He invited us to share his happiness.

A big deal. New opportunities. Finally, someone had recognised his true worth.

I was about to congratulate him.

Then, further down, it said when I needed to collect my belongings.

Good thing I had not bought flowers yet. I needed to establish the occasion.

On 4 November, news broke that Meta had acquired Conductor, an application for working with several AI agents on software projects.[1]

The idea is straightforward: instead of one digital assistant, you organise a whole team. Different agents work in their own spaces while you try to turn their activity into a finished result.

Management has finally been automated to the point where you need management again.

But people used it. Built workflows around it. Got comfortable.

And then came the wonderful news.

The founder’s announcement contains gratitude, ambitious plans and the promise of a new product next year. Plans for the current cloud service are more specific: read-only on 13 November; closure and the start of cloud-data deletion on 20 November.[2]

He has a new chapter.

You have a backup.

I love it when both parties grow.

My favourite detail was hiding in the release notes.

The very release announcing Conductor’s coming wind-down also added the option to choose your own completion sound.[3]

We are leaving.

But you can choose the soundtrack.

Finally, a personalised goodbye. Products used to simply stop working. Now they take your musical preferences into account.

A funeral director with excellent UX.

I would choose a cash register. Somebody is clearly having a lovely day.

It would be unfair to say users were simply shown the door.

Conductor offers exports, transfers of cloud workspaces to your computer and refunds for active subscribers. The local app will receive new models and critical fixes until early 2027, when its wind-down is also planned to begin. The company says it has never sold or trained on user data and will not do so.[2]

Those are the right steps.

But refunding your subscription and refunding your time are different services.

Somebody has to move the work. Check everything survived. Find a replacement. Explain to colleagues why the system they had just got used to is now a success story and they need to watch another tutorial.

The subscription is refundable. The habit is collection only.

“Thank you for being with us.”

You are welcome. I had actually planned to stay a little longer.

The interesting part is that the user may have done everything right.

Found a useful service. Paid. Recommended it to friends. Reported bugs instead of quietly leaving.

Helped make the product better.

And one day, it became attractive enough to buy.

This is where the founder’s story and the user’s story can part company.

The founder gets the chance to build something bigger.

The user gets the chance to download a ZIP.

New horizons for both. One gets career opportunities. The other gets a “Choose folder” dialogue.

I love how often technological farewells use the word “together”.

Together, we came this far.

Together, we changed what was possible.

Now let us look together at the precise point where your routes stop overlapping.

Can you buy a product and keep it running?

Yes.

Microsoft acquired LinkedIn for $26.2 billion, announcing that it would preserve its separate brand and independence. The deal closed in December 2016. Almost ten years later, the service is still operating and reporting on its development.[4][5][6]

Yes, LinkedIn is still with us.

We can still read about a man who missed a flight and extracted seven leadership lessons from the experience.

His luggage went to Madrid.

His personal brand went even higher.

Microsoft could have spared us these stories. Instead, it preserved the product. I respect that commitment to user habits.

Of course, LinkedIn and Conductor are different businesses with different scales and objectives. This comparison does not establish that the same strategy would suit both.

It demonstrates something simpler: closing a product is not a compulsory ritual following its acquisition.

You can buy a restaurant and keep feeding the guests.

You can buy it for the chef, take the chef away and tell the guests that an extraordinary culinary future awaits.

Containers for the leftovers are by the exit.

This is where I would like to clarify what we mean by startup success.

For a founder, a sale can be a major achievement.

For an investor, the outcome they risked money for.

For a buyer, a way to acquire a team, technology or foundations for another product.

For a user, unscheduled work on a Sunday.

All these things can happen simultaneously.

It is usually the first three who order champagne.

Exit is a wonderful word. Especially when everyone has found one except the people still working inside.

This does not mean founders must maintain a service forever. Nor does a subscription entitle us to direct somebody else’s career.

But a successful deal does not oblige us to celebrate our own migration either.

I can congratulate someone.

And still be annoyed that their success has created more work for me.

Adult relationships can accommodate two thoughts. Press releases generally prefer one.

In this case, we do not know the deal price and have no basis for claiming Meta bought Conductor specifically to shut it down.

But there is a question larger than one buyer’s motives.

What happens when parts of a product are worth more to someone than keeping it running for the people who use it?

The team may be valuable.

The technology may be valuable.

The experience of building it may be valuable.

And the application itself—with your habits, work history and favourite button—may not get a place in the new plan.

You thought you were using the future.

It turns out you were participating in its job interview.

The future got the job.

You have been asked to wait for the next version.

How often is startup success measured in the money someone will pay for its disappearance?

An honest answer requires data. One Conductor does not provide statistics for an entire industry.

But it gives us an excellent reason to reconsider how we tell stories about success.

Beside the deal price, I would like a few more lines.

What did users keep?

How much time were they given?

What can they transfer?

And who pays for the hours that were not included in the subscription?

Because a startup can become a success story at the very moment its product becomes an obituary.

It depends which side of the table you are on when you read the announcement.

Our app graveyard will need a separate avenue.

“Could not compete.”

“Ran out of money.”

“Was acquired. Doing wonderfully.”

The last one, I suspect, will have the best landscaping.

And exceptionally optimistic inscriptions.

Extraordinary opportunities ahead.

We cannot wait for the next chapter.

Please export your data.

I am standing here with flowers, trying to work out whether sadness is appropriate.

The founders are celebrating.

The buyer has plans.

My tool is going away.

He got everything he wanted.

For some reason, I thought his dreams included us working together a little longer.

I helped him grow. He became expensive enough to disappear.