It’s never easy to say goodbye.
The last 3 years have been pretty intense. A new company, a new country, lots of new friends… kind of a new life. I recently had the chance to put the pause button and to take a few steps back, which is something I rarely do. For once, I had the time to sit, think, remember, and I realize that even if the outcome was not the one I dreamed about, I have enjoyed every single moments of this crazy journey.
From the weeks we spent with Laurent & Tiago, hidden in the south of France, building the first Tribe MVP in August 2015, to our departures to San Francisco few weeks after.
From our first hacker-house in Castro, our 7am daily Philz Coffee, to my first Skype with Jonathon (Morgan i owe you this one), our mandatory morning gym sessions in the living room and the early days of Product Hunt.
From the first unexpected call we received from Sequoia on a Friday night, the endless nightly strategy discussions with Bass or the too many coding sprints, always with cheap red wine, loud French rap and Tiago’s amazing meals.
From my investors meetings in the garage or in our garden, as we did not have enough space, our or friends leaving big companies to come start their new projects in our living room, literally sleeping on the couch… (Bart i see you).
In fact, I remember all of it, and I’m convinced that these moments will stayed in my mind for years, if not forever. And while those three last years have been incredibly intense, I however feel like it was just few weeks…It’s crazy how time flies when you’re doing what you love, surrounded by friends and amazingly talented people.
Sadly, earlier this summer, we’ve decided to stop Tribe. And it wasn’t an easy decision. When you’re building a social platform, you know that you’re not going to have any kind of revenue for a while. So, three years ago, we flew in California to meet and learn from the investors who’ve been financing the biggest consumer success. We’ve been lucky enough to partnered with the best in class, from Sequoia Capital (Google, WhatsApp, Airbnb, Youtube) to KPCB (Amazon, Twitter, Snapchat) and many fascinating others.
We’ve been focusing every single day on product, community, scale, and have built one the best product team I’ve ever seen. (I’ve learned so much w/ you guys, thank you.) We’ve raised a bunch of rounds, pivoted a few times, from asynchronous video messaging in 2016, to live video calls in 2017 and our latest iteration, the social gaming platform, earlier this year. But despite all of these efforts, we were not able to find the right traction. Ending this fascinating adventure is hard, but that’s the right thing to do when things are not taking off as expected.
Today, I’m glad that the large majority of the team has already found new home at great companies like Twitter, Snapchat and others. Few others are starting their own projects and I can’t wait to share with you the exciting things they are currently working on.
At Tribe, since day one, we’ve been building a community, and carefully tried to bring to market a product they would love. I personally spent hours replying to every single message on the Tribe support, through video, at some point during few hours per day. I met incredible people from all over the world to through this channel. Some of them became friends, some others invested in our company, and others literally helped us for free in their spare time. For us, Community is everything, and this is why the team has decided, before closing this chapter, to give our entire video stack.
It’s here, open sourced, on GitHub: https://github.com/spebsd/live-webrtcsignaling
We deeply hope that what we’ve spent thousand of hours building will help the engineering community and other video companies in the futur. Special thanks to Seb, Germán, marc and Timothée who led our efforts in video engineering and have accomplish an incredible job designing, building and releasing one of the most powerful video stack to date.
Huge thanks to all our Investors, who’ve made this journey possible, and have been incredibly helpful and comprehensive, all the way until the end. Special thoughts to Stephanie, Emmanuel, Jean, Georges, Rodrigo & Romain who have been here for my too many phone-calls, every time I needed it ❤.️
With love,
Cyril, Mada Aflak, Nicolas, Margot, Rémy, Sofiane, Timothée, Seb, Germán, marc, Ruben, Ryan, Tiago, Bass, Laurent and Geoffroy.
