24 ms·

Quitting Dgraph Labs

212 points by dddddaviddddd 5y ago

fernandorojo 5y ago
We recently migrated our db to DGraph and are blown away by how good it is. This is really a bummer. I feel for Manish, hopefully the next steps can work out. It's easy to roast a CEO from the sidelines when things go south, but it's really hard to build such good tech.
ramoz 5y ago
Badger has performed exceptionally well for us. Preferred over LevelDB/similar solutions. https://github.com/dgraph-io/badger https://github.com/dgraph-io/badger
icco 5y ago
woofta, what a way to go.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
staticassertion 5y ago
Sorry to hear about this Manish. I've been using DGraph for years and I can say that it's an excellent database with great people working on it. I'm glad to hear that it will continue forward open source and I hope that any purchases are to the benefit of the existing community.
kvm 5y ago
"They are now contemplating a few purchase offers. I have no control or say over this process. There’s a lot of politics. I’m a builder, not a politician and I see no point in staying on." The investors poured ~$15m into this company, and the board is now trying to fulfill its fiduciary duty by trying to recoup some of the invested capital. I understand that open-sourcing the code base would be a better outcome for its customers. However, I am having a tough time seeing if the investors were truly political or antagonistic in any way.
- ctvo 5y ago
  Author goes on to talk about how difficult it was to raise capital, and the company being constantly undervalued. Doubtful they're only referring to this singular event.
- lann 5y ago
  A bit of a tangent, but board members (and company officers) do not in general have a specific duty to maximize shareholder profit. They have a duty of care (think carefully about decisions) and a duty of loyalty (act in the best interests of the company as a whole). Those could lead reasonably to a profit-maximizing decision but it isn't a straight line.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- threeseed 5y ago
  Open sourcing their code would be a terrible idea for the business unless they opted for a Elastic/MongoDB style license where you are prohibited from offering a cloud version of the code. Because you know AWS would be circling this news very closely for another product to add to their lineup.
  - halamadrid 5y ago
    I think AWS already has a graph DB product. https://aws.amazon.com/neptune/ https://aws.amazon.com/neptune/
    - metadat 5y ago
      Is Neptune really on-par with Google Spanner?
      - sulam 5y ago
        Is dgraph?
stevage 5y ago
Terrible new name though. Outcaste manages to both combine the negative associations of being a reject and the Indian caste system, and permanently remind users of the project's troubled history.
- kadoban 5y ago
  I would imagine that if it goes anywhere they'll rename when they have some time?
- metadat 5y ago
  Is it really that bad? *cough* CockroachLabs / CockroachDB *cough*
  - 2StepsOutOfLine 5y ago
    Also, the company behind Traefik. Containous. It doesn't sound bad in your head, but then you say it out loud. (Yes even the CEO pronounces it that way in videos too)
  - Operyl 5y ago
    I like that name, cockroaches are difficult to kill ;)
    - nikolay 5y ago
      Actually, they are not that hard to kill if you know them well.
      - lriuui0x0 5y ago
        Cockroaches or CockroachDB?
        nikolay 5y ago
        I guess, both. Cockroaches are not so smart in the end, in fact, they often become victims of their powerful drives, which can be exploited for their own demise. I'm sure knowing the architect and behavior of the DB can be exploited in a similar way! I'm joking, of course.
mrdoops 5y ago
Definitely a cool piece of software - there is a lot of unsurfaced potential in distributed graph databases - good luck I hope the future is bright.
zanek 5y ago
yea, that's my biggest fear right there (in terms of raising money). I doubt he walks away with anything after pouring his life into the company for years. I get that they raised $15 million, but to lose your code, company and time is horrible. He ended up being powerless at his own company
- yesimahuman 5y ago
  Agreed. We all celebrate the big raises and never talk about the very significant potential downsides of those raises for both founders and employees when things don't go well.
- ziggus 5y ago
  Right, that sucks, but he signed up for it by taking VC money.
kbd 5y ago
Building a database is such a hard undertaking. I have to give a shoutout to RethinkDB, which also had cool tech and also failed commercially. And then if you have success as open core, AWS will just fork and offer a hosted version of your software. Good luck continuing Dgraph as open source.
- maerF0x0 5y ago
  Spencer Kimball talks about this wrt CockroachDB in this changelog (founderstalk.fm?) podcast https://changelog.com/podcast/448 https://changelog.com/podcast/448
ayewo 5y ago
Since the CEO has quit, there’s a high chance someone with authority might delete the ex-CEO’s public posts because it paints the company in a very bad light. Archive link https://archive.is/sTfCd https://archive.is/sTfCd in case the discussion gets deleted.
- softliving 5y ago
  It is going to get deleted with post from Admin. They are going to hire *proper graph engineers* to work on Dgraph.
- redbar0n 5y ago
