Airtable lays off over 250
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
That's gotta be a little worrying, huh?
Also, in the article, it mentions that "20% of staff were affected". That puts Airtable at ~1250 employees (pre-layoff). They raised $725 million in 2021. So this can't possibly be a cash crunch, right? Feels more like opportunistic restructuring - a chance to make some painful changes with the justification of "the economy."
(That doesn't preclude it being worrying for the business.)
linked article makes it clear that it was the chief product officer
https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/08/airtable-chief-revenue-off...
It's a trick VCs play.
They aren't buying typical common stock. They're buying preferred stock. They won't get wiped out in bankruptcy like typical common stock shareholders.
It's a $725M minimum valuation. Not an $11B market cap - as it would be for a public company.
The options strike price is usually dictated by the last round valuation - this may mean that in a possible IPO in the future many employees will find they made close to nothing
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/18/api-platform-postman-value...
Personally, I see these kinds of things as a failing of the US's macroeconomic policy since 2010 first (ZIRP), and the failing of the board and VCs second, before dicing up the blame amongst c-suite and executives. The incentive structures start from the top.
Massive addressable market, pretty mediocre state of the art, problem that people already spend real money to solve (poorly). $3B is high, but I can see a world where it’s justified.
Employee count seems high but I would imagine a disproportionate number are sales/marketing because, again, addressable market is huge and competition is fierce.
Postman… the addressable market is just not that large, especially for the features you actually pay for.
There's definitely value in the space, but I struggle to imagine how the ends (capturing that value) justifies the means (how they're pursuing that value).
If you know your way around CalDAV [1], you can build the most valuable 20% of their features in a weekend. A team of 3-4 could build the most valuable 80% in a month or two. In fact, some people have not only done that but kept going, and we have FOSS tools like https://cal.com as a result, that are arguably easier to use.
As a board member/founder/executive, one has to in the mirror each night, and feel confident saying "I'm running this company responsibly".
Especially if you're working in a purely digital space (which Calendly is), you have to bend really far to justify hiring that many people. IDK, maybe I'm a standard deviation or two away from norms on frugality, but this baffles me.
[0]: To contrast, WhatsApp sold in (!) 2014 (!) with 32 engineers (~50 total heacount), servicing 450mm active users. So, Calendly have 10x the headcount, on .2x the valuation.
If calendly links improve the top-of-the-funnel size by X% it would be very easy to justify paying them large amounts of money to do so. If I’m employing 50 recruiters why wouldn’t I pay calendly $100k/year or more to make them X% more effective?
You could argue for building your own, but it doesn’t make sense for every business to build their own, and I think it’s obviously the type of tool where a prototype would be easy to make but getting enterprise-ready would be challenging.
In practice if calendly gets a large share of the market and really can charge 100k/customer, competitors will pop up quickly and force pricing far lower.
For a long while many tech companies had no serious competition as startups stayed in their own lane, but thats no longer true.
E.g. people were saying the same things about Zoom and Slack, but now they’re a dime a dozen.
Amazon just launched a tiktok clone. Nothing is safe from competition, so dont expect outsized margins to last forever in your forecasts. First movers get a few years of runway before profitability will be pressured
Sure, every company has competitors. That doesn’t mean $3b is an unreasonable valuation.
Just commenting on the apparent assumptions made using the analysis above. Zoom is still worth $20B, but there were many who said it was worth far higher because they didn't consider or discount competition at all.
However, I also think Zoom is likely to fall quite a bit more from here. Their revenue is flat YoY and still valued at 30 PE.
Identical competitors is popping up easily by offering the exact same service. It is a simple concept and the fact is that the only innovation they can add is adding very simple bells and whistles. The barier to this industry is virtually non existing.
Nothing is stopping Google or Microsoft to build their own integrated calendly like app. Considering platform risks, I don't believe any SAAS whose core offering relies on external API to have a sustainable revenue model.
What is your opinion about Microsoft Teams?
I have done couple of gigs for a Azure shops. It is borderline admirable how one client vehemently adhered to the MS teams. Even to the point of using Teams integrated Onenote for software design. Everything that was supposed to be written went to onenote on teams.
They just don’t do them well enough for adoption.
[1] https://github.com/Kong/insomnia [2] https://github.com/flawiddsouza/Restfox
I... thought it was someone's hobby project. Maybe something ran by a tiny team.
Why did they even take funding? Surely making a profit from the get go wasn't a challenge for them? It isn't like there is some huge growth opportunity for them outside of "gain more customers", and pretty much every developer in the world has known who they are for ages now.
