Meet the New Filepicker Team | Hacker News Reader

Meet the New Filepicker Team

blog.filepicker.io

78 pointssethbannon39 comments

As the original founder and CEO, I can provide a bit of clarity. As with many startups, ours was a thrilling but ultimately tumultuous journey. At the end of the day, we ended up with a nice profitable lifestyle business (filepicker.io) and a big ambitious change-the-world product that we were not able to get traction with (Ink).

The team decided that the right thing to do was to sell to someone that would: 1. Value and support existing customers 2. Return as much money as possible to investors, and 3. Allow the team to move on to new opportunities. (In priority order)

I have a tremendous amount of respect for the new team, and actually think they will do a better job with filepicker.io, because they are committed to its success as a company and a business rather than some distant vision.

For those who were fans of what we were trying to do at Ink (helping connect the apps and services that people use), I'm still committed to the dream and seeing if we can do it in a slightly different way at IFTTT.

At some point I may do a more full post-mortem, for now if you have any questions hit me up at <my username>@gmail.com

As a customer of filepicker.io I've always been impressed by the quality of the product, documentation, and support. So far this seems like a classy way to move on, best of luck at IFTTT!

I've been using Filepicker from day 1. Never gave me trouble. Noticed they raised, tried for an ambitious strategy, since it wasn't part of my wheelhouse I quietly cheered them on.

Yesterday while checking on something I logged in and noticed the Ink side disappeared and now they're introducing a new team.

I love you guys but be honest, be merciless. What went wrong? Why drop Ink? Why the new team? It'll be better than this pablum PR puff.

Well, this is the most ambiguous post i've read in a while. I think a little transparency here would have gone a long way to inspiring confidence in the new company/team

Where have the new team come from? Were they staff? Or did they buy it when the founders wanted to quit? What was Ink? Was that by the original founders or the new team?

Maybe the new team could list their full names? Bit strange to have "meet the new team" but not have their names and where they've come from.

Yeah, I feel like I've read only the epilogue to a long story. Would love a quick rundown of what lead to this anouncemnt.

"Ink" was a rebranding they did when they were attempting to move the service beyond just FileUploadingAsAService.

So FilePicker was replaced by Ink and now FilePicker has returned?

Odd. They tell us a new team was necessary, with a little detail but not enough to stop me wondering for more.

Then, despite the title, they don't actually introduce the team. Just some tiny images and only their first names.

Thanks guys! Jason from Filepicker here. You’re right—Ink on mobile was too far ahead of its time. I’m still frustrated I don’t have a filesystem on my iDevices… that said, the core business of handling files for uploading no matter where they live couldn’t be more exciting for us. We’ve a huge roadmap and if you check out the blog you’ll see we’re starting to announce our updates already. Everything from new client libraries, iPhone iOS8 support, Metadata APIs to new transformations, data sources and much, much more coming. We’ll give a deeper update on the business once the dust settles but feel free to contact me directly if you have any questions about our service!

Hi Jason, What happened to the old team? Why did they quit? What happened to INK?

It would be great for one or more of the founders to do a postmortem write-up once any dust has settled. I had high hopes for Ink, seems like a shame. I'd imagine this comes at the end of a lot of work to get things transitioned so it is understandable that it is a bit light but it would definitely be good to hear more detail.

Eek. I used Filepicker at my last start-up and loved it. In fact, the website's still using it right now. I integrated it before it was called Ink, went through a rebrand, and now I'm left wondering if the old code I wrote is still going to work.

I wish there was more context here and explained if the product was going away or not. On a personal note: I had talked with Brett and Anand repeatedly in the past, it would've been nice to get more details.

Glad you love the product, everything will work as before. I would extend that and say it will be more robust and faster then ever before.

You should understand that your blog post makes us filepicker users nervous. Please tell us more about what it going on. This is normally the feeling I get when I have to start planning a transition. Give us some fact, or plans even.

We are doubling down on the product. We want to make sure everything is extremely stable first. We have an awesome roadmap that we will be sharing on the blog soon that outlines our plans to make filepicker the best service for dealing with files.

It isn't the product that has me worried - it is already very useful. It is the team and financing that is. Will you make it to cash flow positive? Will you survive? Is there at least a reasonable plan to get there?

cschmidt, Filepicker is growing fast,will survive, and has a very bright future ahead. We will be publishing our roadmap soon.