  Prescient...! Today: "Dear Dgraph stakeholders: As you may have read, the person who originally coded Dgraph is no longer with the company. Over the last few months it had become clear that this was inevitable. Only the final form it would take was unknown. After resigning, he improperly used company confidential credentials to make an illegitimate post in the Announcements section of this site in which he made many statements, some accurate, some not. We are considering deleting that post to avoid misleading customers, but for transparency we will not do so for at least 7 more days to give you a chance to read or save it. ... " https://discuss.dgraph.io/t/dgraphs-future/16751 https://discuss.dgraph.io/t/dgraphs-future/16751 archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20220202112429/https://discuss.dgraph.io/t/dgraphs-future/16751 https://web.archive.org/web/20220202112429/https://discuss.d...
traceroute66 5y ago
Doesn't come as much of a surprise really. $employer had a need for some of the bits of Dgraph that are unfortunately hidden behind a paywall (bits that IMHO should have been in the community version as they were not particularly enterprisey, but hey such is life). A frustrating conversation with Dgraph sales-droid ensued: Us: We need access to X/Y/Z features, but on-prem Droid: But Cloud Us: Cloud = No-go because X/Y/Z Droid: But Cloud Us: Come on mate, I already explained why we cannot do cloud, plus you say on your website on-prem is an option Droid: One meeelion dollars Us: Goodbye
- glenngillen 5y ago
  I’m not sure why you think this is their fault, or why you think the enterprisey-ness of a feature determines whether it should be behind a paywall. Clearly it was valuable enough for you to want it. People should pay for value. Especially if they want companies to stick around for the long haul to support the technology.
  - traceroute66 5y ago
    > I’m not sure why you think this is their fault I think you missed the point. What I was making a point about was first the tin-eared nature of the salesdroid (i.e. "cloud cloud cloud cloud" despite me explaining why not). Second about the price point of on-prem. Of course I will "pay for value" but there is a difference between paying and paying through the nose. Basically it gave the impression that Dgraph was so up itself that it thought it could dictate how their customers should run their IT and thought it was special enough to be able to ask silly money prices.
ajsharp 5y ago
I feel for this person, but there's a line in here I found revealing: > Unfortunately, Dgraph was always undervalued by investors. This feels a bit like blaming the investors for why the company failed. To put it bluntly, there's a point at which you raise capital and build on vision. Your early investors and users are taking a giant leap that a. you can execute on the vision and b. customers will one day want to pay you for that vision. Then there's point at which the rubber hits the road, and either customers pay you money for the thing you built or they don't. If they don't, you need a really convincing story to convince your investors they shouldn't cut their losses. It's a shame the company failed, it seems like they were working on some cool technology. But based on this post it sounds like no one wanted to pay for whatever it was they built.
- cirrus3 5y ago
  That caught my eye also. It sounds like a version "people didn't like our product as much as we like it, obviously they are wrong".
- threeseed 5y ago
  Their last Series A [1] was led by Redpoint Ventures which means you would have Tomasz Tungus involved in this decision. Of all of the VCs I've ever seen, heard or read about he is the most metrics driven. He regularly benchmarks companies against each other and has a deep understanding of the health of each aspect of a business. I would highly doubt this decision was personal or politics driven in any way. At a guess I would say that they did an analysis of the company and recommended it be shut down. And the other VCs i.e. the Australian trio of Airtree, Blackbird, Grok who are far less experienced in the VC game went along with it. [1] https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/dgraph-series-a--caa1d13e https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/dgraph-series-a--ca...
- redwood 5y ago
  It's that kind of belief that gives a founder drive tho
m_ke 5y ago
Maybe this whole VC fund cycle driven model of pumping and dumping/exiting companies is not ideal after all.
- threeseed 5y ago
  Except that's not what is happening at all. VCs are holding onto companies much longer as, (a) the average time to reach IPO stage has gone from 4 to 11 years over the last two decades and (b) the amount of unspent money floating around is so high. There is definitely more to this story than just the VCs trying to exit.
  - m_ke 5y ago
    In this case it sounds like the business is failing and they want to write off their losses. My comment was a broader critique of the venture model, which leads to business churn that nobody other than the VCs need.
maximilianburke 5y ago
We invested a fair amount of time into a Dgraph-based solution but had so many issues with it that we had to migrate away. We couldn't get basic things (like database dumping and/or reimport, or some large queries) to work at all reliably which scared us away from going with their enterprise product. It seemed neat from the outset but I can definitely see why they might have problems finding paying customers after getting hands-on with it.
- mindhash 5y ago
  When I first looked at dGraph, I was unimpressed. The interfacing, documentation looked like it was meant for their internal team. A few well-known Open source projects lack user-centric product thinking. I felt dgraph had this issue.
