Comment by swyx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by swyx | Hacker News Reader

> As part of this transition, we will unfortunately be sunsetting the Airplane platform on March 1. We’ve closed new signups, and existing users will be receiving an email with further details.

> To all our users and customers: we are sincerely grateful for your interest, support, and feedback over the years. It’s been a pleasure and an honor to learn about, collaborate with, and assist your organizations.

i was/am a fan of the airplane founders but this is so disappointing. what went wrong? no transparency here to the users and customers they are grateful for. no lessons to pass on to others. no reassurances to the rest of the b2b software community, so people default to "startups bad" mentality seen in other hn comments here. to be clear we are not owed any of that, there's always a story that we don't know about. just disappointing but we'll live :)

Also didnt Airtable just layoff 230 people 4 months ago. now they're acquihiring?

Edit: Airtable also speculated to be worth 1-2b now: https://twitter.com/asanwal/status/1703492397739516068?lang=...

> i was/am a fan of the airplane founders but this is so disappointing. what went wrong?

The airplane founders/owners got a big payday. What makes you think that, from their perspective, something went wrong?

> no lessons to pass on to others.

Someone just paid them for all their lessons, why would they give them away for free?

> The airplane founders/owners got a big payday.

I would not assume anyone got a major payout in an acquihire.

If they settled for an acquihire, then it must be the best out of all the alternatives - which means it's as big a payday as they'll ever get.

Throwaway because I worked there:

Re the 1-2b tweet, two important numbers (2023 ARR, and hence growth rate) are wildly off.

The tweeter runs cbinsights, and then quotes cbinsights in the tweet. Super wried.

hmm thanks. anand should have gotten that feedback, and yet his correction (https://twitter.com/asanwal/status/1703598605406265535) wasn't "hey i was super off"

Is he a well known person? The tone of his tweets doesn't sound like someone who owns up to mistakes.

The analysis largely holds tbh even if the ARR is higher. At some point, euphoric private market valuations don't hold when there are public comps (of which there are many for Airtable)

And the company if you compare to those public comps is still worth a fraction of its last valuation although to their credit is probably is worth more than its total equity funding.

I'm happy to update the analysis if someone has verifiable revenue figures - else I have to use the figures that have been leaked or given to the press historically.

Yes, this is sad to hear. This blog post from Airplane https://www.airplane.dev/blog/no-code-has-no-future-in-a-wor... had resonated with me. I think platforms which help teams securely deploy and manage low-code solutions generated with AI assistance are going to become popular. The challenge for Airplane might have been that SaaS (as against open source) in the developer tools space is difficult to sell.

Thanks for that link. I think he's correct, no-code is dead. What he hasn't made clear in the article and I think is implied is that low-code is the future.

"They have to re-create their own (usually subpar) versions of IDEs, version control, code review, integration testing, and more." - Our solution to this will be to allow users to use actual git as the input method. i.e. Coder sets code in git, gets reviewed in github or similar, merged and released. Now the edits will need done in the UI initially but where possible code will be exposed sensibly. e.g. SQL queries written will be visible. Many other tools are beginning to do similar.

An interesting conundrum to this. If AI can be used with no-code OR with low-code does it matter.

> Also didnt Airtable just layoff 230 people 4 months ago. now they're acquihiring?

What was the reason for the layoff? Layoffs often just mean something like "we overhired/overinvested in this area, and it turns out that area is less important to our strategy than we thought."

The pandemic/WFH was probably a boon for Airtable, as companies were learning new ways to collaborate. Hiring and firing can be highly cyclical or trendy (think of how many companies have desperately hired for AI roles in the past year).

Why would you expect anything different than all the other "our incredible journey" notices? https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com

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They don’t really do the same thing. Airplane is a developer focused tool to quickly productionize scripts. Its closest competitor is windmill.dev. All these may be converging in the same direction but Airtable offers nothing for me to migrate to.

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