I am sure postman is one of those products where 90% of the common features are super easy to replicate, and the last 10% take 80% of the dev org to work on.
If I'm writing an API, I'm testing that thing as I work on it, and the tests describe the spec of the API along with any public-facing documentation. I'm also going to provide a nice interface for testing it manually, because there are plenty of tools for doing so.
At this point, what does my team gain from using a GUI to interact with the API? Is it better documentation, better accessibility to less experienced devs?
I admit I'm naive, I'm probably missing a killer feature. I don't feel like I have an API problem though. They work well, they're tested, easy to use, directory structure/conventions/tests provide good discoverability, docs exist where code falls short, etc.
What cool stuff am I missing?
postman was good, now its awful. luckily there are other hobby projects that are still enjoyable to use
It's critical infrastructure for a lot of Ecommerce companies.
If you worked at Airtable, thank you for making a cool product. I hope it helps you in your job searches too!
Also, pivoting to enterprise worries me as a end user who likes their free plan
But the answer is mostly no. You don't become a worth $10Bn+ by being slow and steady. You grow fast when money is cheap and you hibernate when money is tight. (I don't agree with this way of building a company, but that's not the point.)
In a market with any amount of stickiness (arguable most tech markets), losing share is a permanent problem. Every customer your competitor acquires is theirs for as long as the stickiness holds, and if you want to woo them, not only do you have to convince them you're worth trying, but that you're worth switching for.
So under the all my competitors big and small are being aggressive and fighting for share framework, most companies bit the bullet and decided to accelerate hiring (especially since, as we are seeing now, it's so easy to reverse that decision for top management).
It's an argument for why the overall economy has become less volatile as growth has slowed, but the high growth pockets (like tech) are more volatile than ever.
Whether these companies can only survive in a 0% environment is a matter for debate I won't get into; my main point here is more along the line that there had to be consequences to that somewhere. The rate of resources flying around reduces, the rate of resource consumption must reduce.
Given one a16z VC gloating about it and praising Musk's "sack everyone and work the rest to death", I wouldn't be surprised if it's the billionaires co-ordinating.
It's not as though suppressing workers is new, and SV got co-ordinating their efforts to crush salaries.
And it's important to put the "work the rest to death" thing in context. In the past, Twitter workers were secretly video taped bragging about only working four hours per week.
https://www.tellmebest.com/twitter-communists-employee-leake...
Or maybe “mature” is an uncalled for judgement. Company correctly forecasts hiring needs and business environment is maybe more correct.
Subject: How and why to contemplate layoffs in Q4 2022
Median engineer was making $370k (of course half of that is pre-ipo RSUs)
How am I “made whole” by illiquid equity?
In the case of a private company, I have no guarantee that my equity will ever be worth anything and I have to wait until an exit event.
Yes I know that there are ways to sell options in private company if your company allows it and if there is a market for it. This again is unlike logging into Fidelity and selling my stocks the day they vest.
> When someone says "I want a programming language in which I need only say what I wish done," give him a lollipop.
thoughts? people keep saying we won't have a big recession because tech is the ONLY sector that will have layoffs. I am doubtful of that statement.
Interest rates have gone up substantially this year, and companies in that sector are definitely feeling the burn.
I’m working on it, would love to hear your takes, especially as in term of performance and speed we worked heavily this year and believe to have reached something superior to alternatives.
I wish I had access to the issues I was going back and forth with your team on, but I no longer have access to that email account.
One big thing we wanted was relationships. Perhaps we’d keep data in a table and some entries would link to another document. At the time, this wasn’t possible but I was told it was on the horizon/being considered.
Otherwise we had issues with performance slow downs when we allowed documents to get very large. This was generally bearable, but we had some documents we didn’t want to break apart (for reasons), and opening them up became a little frustrating. They didn’t scroll well and editing them was laggy, for example.
I trust your team has been working hard on it because it was very evident that the team cared a lot and was super attentive. I constantly worried I was being annoying, but I got quick, steady, and very gracious responses, always looking to provide useful information. Super positive experience in that regard!
The performance definitely is something we improved a lot, and indeed relational data - I guess you mean roll ups in database- is not something we allow at the moment, thanks for sharing again!
I am a huge fan of AirTable, but obviously think they've missed something huge: (see my talk "If spreadsheets and programming languages had a baby" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0l2QWH-iV3k). We've got lots of exciting stuff coming out!