pm90 5y ago
> They are now contemplating a few purchase offers. I have no control or say over this process. There’s a lot of politics. I’m a builder, not a politician and I see no point in staying on. This statement seems a little naive. If you’ve raised money from investors, started a company, been it’s CEO… did you not realize there would be a lot of politics involved in this role? And more importantly, why would anyone want you to be CEO again? At the end of the post they mention they’re going on to start a new company building on the same product. What would be different this time?
ctvo 5y ago
I've followed Dgraph off and on. I enjoy looking through their open sourced work. A lot of it is interesting. Manish seems to be THAT person. The technically competent, unwavering to the technical vision, doesn't work well with others person at your company. He went on to found a startup so he could do what he wants, and unfortunately has now realized board members are very similar to managers at Google. Here's a blog post where he stepped down from being CEO to being CTO: https://dgraph.io/blog/post/changing-guard/ https://dgraph.io/blog/post/changing-guard/ > I’m very confident in my abilities to bring in a solid VP team and lead the GTM motion. But, I’ve also realized that Dgraph is an intrinsically technical product. While I can find other S&M folks, finding a true engineering replacement for me has been, and will continue to be a real challenge. Reviews from Glassdoor confirm this inability to let others touch his baby: https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Dgraph-Labs-Reviews-E1284992.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Dgraph-Labs-Reviews-E12849... > Massive layoffs with no warning and almost no severance pay. This is a sinking ship, not a rocket ship - avoid it! Inept founder (was CEO and CTO while I was there) who only believes in his ability and doesn't trust employee expertise. He would rather be right than make money or see his company succeed. Manish doesn't listen to employees or managers and even disputes data showing false assumptions or failed business approaches. Micromanages in departments where he has minimal knowledge or understanding, leading to low morale and poor results.
- throw10920 5y ago
  If he is "THAT person" then why is the (rest of the) core Dgraph team also leaving and joining his new project?
  - darkcoderrises 5y ago
    Most people are not joining his new project. Source: I was part of the core team.
    - throw10920 5y ago
      Aha, so the original post was inaccurate, intentionally or not. Thanks for the info!
topicseed 5y ago
Manish and his team have built wonderful pieces of software and have been nothing but amazingly helpful to me when I dabbled with Dgraph three years ago or so (early versions). Feeling sad for them but I'm sure they'll come out stronger and current users will follow them. No clue about the politics and $$$, but the product was already promising and different from the competitors (ArangoDB and Neo4j).
notyourday 5y ago
When you raise money, you become responsible for the execution/growth to people who gave you money. If you don't like that, you should not raise the money.
danhab99 5y ago
I just refactored my whole app from MongoDB to DGraph... Guys I really like this idea I don't want to abandon it. What should I do: eat section 13 of Mongo's license, or try to maintain a database server myself?
- vosper 5y ago
  I'm not sure what "eat section 13 of Mongo's license" means, but if you're asking whether you should self-host Mongo or pay Mongo Corp to host it, I would say the latter. It's not that expensive, they have a nice management UI, failover, performance hints, backups etc.. And I say this as someone who doesn't like Mongo DB and believes it's almost always the wrong technology for business to use. But if you're using it, might as well get the experts to host it for you.
  - danhab99 5y ago
    > I'm not sure what "eat section 13 of Mongo's license" means Buncha weeks ago I had a paranoid fit about the legalities of this app I wanna try to launch. I read some conserning things about the MongoDB license, mainly that the open source initiative didn't approve it bc Mongo pulled out. I read the controvertial paragraph and now I am 80% convinced that I'm not allowed to self-host a MongoDB server for my own profit.. I'd have to pay.. which why should I when SQL is free. BUT I DON'T WANNA USE SQL. And frankly MongoDB wasn't living up to the stresses I wanted from it but Dgraph does. Asking for help on stackexchange didn't do me any better https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/74510/can-i-use-mongodb-community-for-profit https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/74510/can-i-use-mong... I was planning on self-hosting my Dgraph database anyways, and if this app actually ends up being something, I would beable to calculate milestones that I'd need to reach before considering upgrading to Dgraph Enterprise. Now I'm more worried about future support. Is Dgraph going to be sunsetted, and will I have the features I might need in the future. IDK I think I just freaked out about something I didn't understand, sry guys.
    - eudoxus 5y ago
      IANAL but from what I know about Mongos current license (Server Side Public License) the restrictions of section 13 only apply if you are making a service with the express interest in providing DB functionality directly to your customers/users. IE: If you are making a Database as a Service platform, similar to Mongo Atlas or AWS RDS. If you are just using mongo as a backend DB to fulfill some other internal requirement in your application, like general CRUD operations, then you are fine.
