Quitting Dgraph Labs

I think all you need to know about this CEO&#x2F;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&#x27;ll claim it&#x27;s not data loss if the data still happens to reside on the disk somewhere, and *then delete the bug report*.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dgraph-io&#x2F;badger&#x2F;issues&#x2F;578" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dgraph-io&#x2F;badger&#x2F;issues&#x2F;578</a> titled &quot;Badger unable to return data after value log GC&quot; vs <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dgraph-io&#x2F;badger&#x2F;issues&#x2F;570#issue-362116826" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dgraph-io&#x2F;badger&#x2F;issues&#x2F;570#issue-3621168...</a><p>&gt; 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&#x27;s technically not a data loss (See Badger unable to return data after value log GC #578).<p>Never let this person store your data.

I feel for this person, but there&#x27;s a line in here I found revealing:<p>&gt; Unfortunately, Dgraph was always undervalued by investors.<p>This feels a bit like blaming the investors for why the company failed. To put it bluntly, there&#x27;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.<p>Then there&#x27;s point at which the rubber hits the road, and either customers pay you money for the thing you built or they don&#x27;t. If they don&#x27;t, you need a really convincing story to convince your investors they shouldn&#x27;t cut their losses. It&#x27;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.

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.<p>Archive link <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;sTfCd" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;sTfCd</a> in case the discussion gets deleted.

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&#x27;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&#x27;t get basic things (like database dumping and&#x2F;or reimport, or some large queries) to work at all reliably which scared us away from going with their enterprise product.<p>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.<p>Thanks to Dgraph&#x27;s query language, we were able to implement a GraphQL API server that had <i>no</i> resolvers and no need for dataloader—the n+1 problem simply couldn&#x27;t occur! It was like magic.<p>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.<p>I ended up leaving in November, but I think I know what my former team will be doing over the next few sprints!<p>I wish Manish and crew all the best, and hope they succeed in their new endeavor. Dgraph is pretty dang cool.

&quot;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.&quot;<p>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.

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.

&gt; 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.<p>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?<p>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.<p>It&#x27;s easy to roast a CEO from the sidelines when things go south, but it&#x27;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).<p>Feeling sad for them but I&#x27;m sure they&#x27;ll come out stronger and current users will follow them.<p>No clue about the politics and $$$, but the product was already promising and different from the competitors (ArangoDB and Neo4j).

Sorry to hear about this Manish. I&#x27;ve been using DGraph for years and I can say that it&#x27;s an excellent database with great people working on it.<p>I&#x27;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.

yea, that&#x27;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

Yeah, that&#x27;s a bad look for both dgraph and the new company imo. What guarantees the same thing ran by the same people won&#x27;t have the same issues again?<p>Not only that, if the core team moves to the open source product to &quot;rebuild&quot; the same features, isn&#x27;t that way too dangerous IP-wise?<p>This is also one of the reasons I didn&#x27;t use dgraph: Open source core doesn&#x27;t work. All the companies that were sold to now have nowhere to go for support.

Doesn&#x27;t come as much of a surprise really.<p>$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).<p>A frustrating conversation with Dgraph sales-droid ensued:<p><pre><code> Us: We need access to X&#x2F;Y&#x2F;Z features, but on-prem Droid: But Cloud Us: Cloud = No-go because X&#x2F;Y&#x2F;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</code></pre>

This topic came up in a group of early stage investors I&#x27;m associated with and I know I&#x27;m not alone when I think: they couldn&#x27;t raise more than 15M? And lost control of the company??<p>Sure, I get that it&#x27;s a database, and databases are harder sells than a lot of other things, but christ on a bike they must&#x27;ve fucked something up if they couldn&#x27;t draw the allure of any of the big funds currently throwing gobs of money around.<p>I know a few founders at smaller companies than dgraph, where similarly engineers are their target audience, who have <i>complete</i> control of their company despite raising in the ball park of 100M over two or three rounds in the last couple of years.<p>There&#x27;s just no excuse. Either their fundamentals were so fucked, or they were too arrogant even for VCs which is almost impossible.<p>We&#x27;ll probably never know the full story here.

When you raise money, you become responsible for the execution&#x2F;growth to people who gave you money. If you don&#x27;t like that, you should not raise the money.

Badger has performed exceptionally well for us. Preferred over LevelDB&#x2F;similar solutions.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dgraph-io&#x2F;badger" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dgraph-io&#x2F;badger</a>

Maybe this whole VC fund cycle driven model of pumping and dumping&#x2F;exiting companies is not ideal after all.

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.

The level of negativity on HN around hard engineering problems like data stores...it&#x27;s really unforgiving here.

I just refactored my whole app from MongoDB to DGraph... Guys I really like this idea I don&#x27;t want to abandon it. What should I do: eat section 13 of Mongo&#x27;s license, or try to maintain a database server myself?

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

I&#x27;ve followed Dgraph off and on. I enjoy looking through their open sourced work. A lot of it is interesting.<p>Manish seems to be THAT person. The technically competent, unwavering to the technical vision, doesn&#x27;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.<p>Here&#x27;s a blog post where he stepped down from being CEO to being CTO: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dgraph.io&#x2F;blog&#x2F;post&#x2F;changing-guard&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dgraph.io&#x2F;blog&#x2F;post&#x2F;changing-guard&#x2F;</a><p>&gt; 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&amp;M folks, finding a true engineering replacement for me has been, and will continue to be a real challenge.<p>Reviews from Glassdoor confirm this inability to let others touch his baby: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.glassdoor.com&#x2F;Reviews&#x2F;Dgraph-Labs-Reviews-E1284992.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.glassdoor.com&#x2F;Reviews&#x2F;Dgraph-Labs-Reviews-E12849...</a><p>&gt; 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&#x27;t trust employee expertise. He would rather be right than make money or see his company succeed. Manish doesn&#x27;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.

woofta, what a way to go.