I was not aware (my ignorance) that there are such great companies built around PostgreSQL support and development and that so many core engineers of the product work there. I assumed the engineers are from much more diverse set of companies.
Given how PostgreSQL has been growing, what is stopping more startups to build around this? The reason I ask is this is HN, which is part of YC - so many of us are (possible) founders. This looks like a growing B2B/Enterprise opportunity, or am I wrong?
Support and consulting services generally aren't a good startup business model. Your revenue scales linearly with headcount which generally prevents hockey stick growth and massive revenue per employee numbers. It's why so many OSS based startups are doing SaaS models right now.
Support and consulting services are great startup business models. Low cost of entry, generate revenue early in lifecycle thus a strong basis for bootstrapped/organic growth, relatively straightforward sell cycle, lots of opportunity for growth and new market exploitation (e.g. expand from consulting to managed services or SaaS once revenue supports it). I've started several such companies, and it was fun and profitable.
The only people who call a business idea "bad" solely because it doesn't enable "hockey stick growth and massive revenue per employee numbers" are people who's business world view is so constricted that the only possible "good" business is a SV ideal, VC funded, growth at all cost model. That isn't the only way to do it.
A "startup" (according to Wikipedia and most others) is essentially a business in search of a business model (see Steve Blank's work in particular).
A small consulting business is not a startup, it's a small business that already has a perfectly fine business model. As soon as the founder picks up the phone and makes a few calls it's out of the "startup" search phase and is now started as a real business.
It's probably because I'm just a poor, unsophisticated non-SV type, but I never thought I was out of 'startup' phase in the consulting biz until I got my first invoice paid. But even if 'startup' is the hours or days between quitting your day job and hanging out your shingle, I don't see how it invalidates anything I said.
I mean, the word "startup" as referring to a business literally wasn't in use until it was used for silicon Valley electronics companies in the 70s. So yeah, it's got a specific meaning and has had it for the last 50 years.
Some people want to co-opt it to refer to lifestyle businesses and small businesses and whatever else because it gives them better marketing. Most people find that silly.
The Postgres consulting/support services landscape may be consolidating some, but I'm not even sure that is a broader trend. Meanwhile there are more tools and services popping up regularly.
That being said, there are various other companies providing this type of services around the world, although most of them are more local (but hey, anyone can be global with a zoom meeting now).
There are also quite a few other companies doing other stuff, employing great PostgreSQL hackers and contributing to the community.
I don't disagree that's it's a viable business model but just saying that it's generally not the kind of business model that the startup crowd (YC, venture funded, etc.) is looking for.
"Yet", I think you mean looking for yet. Ideas change. "Starting up" is the most basic phrase I was used to as a teenager, dreaming of businesses. Then some SV folks reimagined the word to make it mean something super niche.
I am seeing a trend toward sustainable businesses nowadays. I am happy starting up a sustainable business, no matter what you might call it.
The Oxford English Dictionary traced the use of the word "startup" for a budding business to a Forbes article in 1976 where it referred to the Silicon Valley electronics companies.
So, no, the term "startup" wasn't co-opted but has meant a fast growing silicon valley type company for the last 50 years. Before that it was not used to refer to new businesses.
As a note, "starting up" is not the same as "startup."
There's for example Aiven, which is offering managed Postgres in cloud [1]. They also have similar managed offerings for various other open source tools. They raised $40M earlier this year.
They also had a major incident last year where customers suffered data loss. As I heard a bug made their systems think that customers didn't pay so it terminated their instances.
Given how PostgreSQL has been growing, what is stopping more startups to build around this? The reason I ask is this is HN, which is part of YC - so many of us are (possible) founders. This looks like a growing B2B/Enterprise opportunity, or am I wrong?