Hackpad

Hackpad emerged in 2011 as a web-based, real-time collaborative text editor, founded by Alex Graveley and Igor Kofman. Graveley, who served as CEO, had a background that included roles at VMware and early involvement with the GNOME Foundation, later going on to create GitHub Copilot. The idea for Hackpad was born out of a practical need to organize large-scale projects for Burning Man, which led Graveley to fork the open-source Etherpad editor and build upon it. Before its formal launch, the tool was already being used by many large Burning Man camps for organizational purposes.

The company participated in the Winter 2012 batch of the Y Combinator accelerator program, securing seed funding from the accelerator. Hackpad's platform was designed as a collaborative wiki, allowing teams to create, edit, and organize documents in real-time. Its feature set included the ability to see who made specific contributions, take collaborative notes, share files, and use comments. The service catered to teams needing a shared workspace for everything from company wikis and personal notes to event planning. The platform gained traction and was adopted as a company wiki by prominent startups of the era, including Airbnb, Stripe, and Upworthy.

In a significant milestone, Dropbox acquired Hackpad in April 2014 for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition was part of Dropbox's strategy to expand its collaborative services. Following the acquisition, the Hackpad team joined Dropbox and their technology became foundational to the development of Dropbox Paper. Initially, Hackpad continued to operate as a standalone product. In April 2015, Dropbox announced that Hackpad would become open source, and the code was published on GitHub in August 2015 under the Apache 2.0 license. Ultimately, Dropbox announced in April 2017 that Hackpad would be shut down on July 19, 2017, with all users and their data migrated to the newly launched Dropbox Paper, marking the final integration of Hackpad's legacy.

Keywords: Hackpad, collaborative editor, real-time wiki, document collaboration, Alex Graveley, Igor Kofman, Y Combinator, Dropbox acquisition, Dropbox Paper, Etherpad fork, startup wiki, team collaboration, collaborative notes, open source, knowledge sharing, project organization, real-time editing, document management, productivity tool, text editor