I said this in the other thread and I know it sounds cliché, but we're not planning to "go away" or get acquired or something. We've always positioned this company as a long-term play, and made that very clear when hiring, raising money, etc. It's just not possible to go after something big if you plan to "flip" the company quickly.
> but we're not planning to "go away" or get acquired or something
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.
To address the VC issue the poster and subposters are talking about:
> 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.
To elaborate on this point: 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 will make it nearly impossible to get other investors interested. So they basically have you by a chain.
That's what the parent poster is getting at. In SV, most founding teams retain control after a seed financing, and many continue to retain control after a Series A.
I think you're actually wrong about VC goals. Yes VCs look for acquisitions, but acquisitions only really move the needle when they're really big (>$100m). Anyone acquiring for those amounts aren't going to shut the product down.
It's pretty easy to name any number of >$100M acquisitions that have been shut down. Regardless, that's only a goal of VCs: there's no shortage of VC-funded companies that have been sold for far less than $100M when they couldn't raise the next round at a palatable price.
No startup company can make a defensible claim that their product will be around for the long haul.
Not sure where the B2B constraint came from. That's a little more challenging, because B2B companies are more likely to have revenue and enterprise sales channels, etc., worth preserving, and it's not particularly relevant to your thesis (that products from VC-backed companies are less likely to get shut down).
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 don't think the point is only about the product going away. If Inbox is acquired then it's no longer 'the email company' but the whatever-the-acquirer-wants company (which may well be advertising).
They're building a platform. They can make money by charging developers a percent of revenue made from apps built on the platform. No need to charge users for email directly.
Yeah, but very few companies start with plans to be "flipped". The reality is that the failure rate of startups is very high, the exit options are few, and privacy policies generally aren't worth the digital bits they're stored on. While you may have the best of intentions (and I genuinely believe you do) it's still not enough to let me give you access to all of my e-mail. I already do this with Google; shifting my e-mail to a new service is not practical so I would simply have two companies with access to all my e-mail instead of one. I'm also suspicious what you get out of the deal: you know how it goes, if you're not paying for the product, then you are the product... At least with Google, I know and understand their intentions.
I wish you the best of luck, because this is a hard space to play in.
In that case, you should probably make a big fancy statement to that effect. It would be popular, people are very concerned about the issue of services being acquired and binned these days, it's such an obvious pattern.
If you are not legally/politically able to make such a statement, then these casual assurances are worthless, and ultimately misleading.
Your two paragraphs are logically irreconcilable. Obviously, they cannot legally or politically make a statement like "we will never get acquired." You tell them not to make that statement if they can't. But then you also tell them they should make the statement?
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.
The strongest statement you can make to this effect is to preferentially take _my_ money over VC money. Words on this particular subject have been reduced to having no value with most people.
I wonder if it's possible to make that promise a legally binding contract. Of course all startups say that they won't "go away", but most of them will even if they say they won't.
While I can't think of a legal way to guarantee "not going away", you can legally guarantee a very strict privacy policy, good for 10 years counting from when the account was created. Future changes in privacy policy would not be able to cancel the 10 years promise, so any acquirer would be prevented from pushing ads. The acquirer could still kill the produce though.
You simply set aside money in an endowment fund (or other funding apparatus) and create a legal entity charged with the task of using the money in the fund to continue operations in the event the main company shuts down. Just add a clause in the legal framework of the organization which provides for the startup and handover operations, put individuals on a "board" of some sort who will begin drawing a salary when the organization is kicked into action, etc. It's not exactly rocket science.
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.
I am confused. The fund is set up by the company itself right? So if things get so bad that the company has to shut down, BUT they have a fund big enough to keep running the company, why must they shut themselves down to tap into it? Why can't the original company simply use that money to keep operations running?
Because that's the only way to prove continuation of operations. Also notice the difference between continuing to provide services and continuing running the company as normal (which typically would involve lots os expenditures beyond the basics necessary to keep services running).
As a fellow receiver of venture funding, I think you need to have more explanation than that if you want to be convincing.
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.
I don't even understand what the intention is with the scare quotes. Are they suggesting that google would claim to discontinue gmail, but not actually discontinue it?
They would have gotten exactly the same press (TechCrunch) minus that commentary. But with that commentary they instantly cloud their announcement with two immediate thoughts-
-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.
Indeed, the probability of this being discontinued, if it follows normal trends, is dramatically higher than pretty much any Google product, and worse the notion that the "product is their focus" is specious: getting investment cash or a buyout is their focus, as it is with virtually all startups.
Moralizing or taking shots at competitors is a dangerous tactic when you live in a glass house.
In fairness they're a new company and probably only have a basic view on how they're going to make money. They just licensed their core code under 'free software' so it makes sense for them to have a CLA. It will give them some flexibility as they figure out their commercial path - though I can't actually find the CLA on their site.
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.
Is this viral like the gpl? Does the use of the inbox backend, hosted by me, require release of the full source to the entire app that uses the inbox backend? My brief reading of the agpl seems to say yes. Which makes this an interesting toy but nothing more...
Yes, the AGPL does require the release of the source of any code built on components licensed under it. Chances are they'll have a commercial license, though my salary disputes your assertion that an AGPL base can only be used as a toy - we have contracts with some of the largest companies in my country.
I'm an idiot, but I'm willing to believe there are still people out there who love what they do, and would stand by it, even if Corporation X comes knocking on the door with a pot of gold.
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.
Well, I think everyone kind of breaks down with their "morals" or idealistic visions when presented with the word "billion". E.g. see Occulus Rift founder Palmer Lucey's posts on Reddit from years ago claiming he will never sell the company under any condition.
But a quick offer with a billion was made and just like that Oculus was Facebook's.
The problem is, Inbox already has a BUNCH of VC's behind it. Which means a lot of people only worried about making money on the board. Unless the founders collectively agree they won't sell the company and also have a majority of shares in the company, the first big tech company that comes knocking with an offer will treated like the second coming.
I think the point the parent comments are trying to make, factually correct or not, is that it's not entirely within the control of the people/company developing the product to determine whether they accept a buy-out if they have accepted outside money. It's not cynicism to point out when people make statements they may not have the ability to back up.
Whether that's actually the case is less clear to me though, after following some of the other comments from the developers here.
Working on a problem you care deeply about with great people is already a pot of gold. It's something that money literally cannot buy, and much harder to create than than cash in one's bank account.
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.
So, since you seem to be a developer on this -I'd like to ask:
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...
Sure, I'll run though these. You can also ping me at mg@inboxapp.com.
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.
It might be simpler to just use a regular SMTP server and procmail or equivalent to deliver to Inbox, with fallback to local mailbox on failure to deliver, which Inbox could then sync. No need to reinvent the wheel here.
By all means believe and cheer. As we can observe from the sports industry, people like having things to believe in and cheer.
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.
Very amusing. But for all we know they will be acqui-hired, maybe even by Google, and then shifted to a different project.