by anhldbk on 3/13/21, 2:41 AM with 227 comments
by jandrewrogers on 3/13/21, 5:03 AM
People that love database technology — that would be me — tend to start database companies. It is very difficult to sell a database. It is much, much easier to sell a compelling solution to a somewhat boring but very valuable business problem that just happens to require an amazing database capability behind it. That’s your moat, the customer doesn’t actually care that there is an amazing database engine behind it but it makes it difficult for competitors to replicate.
Filed under “lessons I learned the hard way”.
by abraxas on 3/13/21, 5:28 AM
Analogous to it, the nosql DB market is the exact wrong market to enter. Large companies willing to pay big bucks for enterprise features will pay established vendors for the stodgy but battle tested stuff like Oracle or DB2. The hipster startup market pays nobody for anything as there is a myriad of free choices in every common flavour and the few that will pay will mostly do so to purchase managed hosting. And that’s only if their PoC built on your new and untrusted database ever makes it to production. And then it’s probably your cheapest tier. Don’t be selling to paupers!
by nonpolitic on 3/13/21, 6:38 AM
This is key, and plays out over and over again in different forms. There are no points for difficulty, only supply and demand. PG puts this well [1]:
> That's the essence of a startup: having brilliant people do work that's beneath them. Big companies try to hire the right person for the job. Startups win because they don't—because they take people so smart that they would in a big company be doing "research," and set them to work instead on problems of the most immediate and mundane sort. Think Einstein designing refrigerators.
by jwr on 3/13/21, 3:38 PM
RethinkDB was done really, really well. It is one of the very few distributed databases that went through Jepsen relatively unscathed and delivered on promises made. Development was done in the public, questions were asked through StackOverflow. You interacted with competent, skillful and experienced developers.
And yet MongoDB was the latest fashion fad, end even though it did NOT deliver on the promises, it was the hot-database-du-jour that kids used.
The article is mostly about the business model, and I also always thought they would have a hard time making money on the database. But I think they would have had a much better shot if it became more popular. It didn't, which accelerated the company's demise.
EDIT: I just realized that I wrote about RethinkDB in the past tense, even though it very much exists as I write it. In fact I run my business on it. But because it fell out of favor, when it was open-sourced, it failed to pick up momentum, and it now seems unlikely that it will.
Which is why I'm working on switching to FoundationDB, and I'm slightly worried that it will suffer the same fate: it is excellent technically (the best transactional guarantees in a distributed database you can get), but difficult to understand and not very user-friendly. It's not the "node.js database for everyone". The only reason I'm considering it is because Apple uses and develops it, which gives me hope for longer-term maintenance.
Going back to fashions — you can have a product which excels technically, but if it's out of fashion, it might as well not exist.
I think we would all be better off if we stopped trying to always pick The One True Database, The One True Programming Language, etc — and instead accepted that there might be multiple tools, each specialized for certain kinds of tasks.
by plorkyeran on 3/13/21, 4:39 AM
That's not to say that they would have succeeded if they'd gone after that though; instead we might have a blog post about how they correctly predicted where the market would go and simply ran out of money before the market got there.
by nathcd on 3/13/21, 3:06 AM
There was a large discussion (948 points, 267 comments) at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13421608
by nithinkashyapn on 3/13/21, 3:47 AM
by geophile on 3/13/21, 3:15 PM
The first one, an object-oriented database company (last 80s, early 90s) suffered from an extreme case of misperceived markets, due to the occasionally intentional blurring of the lines between a "database system" (which means SQL to nearly everyone, and we didn't to SQL), and a persistent storage class added to C/C++ (and later Smalltalk and Java).
The second one (mid 2000s) was a neat physical storage trick, which should have been a feature of a database system, not an excuse for building a new one. My bad for missing this, but I really, really liked the physical storage ideas, so I joined.
Building and selling new database technology is extremely difficult. There are successful, huge, entrenched companies. There is, therefore, no good reason for anyone to gamble on your new technology. Your only chance is to convince the architecture astronauts at some prospect that they just have to have your product, but the odds of such a decision sticking all the way through the delivery of their product is extremely low, no matter how good your technology is.
by toolslive on 3/13/21, 7:07 AM
by nojvek on 3/13/21, 7:00 AM
I wish they didn’t run out of money and give up. In many ways startups feel like you gotta be a cockroach. The goal is to not die and live long enough to be profitable where you control your own destiny.
Like mongo atlas, rethinkdb’s hosted solution (horizon I think) could have easily taken off.
