[rawrmaan]

Parse was an amazing discovery when I was just starting out my dev career and I've used it in all of my major projects, but it had some serious shortcomings. I wrote about why I think Parse failed from a developer's perspective.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13522602

[mofirouz]

Why do you think Parse was a failure in the first place? Surely, Parse founders got a nice little cash out of the acquisition and Facebook got developers onboard and Facebook Login integrated onto many apps.

[evan_]

> Why do you think Parse was a failure in the first place?

Because the title of this post is "Parse.com is shutting down today".

[mofirouz]

Shutting down is not the same as failure

[jerf]

But it is a reasonable enough definition of it that we should be able to apply the principle of charity to calling it a failure, no? It is not something anyone would mistake for "success" on its own terms, even if the people involved did OK for themselves.

[nickpsecurity]

It really depends on the goal. It's a success if the goal was to build something to be IPO'd or acquired for benefit of investors and founders. It was a big success in that regard. It's a failure if the goal was mainly to benefit developers. That wasn't the main goal. Incentives like this are why I don't use VC-funded stuff unless I have a fall-back option. Risks also apply to proprietary software in general but many suppliers are more interested than startups are in sucking money out of you for long-term. Market leaders stick around longer.

[010a]

People also die. By your definition, are all people destined to fail because we all die? Is no one worth remembering, or being called "successful"?

[jerf]

You posted that directly in response to a message that reminded you about the principle of charity.

[reality_czech]

Parse is just "doubling down on its amazing bet." No failures here!

[geofft]

When a marriage ends in divorce, it is fair to call the marriage a failure even if you get a profitable settlement from the divorce and even if you both go on to better marriages. Same reason.

[beachy]

Nice analogy, but we generally don't select development tools on the basis that we want to grow old with them.

[tommorris]

Speak for yourself, but the longer the tool has been around, the more I trust it. One of the chief selling points of learning something like Vim or Emacs is precisely that it isn't going to disappear next week and become abandonware (TextMate) or just lose interest from people because something else came along (Sublime Text → Atom/VS Code).

Same with a lot of developer tools. (This is sometimes bad. It is still taking a long time for people to migrate to Python 3.x, and the transition from CVS/SVN to Git and other DVCS was pretty slow.)

[alayne]

Why not? I wouldn't choose to develop against SaaS that I knew was going to shut down in 5 years. Parse also said they'd keep running after the buyout.

[brennen]

I am increasingly inclined to do exactly that.

[rawrmaan]

I'm on the same page. My "old = inferior" bias is swiftly wearing off as I gain more experience.

[jkarneges]

Well, he said "from a developer's perspective" ...

[jonathankoren]

Depends. I don't know what the acquisition price was but given that they're shutting it down, I'm thinking it was in tens of millions range, which makes it an aquihire. Assuming they raised low to mid tens of funding, The investors probably have a 1x or more a preference on the sale. This means the leftover value is in the low to mid ones of millions. I love that you're getting 0.1% So we're talking like ones of thousands of dollars for an engineer after two years of work at probably less than market rate salary.

Given that your equity package at a large company would be is late and 50 times that per year yeah the engineers didn't come out ahead so it's a fail.

[mofirouz]

I have to agree with @csmajorfive - This is quite wrong from both a factual numeric point of view as well as guesstimates on what percentage that investors/founders/employees got.

[csmajorfive]

This is wildly wrong.

[itsweller]

Baseless conjecture shot down immediately by someone intimately involved with the project is truly something beautiful to behold.

Are you at liberty to discuss the actual reasons and shed a bit more light on why things went down the way they did?

Side note, your product was unbelievably popular at my university. Parse made getting a functional DB up and running for courses and side projects completely painless and a no-brainer for tight deadlines and PoCs.

[rawrmaan]

I have no idea what you're talking about. Facebook is very generous with equity for employees and I"m sure the founders got a good deal.

[jonathankoren]

I don't give a shit about the founders I'm talking about the employees.