Clockwise acquired by Salesforce

[singron]

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.

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.

[oystersareyum]

> If you are looking to start a new company in this space, I'll gladly offer my services to talk you out of it.

Why is it so rough etc.?

[quietsegfault]

You did great. It was a product I saw everyone at my company use and love.

[paxys]

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.

[bitwize]

Because the features need to be planned by product people, broken down and turned to stories in JIRA. The dev teams need to get together and play planning poker to determine who gets what story and approximately how long it should take. They need to coordinate with the DevOps and security teams in order to ensure it complies with company requirements/best practices concerning authz/authn, o11y, etc.

The good news is the company is headed into a bright and glorious future of productivity. The CEO has been completely one-shotted, and over last weekend he vibe-coded together a companywide TODO app. The submit button glitches out of existence and it authenticates any company email address without even a password, but its existence means the CEO is a dev now just like you. Token and SLOC count KPIs will be implemented next quarter.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Salesforce has lost half its market cap in the last ~year

They're also at record revenue [1].

[1] https://investor.salesforce.com/news/news-details/2026/Sales...

[apparent]

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.

[Reason077]

> "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!

[ares623]

Is the Clockwise founder mates with anyone in Salesforce?

[moomoo11]

Clockwise has thousands of companies using it already.

Buying the company gives them those customers. They shut it down presumably so they can do something with those customers they bought.

Making software is easy. Don’t kid yourself. If you’re a swe you’re an expense line item. Getting distribution is hard.

[pmdr]

> it has been our mission to help the world make time for what matters. We've built a business to be proud of

There must be a lot of pride and meaning in being run over by Saleforce's money truck.

[darth_avocado]

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.

[gip]

> There must be a lot of pride and meaning in being run over by Saleforce's money truck.

They probably don't have much choice and Salesfore needs people who have built and launched products (I don't have any info, just a guess).

[CoastalCoder]

> There must be a lot of pride and meaning in being run over by Saleforce's money truck.

Worst. Isekai. Idea. Ever.

[dmitrygr]

They have families to feed. This might forever protect their families from any financial misfortune. Any sane person would do the same. I would.

[Animats]

Salesforce seems to be doing a shutdown of many of their "pre-AI" products.[1]

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/controlled-demolition-salesfo...

[caseyf7]

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.

[bombcar]

They must really be out of money entirely if they can't even keep things running for a bit, or Salesforce really doesn't like what they have.

Or they're burning it to the ground out of spite so Salesforce doesn't get any of it.

Even the Rise calendar link above still is hosted so you can read their incredible journey.

[SoftTalker]

A huge fuck you to their customer base. Talk about burning bridges to the ground.

[keeganpoppen]

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.

[bombcar]

Looking back was it better or worse than being laid off instead?

[john_strinlai]

seems like a rather short time frame considering they are just deleting the data, links, calendar events, past invoices, etc.?

hopefully no one paying for their service decided to take a 1 week vacation starting tomorrow.

[samothrace]

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.

[chasd00]

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.

[dinamic]

Why would a company acquire the other one just to shut it down?

[pjc50]

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.

[dddgghhbbfblk]

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.

[anthonySs]

i wish i had insights into the minds of the MBAs that make decisions like this

[bombcar]

Interesting tool, but it seems to be more of a feature than a product.

[plasticsoprano]

speaking of, Dropbox bought a similar product a couple of years ago https://reclaim.ai/

[throwaway0q5347]

Now a feature of Salesforce :)

[bix6]

Has anyone used reclaim? I’ve been meaning to try it.

[pmarreck]

Hope they enjoy working on Java code... Forever... With 3 month release cycles, no CD... LOL