Very amusing. But for all we know they will be acqui-hired, maybe even by Google, and then shifted to a different project.
If you've taken VC money, haven't you already gave up that choice? Despite pretenses, the VCs are going to want: a) IPO or b) acquisition.
Since you assert b) is not your plan, do you really think you can become a $100m/year company (IPO) by charging for something that Google/MS/everyone else provides for free?
Perhaps I am too pessimistic (or realistic?) about VC goals/control.
> If you've taken VC money, haven't you already gave up that choice
> if your current VCs aren't able to change your mind, and they get angry as a result,
> Or exercise their Board powers and fire the CEO when push comes to shove.
> if your current VCs aren't able to change your mind, and they get angry as a result, just their absence alone from future funding rounds
Basically, you don't know what you're talking about. Look at the VCs involved, and try to make a case for how this could work!
Fuel Capital is a $20m fund. SVAngel doesn't take board seats. Data Collective does take board seats in A rounds, but its super unlikely they have one here. Crunchfund is a small seed fund.
All of these guys are microVCs/super angels, with <=$200m funds each. They don't take board seats in seed rounds, and I would wager a significant sum that they have basically no way to affect what Inbox wants to do. If the investors get a monthly email outlining the company's performance, they would consider themselves lucky.
Note: they're very good at the latter.
Nobody spends millions of dollars on something to make themselves powerless in it.
No startup company can make a defensible claim that their product will be around for the long haul.
In the B2B space in the last decade? Please go ahead! Name 5 off the top of your head and I'll concede the point.
> that have been sold for far less than $100M when they couldn't raise the next round
Sure, but the question was about what VCs _want_.
Still, here's a few that came to mind where the product has been shut down or changed sufficiently to be the equivalent for many customers: dMARC FeedBurner AuthenTEC Face.com TellMe Wildfire
I'm sure I could come up with a few more if I thought about it a little longer. I'm pretty sure these are all >= 100M.
Vendor reliability is a problem at all levels. If you don't have a multi-year maintenance contract, all the more so.
I wish you the best of luck, because this is a hard space to play in.
If you are not legally/politically able to make such a statement, then these casual assurances are worthless, and ultimately misleading.
People need to chill. This looks like an awesome product and platform, and it doesn't seem like it will require any data lock in (you can always move your emails from place to place, and it looks like they won't necessarily even require you to store emails on their servers. Worst comes to worst, if they shut down, I imagine they would provide migration utilities.
These guys are clearly pretty smart. If someone is going to build this product, they seem like a good choice.
That's the point.
The fact that so many companies who "plan to be around forever" haven't bothered to even think about these sorts of things indicates to me how fundamentally unseriously they take their own business.
And I'm sure that when Google was founded it never imagined things it would be doing years later at the expense of some users of it's products.
[1] People cheat of course but also people change over time with how they see the world.
You took investment money. If you're a typical startup, you plan to take more. Investors are in this for returns. VCs are in it for returns in the timeframe of their particular funds.
That you're not planning to get acquired makes it sound like you have no plan. What you really need is a plan to stay independent and sustainable forever. Which means having some sort of plan to pay off your investors. And if that isn't being acquired, then I presume that means an IPO within 10 years. That is an unlikely outcome for any startup, and personally I'd say it's especially unlikely for an infrastructure company.
As an aside, I definitely think it's possible to go after something big while planning to flip the company. However, in that case it's important to talk as if you won't be flipping the company.
If you're a company that wants to prove that you actually care about providing services that customers can rely on then you need to make a financial and legal commitment to that statement. Create a legal entity tasked with carrying out continuing operations in the event that the company shuts down, set up a bond or other funding source set aside which will provide enough operating budget for operations at some level to be continued for a year or several years.
The goal is not to beat Google, it's to not run out of money and die as a company. To that end, taking a swing at Google is a smart move.
-abandonment. You know, I wasn't thinking of it, but now it's top of my mind.
-delusion. If a funded company talks about the misled motivations of others, I instantly question their self-honesty or delusion. I mean throughout this thread we see claims of not being bought out, etc. You don't take VC money if those things aren't always on the table and top of mind. The selling out already happened.
I don't think it was good at all. Instead of talking about the product or its place, people are talking about that commentary, and not in a complimentary way.
As an aside, "Inbox App" brings you to http://inboxapp.co/. There's also http://inbox.com (which is a decided two generations ago site), and then http://inboxapp.com.
Moralizing or taking shots at competitors is a dangerous tactic when you live in a glass house.
Especially when you all live in the same glass house.
Anyway, in comparison good luck finding a 'free software' license for the Gmail API, or a CLA - and that's from a company that's benefited from Open Source more than any other.
I'd rather cheer for them and be disappointed, than dismiss them in advance and live my life perceiving the world through a cynical lens.
