Paul is one of the most impressive, fun and welcoming people I met at YC. This is awesome — congrats on the well-deserved success, guys! Excited to see what you'll build at Coinbase.
I used Blockspring back in college when it first came out for a bunch of random projects and more recently for lead lists. In the past couple months I actually hopped on a call with one of the co-founders to provide some feedback on the product. For a while it didn't seem like they were updating anything, but in the past year to 6 months they really improved a lot of the features. Pretty cool to see it work out for them, congrats!
Maybe the team wasn't willing to make the jump without them letting to keep it running? Keeping lights on is very different from supporting development. I think time will tell.
The Blockspring pitch of tech-for-nontech-people always annoyed me since it felt like a solution in search of a problem (see my 2015 comment when its investment from a16z was first announced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9969890)
That said, the 3.5 year delta with no funding events since suggests more that the runway ran out.
It is easy to criticize founders when they launch something new. Given enough time, you'll often look smart for doing so since nothing is perfect, and most startups don't end up the way founders hope at the beginning.
I worked with this team for a long time. They built products that people used and that came close being huge. They're nice, smart, good people.
It would be better, I think, to have an honest conversation with them about what might not have gone quite the way they expected or about why they did what they did. It would require more thought and curiosity, but would be far more interesting.
> It is easy to criticize founders when they launch something new. Given enough time, you'll often look smart for doing so since nothing is perfect, and most startups don't end up the way founders hope at the beginning.
That's fair, which is why I typically haven't commented on Show HNs/Launch HNs. However, when a startups receives a substantial amount of venture capital from a(nother) top tier firm based on that startup's idea, it's also fair to open the startup to more scrutiny/skepticism.
Disagree. GP comment's language "joining coinbase was a no-brainer" was as pathetically guileless as SV gets. There is no world in which joining Coinbase was a "no-brainer," even if it was the right decision. Coinbase is a company with basically only one purpose - helping people buy and sell crypto currency. That it helps less technical people do that, or sharing a engineering manager with AWS Lambda doesn't exactly sell the idea that this is just the next obvious thing for Blockspring to do.
There was probably something wrong with the company. That's fine, that's okay, most companies fail. There's no shame in it.
We just don't enjoy being lied to badly. Lie better, at least.
I think i am looking for some level of honesty, away from the usual we are so excited narrative. Acquihires are almost always bittersweet for the founders. Excitement is not in the spirit of acquihires.
If we can be more honest with motives, it would make sv a better place, imho.
Until we don't see a balance sheet and the acquisition price and terms we cannot know how healthy your business was.
Not saying you are not right but saying that you should disclose details to back up your claims. If you can't it is better to stay silent. Partial claims only generate doubts.
Your comment here and your linked comment address different concerns to me. Your 2015 comment was security/privacy focused and i believe appropriately so. Your comment today surprises me. I'd argue that "tech for non-tech people" accurately describes most successful businesses outside of devops-focused SaaS in the last 5 years. Heck i'd argue slack is "tech for non-tech people"
Granted i know little about Blockspring, but no funding events in 3.5 years after a 3.5MM round with 11-50 employees[1] sounds like financial traction to me. Maintaining a < $1M burn for over 3 years with > 10 employees isn't easy. And such napkin math assumes they sold while staring down impending bankruptcy. Possible, but its a tale rife with speculation.
> I'd argue that "tech for non-tech people" accurately describes most successful businesses outside of devops-focused SaaS in the last 5 years. Heck i'd argue slack is "tech for non-tech people"
To clarify, I was more against the "killing of spreadsheets" the linked a16z article mentioned as it seemed to offer a solution that was more complicated than the problem it solves.
You do have a point about SaaSes making things easier for nontech people. Airtable, for example, expanded on spreadsheets to make them better and playing to their strengths, instead of trying to kill them.
I tend to agree. The worst offenders are the drag-and-drop "code" editors, plain english programming languages, etc.
I actually thought Blockspring was kind of cool but then discovered an amazing and amazingly under-publicized Google Docs feature: you can attach and run JavaScript against Google Sheets including URLFetch. Makes for an excellent API runner for massaging data and all sorts of things.
