I'm interested in the backchannel and business that happens when a company that raises multiple millions of dollars shuts down. Do the investors take over? Do the founders have to pay back investors? Is there any liability personally by the founders to investors? This is something that is never really discussed, probably because it gets messy with lawyers.
EDIT: Just heard Mike say that CNCF acquired the ip and assets of RethinkDB for $20k? That's can't be right? Tiny startups that generate $1k a month in recurring revenue sell for more than $20K. RethinkDB raised over $12M right? What am I missing?
The transaction was more of a donation. Companies that get bought are because the technology is strategically important or it is profitable (either business model scales up, or business functions overlap and you can reduce expenses). I'd guess that no companies with enough money to pay sufficiently more than $20K though thought either of those were the case?
> I'd guess that no companies with enough money to pay sufficiently more than $20K though thought either of those were the case?
It seems like an official hosted RethinkDB that included enterprise support could generate pretty nice MRR revenue and take business from Compose.io (IBM). Shoot, wish I'd known, $20K for the ip and assets was a steal. Probably would have been exponentially more to a buyer who wanted to turn it commercial though.
I don't know. Databases are a hard business (see Riak, FoundationDB). Costs money to add features and fix bugs (and really hard to find qualified folks that can do that) as well as hosting costs if you offer a service. We'll see what happens with some other entrants. I would read http://www.defmacro.org/2017/01/18/why-rethinkdb-failed.html regarding DBaaS, too.
I've read it. Completely agree about RethinkDB specifically, who raised VC capital on the order of $12M. A cloud hosted solution is a very tough business, with thin margins when you have dozens of employees, $15-$25k a month bay area rent, and very high overhead. The numbers don't add up and not the return investors are looking for.
Though, if you're bootstrapping with your own capital and grow it to something like $10K or $20K a month in MRR, that's a win. I'm all about bootstrapping SaaS companies and growing recurring revenue.
The company wasn't bought, it went out of business. This transaction was just for the rights to the IP so that the open source project could continue under the same name.
EDIT: Just heard Mike say that CNCF acquired the ip and assets of RethinkDB for $20k? That's can't be right? Tiny startups that generate $1k a month in recurring revenue sell for more than $20K. RethinkDB raised over $12M right? What am I missing?