Scarbutt 5y ago
sydthrowaway 5y ago
Last I heard this company was based in AUstralia, now California and Bangalore?!
yencabulator 5y ago
I think all you need to know about this CEO/CTO, Dgraph as a product, and the underlying key-value database Badger, is that when people report data loss bugs where the database fails to return data written to it, they'll claim it's not data loss if the data still happens to reside on the disk somewhere, and *then delete the bug report*. https://github.com/dgraph-io/badger/issues/578 https://github.com/dgraph-io/badger/issues/578 titled "Badger unable to return data after value log GC" vs https://github.com/dgraph-io/badger/issues/570#issue-362116826 https://github.com/dgraph-io/badger/issues/570#issue-3621168... > However, if the bug only causes Badger to not return data, and the data is fully recoverable by an easy fix to the code -- that's technically not a data loss (See Badger unable to return data after value log GC #578). Never let this person store your data.
- redwood 5y ago
  Do rockets sometimes blow up on the launch pad? Yes. Does that mean they shouldn't have tried to build a rocket ship? Have you tried to build a data layer engine? This kind of attitude is so one dimensional from my perspective... they are trying and it's hard to always be perfect when it comes to data. Inevitably if you're in the data game sometimes data loss happens, that's just the nature of the game. It's not black-and-white like you portray it.
  - hiptobecubic 5y ago
    The point is, when the rocket explodes on the launch pad you don't have the head of NASA saying "Well technically all the pieces of the rocket are still there, so technically we didn't lose it."
    - redwood 5y ago
      This is in the context of essentially a bug bounty for data loss issues that they were running… sounds like a NASA administrator saying something like "show us how our rocket will fail"
      - 5y ago
totony 5y ago
Yeah, that's a bad look for both dgraph and the new company imo. What guarantees the same thing ran by the same people won't have the same issues again? Not only that, if the core team moves to the open source product to "rebuild" the same features, isn't that way too dangerous IP-wise? This is also one of the reasons I didn't use dgraph: Open source core doesn't work. All the companies that were sold to now have nowhere to go for support.
- PhoenixReborn 5y ago
  I would respectfully disagree that open core doesn’t work - companies like Confluent, Databricks, MongoDB have shown that you can succeed with open core. DGraph I think tried to do too much rather than focusing on graph databases, which caused the commercial product to fail.
  - totony 5y ago
    I think an issue with dgraph is their "open core" didn't include a lot of things you'd expect in a "core" DB (iirc backups, multi tenancy & acl). I'm not familiar with confluent & co. but imo for "open core" to succeed you need a product attractive enough to gain market share, and then you can have extra features for commercial use. But then why not just make it completely open source to gain even more market share and offer support contracts (eg redhat & co)?
redwood 5y ago
The level of negativity on HN around hard engineering problems like data stores...it's really unforgiving here.
- sydthrowaway 5y ago
  Just use a csv
stack_framer 5y ago
I worked for a company last year that chose Dgraph as its primary data store. Thanks to Dgraph's query language, we were able to implement a GraphQL API server that had no resolvers and no need for dataloader—the n+1 problem simply couldn't occur! It was like magic. Interestingly enough, we had been working with a salesperson from Dgraph Labs who was affected by the June layoff—along with the rest of the sales staff and CEO—right as we were about to pay for Dgraph Cloud! For a solid week we seriously debated switching to another database, but eventually decided to go with Dgraph Cloud anyway—telling ourselves we would self-host if Dgraph Labs folded. I ended up leaving in November, but I think I know what my former team will be doing over the next few sprints! I wish Manish and crew all the best, and hope they succeed in their new endeavor. Dgraph is pretty dang cool.
xyzzy_plugh 5y ago
This topic came up in a group of early stage investors I'm associated with and I know I'm not alone when I think: they couldn't raise more than 15M? And lost control of the company?? Sure, I get that it's a database, and databases are harder sells than a lot of other things, but christ on a bike they must've fucked something up if they couldn't draw the allure of any of the big funds currently throwing gobs of money around. I know a few founders at smaller companies than dgraph, where similarly engineers are their target audience, who have complete control of their company despite raising in the ball park of 100M over two or three rounds in the last couple of years. There's just no excuse. Either their fundamentals were so fucked, or they were too arrogant even for VCs which is almost impossible. We'll probably never know the full story here.
- CheezeIt 5y ago
  An open source non-sql db is a tough business model. I mean, here's a simple question: Would you use DGraph? Would you pay for it? With something like CockroachDB or TiDB I can easily say yes to that. The value proposition is clear. I think Dgraph's DQL is a worse interface than SQL; there are some aspects of it that give me the heebie-jeebies.

