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 management style. He has been quoted as say (to the effect) that his engineers were not as good as him and he would have to go in and "fix" stuff. That seems wrong to me. Either he is a the best programmer in the world or didn't hire well. Not really sure tbh. But I wanted to love the product but it had too many poorly working features and could have de-scoped a bit and made them good.
FWIW I am really excited by surrealdb. I think it is the sweet spot that dGraph should have been.
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 worse engineers", they definitely aren't lol. But if you've spent years of your time on a codebase it's going to take years for anyone to be as quick to fix a bug.
I think this is sort of obvious. Imagine fixing a bug in your own personal project, compare that to fixing a bug in someone else's project. You can probably see the error and guess what the bug is, accurately, if it's your project. With someone else's code you're going to have to reverse engineer the system first.
> He has been quoted as say (to the effect) that his engineers were not as good as him and he would have to go in and "fix" stuff.
I wonder if this sentence has similar basis:
From the blog post: "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."
FWIW I am really excited by surrealdb. I think it is the sweet spot that dGraph should have been.