An Almost Acquisition Story

astronomer.io

81 points·rywalker··11 comments

>"today we are still 100% Astronomer and in no way a part of Romeo’s portfolio. Without going into too much detail, a week after returning from SoCal, the deal was dead."

Why write everything before this and then leave the reader hanging at the end? For shame.

Yeah that ending is a bit mysterious. In the end, Romeo decided not to move forward. It wasn't price; just not a great fit. The experience did prompt us to change our back-end from a heavy reliance on AWS services to more standard big data technology: http://www.astronomer.io/blog/sneak-peak-at-our-new-backend

This was a fun read, if a little lacking in detail (understandably).

I'm curious what they mean by saying AngelPad is the "top ranked accelerator in the world". I've heard similar things about both YC and Techstars, although it seems everyone knows that YC is the premier startup launching program, if only in legacy. Who makes these rankings anyway?

It was ranked #1 by SeedRankings in 2015 when we went through it (http://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2015/03/17/the-best...). Looks like 2016 dropped to #4, but still an amazing program.

You'll notice the ranking does not include YC at all in the listing because the researchers were told that YC was opting out of such ranking lists that year. YC remains the premier #1, regardless of list.

Why would YC wishing to "opt out" of ranking lists be relevant to the ranking lists?

Nice read. This part cracked me up: 'Interestingly, our CTO, Greg, had a different take: “There’s no way this happens.”'

The incredible journey continues.

Indeed. They got so close to thanking for it though.

Great article and a great reminder to keep your head straight.

really cool article!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com