212 points by dddddaviddddd 5y ago

We recently migrated our db to DGraph and are blown away by how good it is. This is really a bummer. I feel for Manish, hopefully the next steps can work out. It's easy to roast a CEO from the sidelines when things go south, but it's really hard to build such good tech.

ramoz 5y ago

Badger has performed exceptionally well for us. Preferred over LevelDB/similar solutions. https://github.com/dgraph-io/badger https://github.com/dgraph-io/badger

icco 5y ago

woofta, what a way to go.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

staticassertion 5y ago

Sorry to hear about this Manish. I've been using DGraph for years and I can say that it's an excellent database with great people working on it. I'm glad to hear that it will continue forward open source and I hope that any purchases are to the benefit of the existing community.

kvm 5y ago

"They are now contemplating a few purchase offers. I have no control or say over this process. There’s a lot of politics. I’m a builder, not a politician and I see no point in staying on." The investors poured ~$15m into this company, and the board is now trying to fulfill its fiduciary duty by trying to recoup some of the invested capital. I understand that open-sourcing the code base would be a better outcome for its customers. However, I am having a tough time seeing if the investors were truly political or antagonistic in any way.

ctvo 5y ago
Author goes on to talk about how difficult it was to raise capital, and the company being constantly undervalued. Doubtful they're only referring to this singular event.
lann 5y ago
A bit of a tangent, but board members (and company officers) do not in general have a specific duty to maximize shareholder profit. They have a duty of care (think carefully about decisions) and a duty of loyalty (act in the best interests of the company as a whole). Those could lead reasonably to a profit-maximizing decision but it isn't a straight line.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
threeseed 5y ago
Open sourcing their code would be a terrible idea for the business unless they opted for a Elastic/MongoDB style license where you are prohibited from offering a cloud version of the code. Because you know AWS would be circling this news very closely for another product to add to their lineup.
- halamadrid 5y ago
  I think AWS already has a graph DB product. https://aws.amazon.com/neptune/ https://aws.amazon.com/neptune/
  - metadat 5y ago
    Is Neptune really on-par with Google Spanner?
    - sulam 5y ago
      Is dgraph?

stevage 5y ago

Terrible new name though. Outcaste manages to both combine the negative associations of being a reject and the Indian caste system, and permanently remind users of the project's troubled history.

kadoban 5y ago
I would imagine that if it goes anywhere they'll rename when they have some time?
metadat 5y ago
Is it really that bad? *cough* CockroachLabs / CockroachDB *cough*
- 2StepsOutOfLine 5y ago
  Also, the company behind Traefik. Containous. It doesn't sound bad in your head, but then you say it out loud. (Yes even the CEO pronounces it that way in videos too)
- Operyl 5y ago
  I like that name, cockroaches are difficult to kill ;)
  - nikolay 5y ago
    Actually, they are not that hard to kill if you know them well.
    - lriuui0x0 5y ago
      Cockroaches or CockroachDB?
      - nikolay 5y ago
        I guess, both. Cockroaches are not so smart in the end, in fact, they often become victims of their powerful drives, which can be exploited for their own demise. I'm sure knowing the architect and behavior of the DB can be exploited in a similar way! I'm joking, of course.

mrdoops 5y ago

Definitely a cool piece of software - there is a lot of unsurfaced potential in distributed graph databases - good luck I hope the future is bright.

zanek 5y ago

yea, that's my biggest fear right there (in terms of raising money). I doubt he walks away with anything after pouring his life into the company for years. I get that they raised $15 million, but to lose your code, company and time is horrible. He ended up being powerless at his own company

yesimahuman 5y ago
Agreed. We all celebrate the big raises and never talk about the very significant potential downsides of those raises for both founders and employees when things don't go well.
ziggus 5y ago
Right, that sucks, but he signed up for it by taking VC money.

kbd 5y ago

Building a database is such a hard undertaking. I have to give a shoutout to RethinkDB, which also had cool tech and also failed commercially. And then if you have success as open core, AWS will just fork and offer a hosted version of your software. Good luck continuing Dgraph as open source.

maerF0x0 5y ago
Spencer Kimball talks about this wrt CockroachDB in this changelog (founderstalk.fm?) podcast https://changelog.com/podcast/448 https://changelog.com/podcast/448

ayewo 5y ago

Since the CEO has quit, there’s a high chance someone with authority might delete the ex-CEO’s public posts because it paints the company in a very bad light. Archive link https://archive.is/sTfCd https://archive.is/sTfCd in case the discussion gets deleted.

