Quitting Dgraph Labs

> 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?

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--ca...

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.

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/

> 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-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.

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).