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Has there ever been a scenario where someone gave up on a startup, dumped the code, then someone picked it up and turned it into a successful business?

gkoberger 2y ago
This isn't exactly what you mentioned, but Josh Pigford gave up on his startup Maybe, shut down the company and open sourced it. It got incredibly popular on Github, so he started it up again. (https://maybefinance.com/ https://maybefinance.com/) A bigger example might be Mozilla. It was a closed-source browser (Netscape Navigator), and when it was dumped, some employees petitioned to open source it. And that's how we got Firefox.
reboothed 2y ago
Close but not quite (and keeping some parts intentionally vague): There was a data startup ran for ~3y until the 10 person team imploded in a tough market. Everyone left or was laid off, the office was closed, operations ceded etc. The website and some collection were still left running in zombie mode. A couple of years later, the non-technical founder and CEO (who at this point had bought everyone else out) saw demand and PMF emerging. Mostly through serendipity, I was one of 3 people brought in to "see what we can do with it", originally intended as a 3 month project. We came in with zero context and jumped right in to figuring out the ship we were now sailing. I was able to have one or two of conversation with the previous CTO but that was about it in terms of overlap. Things progressed and within a few months we found ourselves as co-founders of "Company v2.0". My partner took over as CEO. I left after 2y around our series A when we were 20~30 employees and arguably a leader in our market segment. At that point there were significant and crucial parts of the stack and codebase inherited (and evolved obv) from the original efforts by the previous team. The company is now an established brand, have offices in several countries and had a successful series B last year.
dboreham 2y ago
There are some legal risks with this. Having an OSS license from the copyright holder to use the code is not the same as being the copyright holder.

gkoberger 2y ago

This isn't exactly what you mentioned, but Josh Pigford gave up on his startup Maybe, shut down the company and open sourced it. It got incredibly popular on Github, so he started it up again. (https://maybefinance.com/ https://maybefinance.com/) A bigger example might be Mozilla. It was a closed-source browser (Netscape Navigator), and when it was dumped, some employees petitioned to open source it. And that's how we got Firefox.

reboothed 2y ago

Close but not quite (and keeping some parts intentionally vague): There was a data startup ran for ~3y until the 10 person team imploded in a tough market. Everyone left or was laid off, the office was closed, operations ceded etc. The website and some collection were still left running in zombie mode. A couple of years later, the non-technical founder and CEO (who at this point had bought everyone else out) saw demand and PMF emerging. Mostly through serendipity, I was one of 3 people brought in to "see what we can do with it", originally intended as a 3 month project. We came in with zero context and jumped right in to figuring out the ship we were now sailing. I was able to have one or two of conversation with the previous CTO but that was about it in terms of overlap. Things progressed and within a few months we found ourselves as co-founders of "Company v2.0". My partner took over as CEO. I left after 2y around our series A when we were 20~30 employees and arguably a leader in our market segment. At that point there were significant and crucial parts of the stack and codebase inherited (and evolved obv) from the original efforts by the previous team. The company is now an established brand, have offices in several countries and had a successful series B last year.

dboreham 2y ago

There are some legal risks with this. Having an OSS license from the copyright holder to use the code is not the same as being the copyright holder.