HACKER Q&A
📣 _448

Anyone here from the RethinkDB founding team? Why was it shutdown?


I am intrigued that a database startup which had some novel ideas to support web apps did not takeoff. Why was the startup shutdown? What were the challenges faced by the team?

  👤 slap_shot Accepted Answer ✓
Slava wrote a postmortem five years ago - I'm curious if he looks back at it and feels any different.

I was an early RethinkDB user - we probably had one of the largest RethinkDB clusters in production by 2013 at an ad network.

I've gotten to know some early folks at MongoDB pretty well over the last year and RethinkDB has come up a few times. I think the answer comes down to a pretty boring one: MongoDB just got there a bit faster, raised a large sum of money, advanced their product greatly with the purchase of WiredTiger[0] and marketed the hell out of the space. The differentiation point for another document database in 2013-2016 was really limited.

The product they built with such a modest amount of funding was nothing short of amazing. I'll always have a special place in my heart for RethinkDB

[0] https://www.mongodb.com/press/wired-tiger

👤 skywal_l
The HN entry for the postmortem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13421608
👤 assface
Stuff like this didn't help:

https://web.archive.org/web/20201204090050/https://twitter.c...