not in it
| for life and death.
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