We were quite disappointed and surprised by the sudden choice to shut the company down. In many ways, we had good metrics, customers that liked us, a lot of runway, and a great team.
In the end, the decision came to our CEO. While he never gave a clear reason why, it was pretty clear that he burned out and tossed in the towel.
Even if Airplane had been cash flow positive, slowing growth and a demotivated CEO and departure of key employees at an early stage is a tough pill for investors to swallow. See my other comment, but I find it highly likely that your investors were pushing for a way to wind things down and return as much of their cash as they could get, and an acquihire is a fairly employee-friendly way to do that.
Don't know any particulars but the real problem here is the misaligned incentives that come from the rather incestuous relationship between founders, investors, and their friends in most companies steroidally pumped-up by VCs. What about the customers and what they want? VCs typically over-rotate on founders they talk to and obsession with comparable companies. Reading between the lines here the real story of a fire sale to Airtable (in some trouble of its own) might have to do with burnout but also machinations with another portfolio company from a lead investor.
The disappointing part was we didn't even get to see the experiment take place before shutting down prematurely. Our sales numbers were still quite solid and there were many paths for us to push forward. As a fraction of our investors' portfolio, Airplane's investment was small. I imagine they would have much more preferred us to continue working hard than to return the bit of capital. In the end, only a few employees chose to join Airtable.
I was curious about this article. How much of the AI hype was demoralizing to his perception of the company's future? Attempting to read between the lines, maybe he was down no more than just no-code. He might have thought AI would outperform in the same space where internal tools platforms (Airtable/Retool) currently live. Following that thought, perhaps Airtable/Retool may be looking to pivot away fast from low-code/no-code into AI-first connections to internal knowledgebases & databases.
We were quite disappointed and surprised by the sudden choice to shut the company down. In many ways, we had good metrics, customers that liked us, a lot of runway, and a great team.
In the end, the decision came to our CEO. While he never gave a clear reason why, it was pretty clear that he burned out and tossed in the towel.