softliving 5y ago
It is going to get deleted with post from Admin. They are going to hire *proper graph engineers* to work on Dgraph.
redbar0n 5y ago
Prescient...! Today: "Dear Dgraph stakeholders: As you may have read, the person who originally coded Dgraph is no longer with the company. Over the last few months it had become clear that this was inevitable. Only the final form it would take was unknown. After resigning, he improperly used company confidential credentials to make an illegitimate post in the Announcements section of this site in which he made many statements, some accurate, some not. We are considering deleting that post to avoid misleading customers, but for transparency we will not do so for at least 7 more days to give you a chance to read or save it. ... " https://discuss.dgraph.io/t/dgraphs-future/16751 https://discuss.dgraph.io/t/dgraphs-future/16751 archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20220202112429/https://discuss.dgraph.io/t/dgraphs-future/16751 https://web.archive.org/web/20220202112429/https://discuss.d...

traceroute66 5y ago

Doesn't come as much of a surprise really. $employer had a need for some of the bits of Dgraph that are unfortunately hidden behind a paywall (bits that IMHO should have been in the community version as they were not particularly enterprisey, but hey such is life). A frustrating conversation with Dgraph sales-droid ensued: Us: We need access to X/Y/Z features, but on-prem Droid: But Cloud Us: Cloud = No-go because X/Y/Z Droid: But Cloud Us: Come on mate, I already explained why we cannot do cloud, plus you say on your website on-prem is an option Droid: One meeelion dollars Us: Goodbye

glenngillen 5y ago
I’m not sure why you think this is their fault, or why you think the enterprisey-ness of a feature determines whether it should be behind a paywall. Clearly it was valuable enough for you to want it. People should pay for value. Especially if they want companies to stick around for the long haul to support the technology.
- traceroute66 5y ago
  > I’m not sure why you think this is their fault I think you missed the point. What I was making a point about was first the tin-eared nature of the salesdroid (i.e. "cloud cloud cloud cloud" despite me explaining why not). Second about the price point of on-prem. Of course I will "pay for value" but there is a difference between paying and paying through the nose. Basically it gave the impression that Dgraph was so up itself that it thought it could dictate how their customers should run their IT and thought it was special enough to be able to ask silly money prices.

ajsharp 5y ago

I feel for this person, but there's a line in here I found revealing: > Unfortunately, Dgraph was always undervalued by investors. This feels a bit like blaming the investors for why the company failed. To put it bluntly, there's a point at which you raise capital and build on vision. Your early investors and users are taking a giant leap that a. you can execute on the vision and b. customers will one day want to pay you for that vision. Then there's point at which the rubber hits the road, and either customers pay you money for the thing you built or they don't. If they don't, you need a really convincing story to convince your investors they shouldn't cut their losses. It's a shame the company failed, it seems like they were working on some cool technology. But based on this post it sounds like no one wanted to pay for whatever it was they built.

cirrus3 5y ago
That caught my eye also. It sounds like a version "people didn't like our product as much as we like it, obviously they are wrong".
threeseed 5y ago
Their last Series A [1] was led by Redpoint Ventures which means you would have Tomasz Tungus involved in this decision. Of all of the VCs I've ever seen, heard or read about he is the most metrics driven. He regularly benchmarks companies against each other and has a deep understanding of the health of each aspect of a business. I would highly doubt this decision was personal or politics driven in any way. At a guess I would say that they did an analysis of the company and recommended it be shut down. And the other VCs i.e. the Australian trio of Airtree, Blackbird, Grok who are far less experienced in the VC game went along with it. [1] https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/dgraph-series-a--caa1d13e https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/dgraph-series-a--ca...
redwood 5y ago
It's that kind of belief that gives a founder drive tho

m_ke 5y ago

Maybe this whole VC fund cycle driven model of pumping and dumping/exiting companies is not ideal after all.

threeseed 5y ago
Except that's not what is happening at all. VCs are holding onto companies much longer as, (a) the average time to reach IPO stage has gone from 4 to 11 years over the last two decades and (b) the amount of unspent money floating around is so high. There is definitely more to this story than just the VCs trying to exit.
- m_ke 5y ago
  In this case it sounds like the business is failing and they want to write off their losses. My comment was a broader critique of the venture model, which leads to business churn that nobody other than the VCs need.

maximilianburke 5y ago

We invested a fair amount of time into a Dgraph-based solution but had so many issues with it that we had to migrate away. We couldn't get basic things (like database dumping and/or reimport, or some large queries) to work at all reliably which scared us away from going with their enterprise product. It seemed neat from the outset but I can definitely see why they might have problems finding paying customers after getting hands-on with it.

mindhash 5y ago
When I first looked at dGraph, I was unimpressed. The interfacing, documentation looked like it was meant for their internal team. A few well-known Open source projects lack user-centric product thinking. I felt dgraph had this issue.