Glad to hear it. I'll look forward to reading your roadmap.

The blog post won't load for me (dodgy airport wifi!), but I just want to say that Filepicker is one of the few SaaS services that I got instant value from and when they went from freemium to paid recently, I paid up right away.

I really hope the service doesn't disappear!..

Jason from filepicker here, Its not going anywhere, we are expanding the service rapidly and have a full featured roadmap. I'm glad you can see the value!

As someone paying for Filepicker/Ink, it's been great to me ... but ... I've got to ask, as a customer...

If I see rebrand, then all founders removed, why should I have confidence that this company is going to be sustainable and not just live off VC funding?

just pinged you.

I'm not too worried about a rebrand. Very happy customer here :).

Let me search something other than CC stuff. Just straight up enable Google images (or gasp, even Bing images).

Off topic, but that sticky navigation at the top is ridiculously large / tall. It seemingly takes up 1/3 of the viewable browser area required for reading the actual "content". Crazy. (NOTE: Browser width must be at least 992px wide to see it).

I only see navigation at the bottom, and it's less than 1/3 of the screen, though that may depend on your screen height as it has a fixed height.

Filepicker is a much better name. I am glad they are pivoting back to the product people wanted.

we feel the same way!

Am I missing something, or is Filepicker solving an artificial problem, namely connecting proprietary services and apps which could instead use standards like HTTP URLs and filesystems? Some industries are built upon being middlemen, but it seems like, as technology develops, the trend is away from middlemen. Why build a new business upon such a strategy? It doesn't seem like a long-term approach.

You're missing something. Filepicker is a great way to integrate on projects where you won't get paid $5-10k alone just for getting S3 secure uploads working. [cost of time]

I'm not sure S3 is a good example, since it uses a public API that has multiple, open-source implementations on both client and server sides.

But it still takes a while to implement, test, refactor, integrate if you're doing it at scale, distributed, and securely. I can pay $15 and have that done with minor integration. I've used it for just this. Their ability to upload from Dropbox, file system, S3, etc are really nice.

Ok, but what happens when they go bankrupt, or get bought out and have the rates doubled or service halved or otherwise ruined? What happens when they have downtime, and your customers complain, and you have to give them the excuse, "Sorry, but Filepicker is down," and they say, "Huh? Pileflicker? What's that? Just fix it! I need to upload now!"

Every external dependency or middleman you require hands over some control of your product or service to someone else. You put yourself in their hands and are at their mercy. And for what? Convenience? Laziness? When there are standard, proven, tested FOSS solutions that don't depend on middlemen, that you can debug and fix yourself?

Web sites are becoming far too interdependent. It wasn't many years ago when web sites had ZERO external, third-party resources, except banner ads. Now every page loads 35 JavaScripts from OTHER DOMAINS, all of which run in the context of the site the user is actually intending to visit. And several of them usually are required, or else the site looks horrible or breaks completely. It's madness.

> It's madness.

I strongly agree.

I weep for what the web could have been. I don't think people realise what they're losing. Sure, you get some nice CSS or JS stuff, but we've lost platform independence.

Over the years there have been a few campaigns with little banner-buttons. Some of those have been bad ([BEST VIEWED WITH IE!]) but some of them were good.

It would be amazing if there was a campaign to get websites to validate, and to fall-back gracefully, and to be accessible.

I'd also love it if web creators would test sites on real hardware and real networks. My iPhone / android / 3G stick on GiffGaff or (what was) T-Mobile in SW UK is probably much worse than whatever you're using.

We've been a customer for going on two years. Working with Anand and Brett was consistently a pleasure. I wish you all the best of luck!

im really curious to know how much the founders made from the deal.

Looks like this YC company burned through 1.8M from Andressen Horowitz, and all of the original founders have left the company to work somewhere else. Sadly, no acqui-hire this time.

> Sadly, no acqui-hire this time.

What are you talking about? This is much better than an acquihire. They've built a good product that people like; it just isn't VC material, as it turns out. So they've found a way to keep their good product going.

Whatever happened to Thomas? Haven't been keeping up with filepicker in a long time.

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