It saddens me to see that we have generated so much ill will from you. It sounds like you were affected by our layoffs last year. You have every right to be upset. If you ever want to chat about this 1:1, you know how to reach me. I’d be happy to make the time.
To anyone else reading this: Some of what this person has shared is true, but some of it is not true.
I debated whether or not to reply. But one of my personal leadership values is “transparency”, so I thought I’d take the time to respond.
Yes, we conducted two rounds of layoffs in 2023. Like many tech companies, we hired a lot in 2021 and early 2022. Then, as the tech market began to correct mid 2022, we were forced to make tough decisions, including layoffs.
I take responsibility for the over-hiring and the layoffs. It brought me no joy to do them. But I feel a moral obligation to our customers to stay on the path of financial sustainability. I also feel a fiduciary obligation to our investors, some of whom are individuals, some of whom are large funds, who have all trusted us with their money. I feel a similar responsibility to current and former Timescalers who own equity in Timescale.
Sometimes, that means making tough decisions like this. But again, it was my call (not anyone else), and I accept full responsibility.
Yes, we did not publicize this news. Frankly, we thought we were too small for others to care. Maybe we got that wrong. But that decision came from a place of humility.
This is not true: “Just an email informing you that you no longer work for them.” Every affected person – except for a handful who were not working that day – was told the news individually, on a live Zoom call, that included at least one of our executives or a member of our People team. For the few teammates who were not working that day, we made many attempts to connect with them personally. I know the team tried their best to approach these hard conversations with care and empathy.
I was glad to see that a number of the affected individuals quickly found new roles at other companies in the PostgreSQL ecosystem, including at Supabase, Neon, and Tembo. These are good, smart people. The PostgreSQL ecosystem is better off with these people continuing to work to improve PostgreSQL.
The comments questioning our belief in open source are also not true. We still believe in open source. The core of TimescaleDB is still open source. Some of the advanced features are under a free, source-available license. Our latest release – TimescaleDB 2.15 – was just two weeks ago. Unlike most (all?) of our competitors, we have never re-licensed our open source software. This is something that is true for us but not for many others, like MongoDB, Elastic, Redis, Hashicorp, Confluent, etc.
Yes, we are building a self-sustaining open source business. Yes, it is hard and sometimes we get things wrong. But we have never stopped investing in our community. Today the TimescaleDB community (open source and free) is 20x larger than our customer base. And this community has more than doubled in the past 1+ year. We are also planning significant open source contributions for the next few months.
To the author of this post: I hope this response provides some clarification. And again, I’m available to chat one-on-one if you’d like.
To our open source and free community users, and to our customers: thank you for trusting us with your workloads. We are committed to serving you.
Finally, to the Timescale team, both current and former: thank you for all your hard work making developers successful. We are here to serve developers so that they can build the future. The road won’t always be easy or smooth. But we are committed, and we will get there.
Taking responsibility for laying off a bunch of people is thin gruel. What does that mean? Nothing. They showed you loyalty, you didn't return it. The over hiring is a symptom of bad management, so taking responsibility would be to demote yourself and take a pay cut. All the executive staff should have taken one and kept more people on. It is irresponsible and cruel to overhire and then dump people. I could say more, but I am sure this is falling on deaf ears.
Over-hiring is a calculus that shifts depending on macro market conditions. To pretend otherwise just isn't an honest assessment of what it means to be a business leader. In the zero interest rate era, it was irresponsible for business executives to not invest to ensure they had a competitive foundation or else be left-behind by those doing so... The rise of interest rates changed the market's appetite to invest in non-profitable growth companies, which in turn had a series of follow-on effects that required software executives to reverse course so as to optimize for their long term viability in the new climate.
It saddens me to see that we have generated so much ill will from you. It sounds like you were affected by our layoffs last year. You have every right to be upset. If you ever want to chat about this 1:1, you know how to reach me. I’d be happy to make the time.
To anyone else reading this: Some of what this person has shared is true, but some of it is not true.
I debated whether or not to reply. But one of my personal leadership values is “transparency”, so I thought I’d take the time to respond.
Yes, we conducted two rounds of layoffs in 2023. Like many tech companies, we hired a lot in 2021 and early 2022. Then, as the tech market began to correct mid 2022, we were forced to make tough decisions, including layoffs.
I take responsibility for the over-hiring and the layoffs. It brought me no joy to do them. But I feel a moral obligation to our customers to stay on the path of financial sustainability. I also feel a fiduciary obligation to our investors, some of whom are individuals, some of whom are large funds, who have all trusted us with their money. I feel a similar responsibility to current and former Timescalers who own equity in Timescale.
Sometimes, that means making tough decisions like this. But again, it was my call (not anyone else), and I accept full responsibility.
Yes, we did not publicize this news. Frankly, we thought we were too small for others to care. Maybe we got that wrong. But that decision came from a place of humility.
This is not true: “Just an email informing you that you no longer work for them.” Every affected person – except for a handful who were not working that day – was told the news individually, on a live Zoom call, that included at least one of our executives or a member of our People team. For the few teammates who were not working that day, we made many attempts to connect with them personally. I know the team tried their best to approach these hard conversations with care and empathy.
I was glad to see that a number of the affected individuals quickly found new roles at other companies in the PostgreSQL ecosystem, including at Supabase, Neon, and Tembo. These are good, smart people. The PostgreSQL ecosystem is better off with these people continuing to work to improve PostgreSQL.
The comments questioning our belief in open source are also not true. We still believe in open source. The core of TimescaleDB is still open source. Some of the advanced features are under a free, source-available license. Our latest release – TimescaleDB 2.15 – was just two weeks ago. Unlike most (all?) of our competitors, we have never re-licensed our open source software. This is something that is true for us but not for many others, like MongoDB, Elastic, Redis, Hashicorp, Confluent, etc.
Yes, we are building a self-sustaining open source business. Yes, it is hard and sometimes we get things wrong. But we have never stopped investing in our community. Today the TimescaleDB community (open source and free) is 20x larger than our customer base. And this community has more than doubled in the past 1+ year. We are also planning significant open source contributions for the next few months.
To the author of this post: I hope this response provides some clarification. And again, I’m available to chat one-on-one if you’d like.
To our open source and free community users, and to our customers: thank you for trusting us with your workloads. We are committed to serving you.
Finally, to the Timescale team, both current and former: thank you for all your hard work making developers successful. We are here to serve developers so that they can build the future. The road won’t always be easy or smooth. But we are committed, and we will get there.