pm90 5y ago

> They are now contemplating a few purchase offers. I have no control or say over this process. There’s a lot of politics. I’m a builder, not a politician and I see no point in staying on. This statement seems a little naive. If you’ve raised money from investors, started a company, been it’s CEO… did you not realize there would be a lot of politics involved in this role? And more importantly, why would anyone want you to be CEO again? At the end of the post they mention they’re going on to start a new company building on the same product. What would be different this time?

ctvo 5y ago

I've followed Dgraph off and on. I enjoy looking through their open sourced work. A lot of it is interesting. Manish seems to be THAT person. The technically competent, unwavering to the technical vision, doesn't work well with others person at your company. He went on to found a startup so he could do what he wants, and unfortunately has now realized board members are very similar to managers at Google. Here's a blog post where he stepped down from being CEO to being CTO: https://dgraph.io/blog/post/changing-guard/ https://dgraph.io/blog/post/changing-guard/ > I’m very confident in my abilities to bring in a solid VP team and lead the GTM motion. But, I’ve also realized that Dgraph is an intrinsically technical product. While I can find other S&M folks, finding a true engineering replacement for me has been, and will continue to be a real challenge. Reviews from Glassdoor confirm this inability to let others touch his baby: https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Dgraph-Labs-Reviews-E1284992.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Dgraph-Labs-Reviews-E12849... > Massive layoffs with no warning and almost no severance pay. This is a sinking ship, not a rocket ship - avoid it! Inept founder (was CEO and CTO while I was there) who only believes in his ability and doesn't trust employee expertise. He would rather be right than make money or see his company succeed. Manish doesn't listen to employees or managers and even disputes data showing false assumptions or failed business approaches. Micromanages in departments where he has minimal knowledge or understanding, leading to low morale and poor results.

throw10920 5y ago
If he is "THAT person" then why is the (rest of the) core Dgraph team also leaving and joining his new project?
- darkcoderrises 5y ago
  Most people are not joining his new project. Source: I was part of the core team.
  - throw10920 5y ago
    Aha, so the original post was inaccurate, intentionally or not. Thanks for the info!

topicseed 5y ago

Manish and his team have built wonderful pieces of software and have been nothing but amazingly helpful to me when I dabbled with Dgraph three years ago or so (early versions). Feeling sad for them but I'm sure they'll come out stronger and current users will follow them. No clue about the politics and $$$, but the product was already promising and different from the competitors (ArangoDB and Neo4j).

notyourday 5y ago

When you raise money, you become responsible for the execution/growth to people who gave you money. If you don't like that, you should not raise the money.

danhab99 5y ago

I just refactored my whole app from MongoDB to DGraph... Guys I really like this idea I don't want to abandon it. What should I do: eat section 13 of Mongo's license, or try to maintain a database server myself?

vosper 5y ago
I'm not sure what "eat section 13 of Mongo's license" means, but if you're asking whether you should self-host Mongo or pay Mongo Corp to host it, I would say the latter. It's not that expensive, they have a nice management UI, failover, performance hints, backups etc.. And I say this as someone who doesn't like Mongo DB and believes it's almost always the wrong technology for business to use. But if you're using it, might as well get the experts to host it for you.
- danhab99 5y ago
  > I'm not sure what "eat section 13 of Mongo's license" means Buncha weeks ago I had a paranoid fit about the legalities of this app I wanna try to launch. I read some conserning things about the MongoDB license, mainly that the open source initiative didn't approve it bc Mongo pulled out. I read the controvertial paragraph and now I am 80% convinced that I'm not allowed to self-host a MongoDB server for my own profit.. I'd have to pay.. which why should I when SQL is free. BUT I DON'T WANNA USE SQL. And frankly MongoDB wasn't living up to the stresses I wanted from it but Dgraph does. Asking for help on stackexchange didn't do me any better https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/74510/can-i-use-mongodb-community-for-profit https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/74510/can-i-use-mong... I was planning on self-hosting my Dgraph database anyways, and if this app actually ends up being something, I would beable to calculate milestones that I'd need to reach before considering upgrading to Dgraph Enterprise. Now I'm more worried about future support. Is Dgraph going to be sunsetted, and will I have the features I might need in the future. IDK I think I just freaked out about something I didn't understand, sry guys.
  - eudoxus 5y ago
    IANAL but from what I know about Mongos current license (Server Side Public License) the restrictions of section 13 only apply if you are making a service with the express interest in providing DB functionality directly to your customers/users. IE: If you are making a Database as a Service platform, similar to Mongo Atlas or AWS RDS. If you are just using mongo as a backend DB to fulfill some other internal requirement in your application, like general CRUD operations, then you are fine.

