Vantaggi
The CEO genuinely meant it with AI-first. Airbyte had one of the most AI-inclusive cultures I’ve ever seen, and for that I’m grateful.
Svantaggi
Airbyte was pushing an enterprise strategy that was starting to show real fruits, but they overhired on sales and underhired on engineering and support. Then they got hit with a double whammy: lag in enterprise progress and the Fivetran/dbt merger announcement. Instead of thinking carefully about how to make a big decision, leadership went all-in on the CEO’s pet project, resulting in catastrophic layoffs. The CEO gets tunnel vision. The product org had its own issues. You can’t preach velocity while dithering on decisions about new bets. But swinging to the other extreme, treating your core business as sunk cost and starting over, isn’t the answer either. The enterprise motion was working. It needed investment, not abandonment. Great culture that will likely degrade post-layoffs. Hard to see a future for Airbyte given they’ve essentially abandoned their core business.