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*.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
$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
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.
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] yencabulator|4 years ago|reply
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-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|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ajsharp|4 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] threeseed|4 years ago|reply
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--ca...
[+] [-] cirrus3|4 years ago|reply
It sounds like a version "people didn't like our product as much as we like it, obviously they are wrong".
[+] [-] redwood|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ayewo|4 years ago|reply
Archive link https://archive.is/sTfCd in case the discussion gets deleted.
[+] [-] redbar0n|4 years ago|reply
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
archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20220202112429/https://discuss.d...
[+] [-] softliving|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stevage|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] metadat|4 years ago|reply
*cough* CockroachLabs / CockroachDB *cough*
[+] [-] kadoban|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maximilianburke|4 years ago|reply
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|4 years ago|reply
A few well-known Open source projects lack user-centric product thinking. I felt dgraph had this issue.
[+] [-] stack_framer|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kvm|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lann|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ctvo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] threeseed|4 years ago|reply
Because you know AWS would be circling this news very closely for another product to add to their lineup.
[+] [-] kbd|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maerF0x0|4 years ago|reply
https://changelog.com/podcast/448
[+] [-] pm90|4 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] fernandorojo|4 years ago|reply
It's easy to roast a CEO from the sidelines when things go south, but it's really hard to build such good tech.
[+] [-] topicseed|4 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] staticassertion|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] zanek|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yesimahuman|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ziggus|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] totony|4 years ago|reply
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|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] traceroute66|4 years ago|reply
$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:
[+] [-] glenngillen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xyzzy_plugh|4 years ago|reply
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|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] notyourday|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ramoz|4 years ago|reply
https://github.com/dgraph-io/badger
[+] [-] m_ke|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] threeseed|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mrdoops|4 years ago|reply