Clockwise

» see getclockwise.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Clockwise was a calendar that rearranged your week while you were not looking. It held blocks of Focus Time against the meetings that wanted to eat them and slid the flexible ones to better slots, leaving a small green sparkle on anything it had touched. Three engineers founded it in San Francisco during 2016, and it took about $76 million to build, the last $45 million of that a Series C led by Coatue in January 2022.

This was enterprise knowledge-work software and I was never anywhere near its market. The problem it solved, a calendar so stuffed with other people's meetings that you need software to defend an afternoon, belongs to a kind of office I have not worked in. Nobody has ever had to automate their way into my Tuesday.

The customers were real. Uber and Netflix were on the list, and by the end the company could say it had created over 8 million hours of Focus Time and moved 23 million meetings. Those are the numbers in its own goodbye page, which is the only place a company ever publishes them.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the round trip ~

Matt Martin, Gary Lerhaupt and Mike Grinolds all came out of RelateIQ, the CRM startup Salesforce bought for $390 million in 2014. They stayed on through that acquisition, then left and spent the next ten years building a company of their own. In March 2026 they sold its staff back to the same buyer.

Salesforce was explicit that it was not purchasing the product. No technology transfer, no plan to fold scheduling into anything, no successor. The team went to work on Agentforce and the calendar was switched off. This was not a rebrand or an absorption, it was a hiring round with a shutdown attached.

Tungle.me went the same way in 2012, when BlackBerry took the team and closed the scheduling app three months later. Clockwise got eight days.

~ the week they gave you ~

The announcement went up on 19 March 2026 and the product stopped working on 27 March. Eight days to find another scheduler and reissue every Scheduling Link you had handed out.

The FAQ on the farewell page is the part that lasts. Every Smart Hold the service had written, the Focus Time blocks and the Travel Time among them, was pulled back out of users' calendars on the way through. Asked whether Salesforce was getting access to the data, the page answered plainly: there is no transfer, and your data will be deleted. Ten years of learning how 23 million meetings actually move, and the buyer had not asked for any of it.

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