It's about time that Timescale started getting what it deserves.
Sometime in early 2022, just as they raised their Series C, leadership decided that they had gotten what they wanted from the open-source community and TimescaleDB. They decided it was time to focus 100% on Timescale Cloud. Features began to become exclusive to Timescale Cloud, and the self-hosted TimescaleDB was literally treated as competition. At the same time, they managed to spoil their long-time PaaS partnership with Aiven, which was (and still is) a major source of revenue for the company. The reason? Everyone needed to use Timescale Cloud and give their money to Timescale, thus making Aiven a competitor. In short, with the raising of Series C, Timescale stopped being an OSS startup and began transitioning to a money hungry corporation.
In 2023, they conducted two rounds of layoffs, even though the company was highly profitable. Recently, Planetscale also carried out layoffs in a similarly harsh manner as Timescale, but at least Planetscale had the "courtesy" to address this with two sentences in their PR statement about company restructuring. Timescale did not even do that; they kept it all quiet. Out of 160 employees, around 65 were laid off. The first round of layoffs occurred in January, and the second in September. No warnings. No PIPs. Just an email informing you that you no longer work for them. Many of the affected employees were in the middle of ongoing projects. The CEO even mentioned in the in-house memo how they diligently worked on the September layoff throughout the summer. Interestingly, many of these employees were hired by competitors like Supabase and Neon. It’s worth emphasizing that this was not a financial issue—Timescale is far from having such problems. Instead, it was a restructuring effort to present nice financial numbers during ongoing turbulence in the tech market. (And yes, you guessed it! Timescale also hired their first CFO a couple of months before the first layoffs.)
You might say that it's just business, but as an OSS startup, I expect them to live by the values they have advertised over the years and treat their users and employees much better than they currently do. With this in mind, I welcome Tembo as a new player in the time-series market.
Footnotes: Timescale = the company. TimescaleDB = OSS time-series database developed by Timescale. Timescale Cloud = TimescaleDB managed by Timescale on AWS.