Like Firebase’s Firestore, it could have been quite successful.
by k__ on 3/13/21, 12:47 PM
MongoDB and ArangoDB did well so there seems to be a valid case for new databases. Rethink was loved by HN commenters. I used it in a startup I was working at in 2015-2017 and it was a pleasure.
by billconan on 3/13/21, 3:25 AM
developer tool market seems to be the only one I'm familiar with as an engineer. If I were to start a business, I will probably also do something for this market.
by ospider on 3/13/21, 7:24 AM
by supermatt on 3/13/21, 2:55 PM
That’s not a reason for failure, of course, but I have mentioned before that we (as in developers) often only choose things with permissive licenses, often to the detriment of the products we “support” (see the recent elastic drama, where we blamed elastic being forked by Amazon for being too permissive!).
by haolez on 3/13/21, 4:06 AM
Huh?
by wideareanetwork on 3/13/21, 4:06 AM
What more reason is needed?
by zackmorris on 3/13/21, 6:52 PM
This article has less to do with databases or open source software than it does with the fundamentally misaligned incentives of egalitarianism and capitalism.
I wish there was a social open source license that said "you can use this indefinitely as long as you pay us something". The price would be up to the user but the generally accepted polite minimum would be at least a penny ($0.01).
Then businesses could publicly display their level of support (both initially and yearly) for the software they use, to attract customers. They could also be audited by the IRS, so a lack of patronage could correlate to a lack of equality and maybe even reveal corruption and other malfeasance. At the very least it would reveal a lack of internal controls.
This could work kind of like UBI for open source. And I'm definitely not the only one who has ever thought about this. But there is just so much free capital floating around right now that it's a great time to be thinking about how to reform the paradigms that we all depend on.
by carlsborg on 3/13/21, 5:41 PM
Maybe another, important, lesson the RethinkDB team left out was: raise more capital than you need, and go public fast.
Two years later, MongoDB the company is now valued at $19.491B. Like many other public tech companies, it is yet to turn a single profitable quarter, and is not expected to in the next few years.
Annual YoY revenue growth is flat too at around $500m. Equity is negative.
Perhaps because the market thinks useful product companies will be valuable vs. the US dollar in the future. And its a vital part of many companies infrastructure these days, without much of a solid enterprise alternative.
by cubicmeter on 3/13/21, 5:32 PM
If anyone tried to sell git itself it would be impossible. I never used mongodb for reasons listed in the article. But there is free and open source and resilient postgres.
the companies who succeeded around git did not build git. it would be a tough thing to develop both git and the hosting / workflow business around it.
so I guess the lesson to learn is don't try to build extremely sophisticated software as a startup where there are already good enough open source alternatives.
by spamalot159 on 3/13/21, 3:16 AM
by johbjo on 3/13/21, 11:34 AM
by bilater on 3/13/21, 9:18 PM
by NetOpWibby on 3/13/21, 9:26 AM
by skyzadev on 3/13/21, 8:41 PM
by roenxi on 3/13/21, 5:14 AM
The industry is still in an awkward position where software deals in 'intellectual property', but the concept was never really developed with an understanding of whatever it is that software is. Something like PostgreSQL for example isn't exactly a product, a service or a novel idea. Most of its consumers don't use most of its features. It is almost a perspective on a problem and some codified good design ideas.
It isn't obvious if selling a perspective is profitable. There are a lot of winners in software that don't actually sell software. Eg, Facebook/Google sells eyeballs, Amazon sells infrastructure, Apple sells iPhones.
MongoDB.Inc probably doesn't sell 'a database' if the details of their customer relationships were open for inspection.
by gigatexal on 3/13/21, 6:46 AM
There is an archive of his deleted tweets here where he describes it: https://gist.github.com/travisbrown/059310042193a2e143408b05...
And then there was an article that seems to be gone from the web (https://web.archive.org/web/20201130215752/https://threader....). It stands to reason this huge distraction played a role in the mismanagement of the database and why it ultimately didn’t succeed.
by ianwalter on 3/13/21, 5:29 AM
Uh no, It was slow on real world workloads, you just don't want to admit it.
by akulkarni on 3/13/21, 4:58 AM
Read The Economist religiously. It will make you better faster.
The challenge in fast changing markets is that the best information isn't written down anywhere (and especially not in magazines!), but that it's locked inside people's heads.
At least, this is what has worked for me (TimescaleDB founder)!
by williamstein on 3/13/21, 3:26 AM
by the_linux_lich on 3/13/21, 3:29 AM
by cryptica on 3/13/21, 11:39 AM