Their bet was contrarian: embracing SQL -- specifically MySQL wire & dialect compatibility -- at a time when the open source options were trending toward NoSQL.
For funded start-ups with a calculable data-to-revenue ratio, Clustrix buys you the option for arbitrary future expansion while retaining the functional benefits of the RDBMS stack.
Once your product succeeds to a level where daily operational reporting is necessary, you'll appreciate the ubiquity of SQL: analysts and off-the-shelf tools all speak SQL without the overhead of glue code, data staging, or ETL.
I can also say that I've been participating in the private beta of this AWS version for a week now and it is both stable and performant. Although we use their appliance in production, I'm very excited about this AWS version as it allows us to run clustrix in our testing and staging environments (where we previously had to run mysql).
I think it's a really great thing that more people/companies will be able to use their awesome database without having to purchase an appliance.