Scarbutt 5y ago

sydthrowaway 5y ago

Last I heard this company was based in AUstralia, now California and Bangalore?!

yencabulator 5y ago

I think all you need to know about this CEO/CTO, Dgraph as a product, and the underlying key-value database Badger, is that when people report data loss bugs where the database fails to return data written to it, they'll claim it's not data loss if the data still happens to reside on the disk somewhere, and *then delete the bug report*. https://github.com/dgraph-io/badger/issues/578 https://github.com/dgraph-io/badger/issues/578 titled "Badger unable to return data after value log GC" vs https://github.com/dgraph-io/badger/issues/570#issue-362116826 https://github.com/dgraph-io/badger/issues/570#issue-3621168... > However, if the bug only causes Badger to not return data, and the data is fully recoverable by an easy fix to the code -- that's technically not a data loss (See Badger unable to return data after value log GC #578). Never let this person store your data.

redwood 5y ago
Do rockets sometimes blow up on the launch pad? Yes. Does that mean they shouldn't have tried to build a rocket ship? Have you tried to build a data layer engine? This kind of attitude is so one dimensional from my perspective... they are trying and it's hard to always be perfect when it comes to data. Inevitably if you're in the data game sometimes data loss happens, that's just the nature of the game. It's not black-and-white like you portray it.
- hiptobecubic 5y ago
  The point is, when the rocket explodes on the launch pad you don't have the head of NASA saying "Well technically all the pieces of the rocket are still there, so technically we didn't lose it."
  - redwood 5y ago
    This is in the context of essentially a bug bounty for data loss issues that they were running… sounds like a NASA administrator saying something like "show us how our rocket will fail"
    - 5y ago

totony 5y ago

Yeah, that's a bad look for both dgraph and the new company imo. What guarantees the same thing ran by the same people won't have the same issues again? Not only that, if the core team moves to the open source product to "rebuild" the same features, isn't that way too dangerous IP-wise? This is also one of the reasons I didn't use dgraph: Open source core doesn't work. All the companies that were sold to now have nowhere to go for support.

PhoenixReborn 5y ago
I would respectfully disagree that open core doesn’t work - companies like Confluent, Databricks, MongoDB have shown that you can succeed with open core. DGraph I think tried to do too much rather than focusing on graph databases, which caused the commercial product to fail.
- totony 5y ago
  I think an issue with dgraph is their "open core" didn't include a lot of things you'd expect in a "core" DB (iirc backups, multi tenancy & acl). I'm not familiar with confluent & co. but imo for "open core" to succeed you need a product attractive enough to gain market share, and then you can have extra features for commercial use. But then why not just make it completely open source to gain even more market share and offer support contracts (eg redhat & co)?

redwood 5y ago

The level of negativity on HN around hard engineering problems like data stores...it's really unforgiving here.

sydthrowaway 5y ago
Just use a csv

stack_framer 5y ago

I worked for a company last year that chose Dgraph as its primary data store. Thanks to Dgraph's query language, we were able to implement a GraphQL API server that had no resolvers and no need for dataloader—the n+1 problem simply couldn't occur! It was like magic. Interestingly enough, we had been working with a salesperson from Dgraph Labs who was affected by the June layoff—along with the rest of the sales staff and CEO—right as we were about to pay for Dgraph Cloud! For a solid week we seriously debated switching to another database, but eventually decided to go with Dgraph Cloud anyway—telling ourselves we would self-host if Dgraph Labs folded. I ended up leaving in November, but I think I know what my former team will be doing over the next few sprints! I wish Manish and crew all the best, and hope they succeed in their new endeavor. Dgraph is pretty dang cool.

xyzzy_plugh 5y ago

This topic came up in a group of early stage investors I'm associated with and I know I'm not alone when I think: they couldn't raise more than 15M? And lost control of the company?? Sure, I get that it's a database, and databases are harder sells than a lot of other things, but christ on a bike they must've fucked something up if they couldn't draw the allure of any of the big funds currently throwing gobs of money around. I know a few founders at smaller companies than dgraph, where similarly engineers are their target audience, who have complete control of their company despite raising in the ball park of 100M over two or three rounds in the last couple of years. There's just no excuse. Either their fundamentals were so fucked, or they were too arrogant even for VCs which is almost impossible. We'll probably never know the full story here.

CheezeIt 5y ago
An open source non-sql db is a tough business model. I mean, here's a simple question: Would you use DGraph? Would you pay for it? With something like CockroachDB or TiDB I can easily say yes to that. The value proposition is clear. I think Dgraph's DQL is a worse interface than SQL; there are some aspects of it that give me the heebie-jeebies.