alt Hacker Newshttps://blog.darklang.com/goodbye-dark-inc-welcome-darklang-... includes this, which is a really interesting pattern that I don't remember hearing about before for this kind of company:
> In conversation with our investors and the board, we believed that the best way forward was to shut down the company, as it was clear that an 8 year old product with no traction was not going to attract new investment. In our discussions, we agreed that continuity of the product was in the best interest of the users and the community (and of both founders and investors, who do not enjoy being blamed for shutting down tools they can no longer afford to run), and we agreed that this could best be achieved by selling it to the employees.
Any other examples of that? I'm particularly interested in that for this kind of software product.
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I wish the owners of Komoot would have done this.
They sold the company because they didn't see a future of growth, and the employees were notified of the sale of the company just a couple of days before.
The new owner then fired most of the employees, it's an Italian "tech company" (Bending Spoons) which already bough companies like Evernote, Brightcove or WeTransfer, and has nothing to do with the outdoors.
Komoot was the best outdoor-community app in Germany and very popular in Europe, made mostly for hiking and biking.
You can see in this really moving video, made by the employees after they got fired, how much they loved their team:
That seems like an exemplary way to handle a failed rocketship that nevertheless produced something useful to certain customers. Big thumbs up to those who made it happen.
> an 8 year old product with no traction ... and we agreed that this could best be achieved by selling it to the employees.
Can someone with more business sense than me explain this? Why would employees want to buy an 8 year old product with no traction? At face value this sounds like a "holding the bag" scenario, not?
> Any other examples of that? I'm particularly interested in that for this kind of software product.
As far as I know, this pattern is not uncommon among traditional businesses. King Arthur Flour Company is the largest one that comes to my mind, but on a local level; grocery stores, restaurants, mechanic shops, plumbing businesses, etc very often "change ownership" this way.
In software, it's pretty common in informal OSS project to transition ownership this way when the original owner/author loses interest or is otherwise unable to maintain the project.
In terms of commercial sortware, something like SketchUp comes to mind, though it's not exact path. It was a startup, acquired by Google, then spun off again with its employees