Good company marred by mishired CEO - Engineering Leader Dgraph Labs Employee Review

I was a high ranking engineering leader in the company and was laid off in June as well. I used to sit in the board meetings as well, so I know the inner picture of what happened with the company. A lot of the blame in these Glassdoor reviews is on the founder. But, nothing could be further from truth. The company had been working well for 5+ years the founder was leading it. It was slightly behind on revenue generation (which caused VCs to grumble), but databases take time to build and the team was on track to build the cloud business. For a database company, Dgraph was always underfunded. The founder really put his heart and soul to make this a success. Despite having two small kids, he spent countless hours working with the engineering team across time zones, starting at 5 am in San Francisco, to ease the time zone issues for the India team. But, the founder was stretched really thin and that’s what prompted him to look for help. This could have been solved by bringing in a COO or a business leader. But, the actual mistake founder made was to bring in a CEO recommended by the VCs, without doing a retained search. The brought in CEO was a CFO by profession and didn’t have much experience leading a highly technical database company, or working with a technical founder. He was a very expensive and political hire. The communication and departments got siloed, decisions were being made with no consultations across departments. The founder was completely sidelined by the CEO and stopped coming to the management meetings. For a database company, all the engineering leaders got removed from the management team. Marketing was advertising stuff that engineering wasn’t even building. The company was spending hours changing accounting firms while running out of money. Sales was getting commission on deals they hadn’t even brought in. Those issues aside, any CEOs top job is to raise funds and build team morale. And those are the two things where the brought in CEO failed hardest. The departments weren’t even talking to each other, founder was disconnected from the company, the team morale was low. CEO couldn’t raise from outside and didn’t take up the existing VCs on their promised bridge round. He kept claiming that he has done bridge rounds in a couple of days and he can raise anytime. And when the company had just a few weeks of burn left, the VCs learnt that the CEO and founder weren’t seeing eye to eye, and backed out of the promised bridge round. That’s what pulled the rug from under the company. The founder couldn’t believe this. He offered to step aside to let the CEO run the company the way he deems fit. But, that didn’t make a difference. The VCs rubbed their hands off and told to shut down the company. But, he didn’t want to shut it down when finally they just launched cloud and were so close to creating revenue. Founder didn’t have control over the board. So, with permission from the board, he resumed as the CEO and to make the remaining money last, laid off most of the team he had spent years building. The team went from 50 strong to 15, all within 6 months since the new CEO was brought in. I was laid off as well. The founder did the announcement, and could barely hold his tears. The CEO was nowhere to be seen. Last I heard, the cloud business did hit a million in annual revenue 2 months after the layoffs. But, they still haven’t raise any money yet. I’d suspect VCs get scared with this level of negativity associated with a company. There are some complaints here about bonuses and stuff. The company used to offer an “up to 15%” bonus, but while I was there, we switched away from that model to just including that in the base salaries itself. It made it easier to hire people when the base is greater than what other companies are offering. Everyone’s salary was adjusted by at least 15-30% to include the bonus and more. A couple of people who were planning to leave and expecting a bonus got affected by this, but most everyone was happy with the change. In fact, many people’s salaries jumped significantly over their Dgraph career. It’s hard to hire system engineers, and the company had to be very competitive with the salaries. There’s a lot of reviews here about founder being “stubborn”. Typically all founder-types are. But, I didn’t get that feeling from Manish. As part of his management team, we used to spend a lot of time debating the pros and cons of decisions, and he would always consider everyone’s opinion. It was even in the core values that best ideas can come from anyone in the company. And he was not only open to ideas and suggestions, but would ask for it repeatedly. He aimed to make good, well thought-out decisions. And the Dgraph product and company reflected his good sense of judgement. I never felt undervalued by him. I didn't see anything close to that level of transparency in the brought in CEO's management style. What’s most curious is all the blame about layoffs on Glassdoor is on the founder. But, he wasn’t even in charge leading up to the layoffs, the brought in CEO was. And if the CEO had actually worked with the founder, they could have raised the bridge round and kept the company alive. So, the real mistake here by the founder was to bring in an inept CEO, and going along with the VCs. That’s what cost him the company.