144 points by nigelgutzmann15 days ago | 76 comments
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I used to work at Clockwise and am (was?) a common shareholder. I'm happy that many employees got to get a job at Salesforce. I'm sure it was tough to swallow some pride and recommend Reclaim, who was our strongest competitor in the space (or at least the one we talked about the most). Reclaim was acquired by Dropbox a while ago, although Dropbox wanted them to continue to run and develop the product there.
I also applaud them for not selling the data (as promised in the ToS). There was always a strong commitment to that from day 1, but I'm glad to see that wasn't an option when times got harder. Calendar data sometimes has really sensitive stuff in it, and it would have been a massive betrayal to do anything but delete it after a shutdown.
If you are interested in a more detailed piece about a company struggling in this space, I recommend Rise's shutdown announcement last year. We read this at Clockwise and unfortunately felt it in our bones. There is an ironic Clockwise callout in the piece if you can spot it.
I'm obviously not part of the decision, but I'm sorry the shutoff for users is so soon. Also, please don't revoke your Clockwise app authorization before the shutoff, since that will prevent Clockwise from cleaning up your calendar. If you want to cleanly turn off Clockwise before the shutoff, you can go through the normal deactivation process at https://www.getclockwise.com/uninstall.
It's a huge bummer for me too to have worked on something for years and then to have it suddenly vanish one day.
If you are looking to start a new company in this space, I'll gladly offer my services to talk you out of it. If any die-hard users want to make a self-hosted tool, I'm happy to give some tips from my experience. I know at least one large company has an internal tool like Clockwise's autopilot/flexible meetings.
Salesforce has lost half its market cap in the last ~year. Spending time and money to acquire a calendar scheduler shows just how badly they have lost the plot.
I know this is an HN meme but can someone look at https://www.getclockwise.com/overview and explain why an internal team couldn't build this in a couple of weeks? And it's not like Salesforce is lacking engineers - they employ 83,000 (!!) people globally.
Typically when a company is acquired and the product is swiftly shut down, the value sought was the team. Although Salesforce has plenty of engineers, they may not have a team that does what the Clockwise team does.
Yeah, acquihires are basically just expensive recruiting. We did a small one a few years back — paid way more than hiring individually would've cost, but you get the team already working together, which matters. A senior team that's already gelled is genuinely hard to replicate from scratch.
> "Spending time and money to acquire a calendar scheduler shows just how badly they have lost the plot."
It sounds like Clockwise was pretty good at what they did, perhaps even the best in its class. Salesforce presumably sees a need for these advanced scheduling features in it's own products, and they figure they can get them more quickly, more cheaply, and with lower risk by acquiring an already-built technology and team. ie: it's an "acquihire".
But it's not like this is a one off. Salesforce has spent over $10 billion on acquisitions in just the last 6 months!
Being proud and being acquired aren’t mutually exclusive things. You can be proud of projects that are not viable financially. They are proud of what they built and are also moving to a place where they can continue building more.
Continuing to struggle for money isn’t a requirement for building cool stuff.
I had stepped out of the high-rise office into the blinding San Francisco sun, a freshly minted millionaire wrestling with the crushing guilt of sunsetting my own creation. We built a business to be proud of, I tried to tell myself, clutching the signed term sheet. There must be a lot of pride and meaning in this.
> it has been our mission to forever protect our families from any financial misfortune. We hoped we could help the world make time for what matters along the way, but ultimately money comes first.
There's nothing wrong with selling out and getting rich. There's no need to lie about it.
Warms my heart to learn their families will finally be able to afford nutritious meals, put clothes on their backs and maybe even afford a bike to go to school rather than walking 2h everyday. We need more uplifting stories like this one. Thank you salesforce.
Jokes aside though, many (most?) acquihires are for very little $. Often just founders not being able to continue and just wanting an honorable exit + guaranteed jobs for their teams.
I’m only interested in this because it is the first company I’ve seen try to completely wipe itself off the face of the earth in a little over a week. You won’t even be able to access your billing history after March 27 and there will be no support available after that date.
Running the shutdown that fast usually means either the acquirer owns the infrastructure and pulled the plug, or they genuinely couldn't afford to keep servers running post-close. We had to do a 30-day wind-down once and it nearly broke us. A week is brutal.
sorry in advance to their employees as they go up against the value buzzsaw that is Salesforce as an acquirer. i have years of firsthand experience, and there was not a single win in my entire tenure there.
I think this is the first time I've seen a cookies pop-up that only offered an "Allow All" option and nothing else. Accept our cookies or go away, I guess.
Salesforce integration with calendaring (o365 etc) has been a sore point, i think it's changed multiple times. I was never a huge fan of what Salesforce calls "Activities" which include calendar events. They don't work the same way the rest of Salesforce does. I think all of Activities was from a prior acquisition at some point too. Maybe this acquisition will help with those integrations in a few years.
Other than directly cancelling a competing product, it's usually to acquire the staff. Bit like the football transfer market, but you can buy Marcus Rashford separately without having to buy the whole of Man U.
It's just an acquihire. On the startup's side, the company has failed and they would be shutting it down regardless; this way they've found jobs for their employees and saved face. On the acquirer's side, they've recruited a team that they think is worth hiring with a lower cost of sourcing them.
The acquirer usually isn't paying that much in a case like this. Unlike what some other comments in this thread say (I assume from people new to the industry), nobody's getting rich.
Reclaim is actually still independent — Dropbox acquired Reclaim.ai but then sold it back to the founders in 2024. Feels like evidence these tools aren't obvious fits inside bigger products.
> Any Smart Hold events created by Clockwise (such as Focus Time, Travel Time, Meeting Breaks, and Personal Calendar synced events) will be removed from your calendar. Flexible Meetings will stop moving and the green Clockwise sparkle will be removed.
The problem Clockwise was trying to solve is well-studied -- Gloria Mark's work on interruption recovery costs is the classic citation. But whether scheduling software can address what's mostly a cultural norm problem around meetings has always seemed questionable to me.
I also applaud them for not selling the data (as promised in the ToS). There was always a strong commitment to that from day 1, but I'm glad to see that wasn't an option when times got harder. Calendar data sometimes has really sensitive stuff in it, and it would have been a massive betrayal to do anything but delete it after a shutdown.
If you are interested in a more detailed piece about a company struggling in this space, I recommend Rise's shutdown announcement last year. We read this at Clockwise and unfortunately felt it in our bones. There is an ironic Clockwise callout in the piece if you can spot it.
https://www.risecalendar.com/blog/sunsetting-rise
I'm obviously not part of the decision, but I'm sorry the shutoff for users is so soon. Also, please don't revoke your Clockwise app authorization before the shutoff, since that will prevent Clockwise from cleaning up your calendar. If you want to cleanly turn off Clockwise before the shutoff, you can go through the normal deactivation process at https://www.getclockwise.com/uninstall.
It's a huge bummer for me too to have worked on something for years and then to have it suddenly vanish one day.
If you are looking to start a new company in this space, I'll gladly offer my services to talk you out of it. If any die-hard users want to make a self-hosted tool, I'm happy to give some tips from my experience. I know at least one large company has an internal tool like Clockwise's autopilot/flexible meetings.