Hackpad

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

~ the eulogy ~

hackpad had its american startup moment around 2013. it was the collaborative wiki that y-combinator alumni used to run their engineering teams, and by extension the thing hacker news readers argued about the ergonomics of. the ankara mid-market ran on confluence and google docs by then. i knew hackpad by reputation from the writing-tools thread on hacker news. i never used it in anger.

hackpad was founded in november 2011 by igor kofman and alex graveley, forked from etherpad's editor engine. it landed in y combinator's winter 2012 batch. the pitch was that startup wikis were badly served: confluence was heavy for a 12-person team, and google docs was oriented around documents rather than living pages that stayed loose enough to keep editing.

dropbox acquired hackpad in april 2014. reporting at the time put the price at low tens of millions but neither side disclosed exact terms. the team joined dropbox to build what would later become paper. airbnb had wired hackpad in as their internal wiki, and so had stripe. the mid-2010s startup canon rested on hackpad pads for onboarding docs and meeting notes for a couple of years. for a while the acquisition looked like dropbox getting a running product plus a team, in one motion.

by 2014 my engineering work sat on confluence for docs, and the smaller side projects went into google docs. hackpad was a name i knew from the writing-tools thread on hacker news, next to notational velocity and simplenote. i understood what it was for and never switched tools to try it.

~ the dossier ~

~ the etherpad line ~

etherpad was the parent. appjet built it in 2008 as a way to type at the same document with someone else without opening a shared word document. google bought appjet in december 2009, folded the team into wave, and released etherpad as open source on the way out. the open source release is what allowed hackpad to fork and rebuild the whole product with a different feature set.

this is why hackpad felt familiar to anyone who had used the original etherpad. the cursor jumping and the color per user. the auto-save that never asked you to hit save. hackpad kept the whole feel. what it added was the wiki side: a workspace with a real table of contents and permissions per pad, plus a search that actually worked.

~ the dropbox absorption ~

after the acquisition, the hackpad team spent about a year continuing to run hackpad as a standalone product while building what would become dropbox paper. paper launched in beta in april 2015 and out of beta in january 2017. it was hackpad with better mobile clients and the dropbox distribution engine behind it. the moment paper cleared beta, hackpad's role in the internal roadmap was finished.

dropbox open-sourced hackpad on github in august 2015 under apache license 2.0. this was the signal that no more development was coming from dropbox on the hosted product. anyone who wanted to keep running hackpad could self-host from the release. very few people did.

~ the shutdown ~

on 25 april 2017 dropbox announced hackpad would shut down on 19 july 2017. users had the option to opt out of automatic migration and export their pads as html or markdown. if you did nothing, your pads moved to dropbox paper on the shutdown date and your hackpad.com urls redirected. the shutdown was as gentle as web shutdowns get. the whole thing was done from one email and a support article.

paper still exists in 2026. the hackpad brand did not survive. what got buried was the specific loose feel of a hackpad pad: the sense that you were writing in a wiki that behaved like an editor, not a document that behaved like a wiki.

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