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.
Company burned more money than it made and winded down, impact on customers have been ultimately negative.
Where's the success?
The subsequent execution might or might be another success.
Here is another; they fucked over their customers. Didn't even open source it on the way out?! Nobody with a memory for this is going use their products without second thought in the future.
But peoples memories are short and a sucker is born every day.
Would a board be lucky to have Ravi on it? Sure, maybe. So their personal success is secured fuck their users; slow clap.
There are so many reasons it's not easy or straight forward to open source the software of a startup that failed. I don't know what to tell you, I guess since I've only worked for startups I kind of understand what risks are involved when working with them, but there are also benefits, it's a trade off that you should be making when you're informed.
If you want stability, buy from a profitable and stable company that can pen multi-year contracts that include liability clauses, and if your company has the leverage, get source code/on prem written into your MSA.
All that said: please, don't use new software or tools, avoid startups and steer clear of emerging technology, you'll feel less betrayed.
*I'm not a founder, never have been a founder, and never could be a founder.
Yeah, I'm sorry you can't see that.
> There are so many reasons it's not easy or straight forward to open source the software of a startup that failed
I'm guessing zero effort was made to continue service for existing customers. If there were efforts made that failed, they would have mentioned it for PR.
> All that said: please, don't use new software or tools, avoid startups and steer clear of emerging technology, you'll feel less betrayed.
Doesn't change what happened.
> *I'm not a founder, never have been a founder, and never could be a founder.
Apparently you don't need to be to have a founder perspective.
"Fuck over" to me implies malicious intent, if it doesn't to you then that may explain why we have differing points of view.
> Apparently you don't need to be to have a founder perspective.
How many startup founders have you worked closely with in your career when the company they ran was < 50 employees?
For example I may be in a life boat with 5 other people and instead of adhering to rations I eat all the food or drink all the water. Because I can't control myself, I lack empathy, or I'm just incredible self-centered. Whatever the motivations I think many may describe what I did as "fucking over" everybody else.
As far as I can tell that applies to neither Heap nor Benchling which were the companies OP cites as successes.
It's a proxy for size of company, and often one of the two public ones (the other being the number of employees you can count on LinkedIn). It's not perfect, of course; there's always a Zapier which raises 1.3M and then grows sustainably. But for VC funded companies, this lets you compare them, if not perfectly.
I think everyone would agree that revenue, ARR, and profitability are all more important. But those metrics are rarely shared for private companies.
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”
It's reasonable that someone joining <1 year in would be considered a co-founder if they had founder-level commitment.
I don't have all the early context, but my understanding (vaguely) is that Heap went through two different incubators, and after one Ravi came on to be cofounder at YC where Heap raised its seed round.