Huh. I didn't know I can write so dramatically. You catch my drift, though.
But a quick offer with a billion was made and just like that Oculus was Facebook's.
Tens of millions and being in charge of a company that improves lives for millions of people around the world in a way you'd love to keep heading up.
Wake up. You don't get to do any of that when your board is stacked with VCs.
First of all JOBS act Title 3 lets you do crowdfunding. And meanwhile there are old school alternatives:
Banks (older school than VC)
Actual profits (probably even older school)
Broker dealers (crowdfunding before there was crowdfunding)
Whether that's actually the case is less clear to me though, after following some of the other comments from the developers here.
And as for control, maybe I should just say it explicitly: we have raised investment but are still in full control of the company (aside: it'd be nuts if we weren't at the stage), and plan to keep it that way going forward. In fact, our investors decided to invest explicitly because they believe our team is the best able to make decisions on growing a sustainable business and solving the developer platform challenges. No matter how good the VC, they obviously don't have the background+skills+focus to design APIs (and likewise shouldn't).
One of our investors likes to say, "We're in your corner, but not in your kitchen," which I've always thought framed the relationship well. I know there's lots of cynicism in the tech world with buyouts/acqui-hires and swarmy VCs, so I can understand where this reaction comes from. And unfortunately I don't have a solid rebuttal other than saying "trust me" with the test of time. Clearly that doesn't work for the HN skeptics. :/
It's also worth pointing out that not all acquisitions are terrible. Google Docs came from an acquisition. So did Google Earth. Facebook continues to run Parse, and Instagram, and Beluga via FB Messenger. Sometimes these acquisitions legitimately make sense, but I think the important thing is keeping the right people in positions to make those decisions when the time comes, and not the people who are just looking for the immediate financial return.
1. If I run my own email server and do not have email addresses from yahoo, google, et al, how does this help me?
2. Is there a way to strip html off every incoming message, but retain the original intent of the formatting?
3. Is the API compatible with PGP? Can I enable PGP encryption at the server level? For example, say the client connected to the server sends unencrypted mail over the SSL encrypted connection... is there a command to automatically encrypt the message to the end user if a PGP key is found on a public server?
4. It seems, much to my surprise, that there is a push toward permanent on-line storage of email -- even though this is extremely insecure [must trust multiple unknown parties/countries/servers/continuous rule of law, etc] and prone to failure as opposed to local only storage -- is there a "local storage" option similar to pop3 for those clients that wish to store email on cheap and easily secured local drives?
5. Tons of other questions... but these are the first four I could think of...
1. We just started with Gmail and Yahoo, and are working to support all IMAP servers. The sync engine currently depends on the CONDSTORE extension for performance, and not all servers have that extension enabled. What server are you running yourself? Dovecot? Cyrus? I'm sure we can get it working quickly-- we just didn't want to push support for servers that we hadn't yet tested.
2. Yep, we have some stuff to do this as well as remove quoted text and signatures[0] so you deal with the "canonical" message. We've been collaborating with the folks from Mailgun on making the best MIME parsing tools.[1] However, the incoming message is always still stored on the mail provider if you need the full rfc2822-compliant version. Storing the unparsed data locally during sync would be a one line patch, so you can do that too.
3. The API doesn't have any notion of PGP/GPG. We'd rather people build clients that have GPG encryption so you don't need to store a key on the server. (Why? See Lavabit.) Inbox just makes it easy to build any app, whether that's for one for sending secure messages, one for sending sales numbers, one for triaging bug reports, etc. etc.
Note that right now the open source sync engine has NO authentication and doesn't talk in detail about security. This was completely intentional to make debugging for developers easier. Obviously you should run this behind your own firewall, VPN, etc.
4. You're exactly right with that trend. Inbox sits as a layer between hosted providers (like Gmail) and your app, providing nice API endpoints. It doesn't currently support POP3, but we'd be up for adding it, especially if someone else wrote it. (Backend providers are pretty easy to plug+play here.) But yeah, this is aiming at the much larger market of people who use hosted services like Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.
Feel free to get in touch if you'd like to talk more about security. I recommend joining the developer Google Group[2], where we'll discuss topics like this one and more. There are clearly lots of big decisions to make when designing a platform this important, and we want to engage the developer community to get as much feedback as possible at this stage.
We've also put a lot of work into making the code readable and modular. I encourage you to check it out from GitHub and take it for a spin in a VM. It's all Python, so very hackable.
[0] I just noticed that the Mailgun folks haven't pushed live the signature extraction library that Inbox also uses. I'll ping them now. It's pretty cool, and uses a hybrid of regex and a trained machine learning classifier.
But if you are somebody making business decisions based on sunshine and rainbows rather than the observed failure rate of startups, then please make those decisions with your own money and your own labor.
Because otherwise, you will end up creating a bunch of cynical employees and investors.