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by mebcitto 536 days ago
A couple of spicy things:

> OtterTune. Dana, Bohan, and I worked on this research project and startup for almost a decade. And now it is dead. I am disappointed at how a particular company treated us at the end, so they are forever banned from recruiting CMU-DB students. They know who they are and what they did.

Ouch.

> Lastly, I want to give a shout-out to ByteBase for their article Database Tools in 2024: A Year in Review. In previous years, they emailed me asking for permission to translate my end-of-year database articles into Chinese for their blog. This year, they could not wait for me to finish writing this one, so they jocked my flow and wrote their own off-brand article with the same title and premise.

Also sounds like he's preparing a new company:

> I hope to announce our next start-up soon (hint: it’s about databases).

2 comments

How do they enforce the ban? Do universities have non-compete clauses for PhD students?
I assume it's not that kind of ban, but more like he'll recommend his students to avoid the company.
Pretty much. Plus, from my perspective - if a company is willing to screw over your advisor/professor, you know that they won't hesitate to screw you over too.
I think that just means they aren’t allowed at career fairs etc.
Anyone know what company he may be talking about?
Inspect element on https://web.archive.org/web/20240827031455/https://ottertune...

For more context:

> I'm to sad to announce that @OtterTuneAI is officially dead. Our service is shutdown and we let everyone go today (1mo notice). I can't got into details of what happened but we got screwed over by a PE Postgres company on an acquisition offer. https://x.com/andy_pavlo/status/1801687420330770841

Because that was a little too subtle and I was sufficiently curious:

view-source:https://web.archive.org/web/20240827031455/https://ottertune...

scroll until you see ASCII art

Oh wow, didnt know pe-postgres-company had any negative rep.

Anyone care to explain how a company can screw another company via a acquisition offer?

Well, there's a leading Postgres company which is owned by not one but two PE firms...