Founder of a (non YC) database company here.<p>Founding companies are hard, databases are really hard, and we're in the middle of a shakeout in the database industry. At Aerospike, we really, really focused on paying customers early. We gathered a huge number of the "big boys" in advertising ( who need ridiculous speed & uptime in a key-value system ) and have leveraged that into lots of enterprise use cases ( telecom, payment fraud, transaction processing ), which has kept us of interest to the investment community and allows us to fund all that we do.<p>The database problem is a _big problem_ requiring a lot of investment. I heard that very explictly from some VCs when I was first raising ( you're a fool if you think you need a $5 seed round, and we don't fund fools, essentially :-) ), and the drip-by-drip VC cycle then requires extraordinarily disciplined product / feature analysis. I get a lot of requests for more types of indexes, more types of notification, and we need to pick and choose the priority carefully. We want to - and hopefully will - get a chance to build everything eventually, but also need to answer the question "why should I use this instead of a familiar tech like Mongo or MySQL or Postgres", and "follow the leader" product planning is a classic fail.<p>Open source of course has to be part of the equation. Aerospike went open source late, about 2014, and I still wonder what would have happened if we open sourced earlier. Our core big customers need a supported product, but we've lagged, and I know Rethink's better DBEngines ranking comes from both more features and earlier open source. Open source is also driving prices down across the board - a $250M / year oracle deal, converted to EnterpriseDB or MariaDB, turns into a $2.5M deal. Further - for instructure, open source is the only escrow you can trust. The business model question is complex, and creates mistakes if you think the opportunity size is 100x the true size.<p>Anyway - I'm sad to hear of this change at Rethink, I remember when they were on Dana St and we were on Castro around the corner, both focused on and coding for Flash and building the best databases in the world. My best wishes to the team, and anyone who is interested can reach out to me directly.