Retrospection and Learnings from Dgraph Labs • Hacker News Board

Re: Retrospection and Learnings from Dgraph Labs

#31

Post by random3 » Sat, Sep 17, 2022, 3:22 AM UTC

tommiegannert wrote: post #4

Thanks for the perspective. Sustainable, open, software development feels like a problem that's still not solved. How do cloud offerings, consulting, extra features ("open core") and donations compare in terms of keeping development move forward? Have there been studies around that?

It's a developing (at a slow pace) model - I'd be curious if there are any but perhaps some in progress.

One model that seems to be workin is when companies have shared infrastructure and they collaborate on it (e.g. Linux).

Another one is when they use it as a standardization layer (e.g. Kubernetes and also note the much-different-nobody-remembers-about openstak)

Then you have open-core where you have a single entity (and the drama that comes with AWS picking it up) like ElasticSearch, Kafka, etc.

The other open-source + consulting (the RedHat model) has varied results because whoever consults gets incentivised to work against community in order to make money and the consultants will be in conflict too (Cloudera/Hortonworks, Mesosphere).

Not an exhaustive list - and not an expert.

It's likely worth mapping these "patterns". For any research I'd start from incentives with a game-theory causal approach.

Re: Retrospection and Learnings from Dgraph Labs

#32

Post by threeseed » Sat, Sep 17, 2022, 5:12 AM UTC

throwawayays wrote: post #27

threeseed wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Manish allowed a new CEO, Gary Hagmueller, to take over on advice from his investors at Redpoint. The two didn't get along and Manish was largely sidelined. And then depending on who you talk to the company failed because of Gary (poor fundraising, strategy etc) or Manish (poor product, management). The investors Dgraph had e.g. Redpoint, Airtree, Grok have an excellent reputation so there is definitely more going on…

Tangential… Airtree historically has a pretty poor reputation amongst founders who have taken money off them and amongst angel investors. I don’t have first hand knowledge but at least half a dozen unique second or third hand data points => dodgy tactics even at early stage and can micromanage founders.

Really appreciate you commenting.

The worst thing about not being in the US is that there isn't enough public data points about which VCs are good or not.

And founders like Manish aren't stupid/drunk enough to ever spill the beans.

Re: Retrospection and Learnings from Dgraph Labs

#33

Post by mrjn » Sat, Sep 17, 2022, 5:17 AM UTC

throwawayays wrote: post #27

threeseed wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Manish allowed a new CEO, Gary Hagmueller, to take over on advice from his investors at Redpoint. The two didn't get along and Manish was largely sidelined. And then depending on who you talk to the company failed because of Gary (poor fundraising, strategy etc) or Manish (poor product, management). The investors Dgraph had e.g. Redpoint, Airtree, Grok have an excellent reputation so there is definitely more going on…

Tangential… Airtree historically has a pretty poor reputation amongst founders who have taken money off them and amongst angel investors. I don’t have first hand knowledge but at least half a dozen unique second or third hand data points => dodgy tactics even at early stage and can micromanage founders.

Just want to set the record straight here, AirTree folks were incredibly helpful. If offered, I'd take money from them again in a heartbeat.

Re: Retrospection and Learnings from Dgraph Labs

#34

Post by avinassh » Sat, Sep 17, 2022, 5:22 AM UTC

throwawayays wrote: post #27

threeseed wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Manish allowed a new CEO, Gary Hagmueller, to take over on advice from his investors at Redpoint. The two didn't get along and Manish was largely sidelined. And then depending on who you talk to the company failed because of Gary (poor fundraising, strategy etc) or Manish (poor product, management). The investors Dgraph had e.g. Redpoint, Airtree, Grok have an excellent reputation so there is definitely more going on…

Tangential… Airtree historically has a pretty poor reputation amongst founders who have taken money off them and amongst angel investors. I don’t have first hand knowledge but at least half a dozen unique second or third hand data points => dodgy tactics even at early stage and can micromanage founders.

> Airtree historically has a pretty poor reputation amongst founders who have taken money off them and amongst angel investors.

can you share some sources?

Re: Retrospection and Learnings from Dgraph Labs

#35

Post by dis-sys » Sat, Sep 17, 2022, 5:28 AM UTC

The article is a nice read, I also agree that they are a contributor to the go ecosystem. That being said, a key issue didn't get mentioned in the article - the team is not fully technically competent for the products they are building.

A few years ago, I spent weeks evaluating their products, including the graph db and some of their open source libraries. I have to say that you are a brave man if you use some of their stuff in your production system. Good luck to you and your whole team is the only thing I can say.

To give you some examples, when I had obvious safety issues raised, quite often I got pushed back with all sorts of excuses, including from Manish himself. That is something more than technical - it is a culture issue from the top.

From memory, they even had an angry ex-employee exposing all sorts of bugs, including safety ones, in their products after leaving the company. At some point, they even had their issue section of one of their github repos closed as a response!

If you don't know what I am talking about, just check their code committed back between 2017-2019.

Re: Retrospection and Learnings from Dgraph Labs

#36

Post by hknmtt » Sat, Sep 17, 2022, 5:46 AM UTC

I have never found a use for graph db but I am still a happy user of Badger. One of the best KVDB written in Go. I think plenty of folks moved to it from Bolt, due to speed. But nowadays I think maybe Pebble is gaining traction.

Re: Retrospection and Learnings from Dgraph Labs

#37

Post by eurasiantiger » Sat, Sep 17, 2022, 6:28 AM UTC

Dgraph is immensely powerful and flexible, especially if coupled with Apollo Federation. It could use more attention from the community.

Re: Retrospection and Learnings from Dgraph Labs

#38

Post by anacrolix » Sat, Sep 17, 2022, 12:21 PM UTC

justtoni wrote: post #16

mardifoufs wrote: post #15

>Dgraph took a hit suddenly due to a critically wrong hire — which made us go from a “things are looking great” to “sorry, you’re out” within a week. I don't understand what this could mean? How can a single hire be so impactful and so quickly? I guess the team was small but even then I'd be very interested to know how that could happen!

Maybe they hired a CFO who said on his first day: "I am sorry, but you are fucked".

Who are you, who are so wise in the ways of hiring?

Re: Retrospection and Learnings from Dgraph Labs

#39

Post by anacrolix » Sat, Sep 17, 2022, 12:25 PM UTC

staticassertion wrote: post #19

onebot wrote: post #10

I may be in the minority opinion here, but I think the biggest issue was the product constantly changed and tried to be too many things. The product-market fit seemed to be on be "The GraphQL" db. But they really just did all this other complex stuff and by the time they were going in that direction ran out of steam. I don't know Manish personally, but there seems to be a lot of negative sentiment about his managemen…

I believe what he said was that he can move a lot faster on things than his engineers. As the founder of a company I'm sympathetic. No one could ever understand the product as well as me, at this point, because I built almost all of the critical code (this is less and less the case, thankfully, and I'm very happy to say that there are now solid chunks of code where I am NOT the authority on code). That's not "they're…

Manish's style is clearly overbearing from a cursory glance at public interactions.

Re: Retrospection and Learnings from Dgraph Labs

#40

Post by seeker78 » Mon, Sep 19, 2022, 7:52 PM UTC

dis-sys wrote: post #35

The article is a nice read, I also agree that they are a contributor to the go ecosystem. That being said, a key issue didn't get mentioned in the article - the team is not fully technically competent for the products they are building. A few years ago, I spent weeks evaluating their products, including the graph db and some of their open source libraries. I have to say that you are a brave man if you use some of the…

I think it was a bug bounty program. Manish claimed it was an ex employee and he deleted all github issues related to bugs and safety