Four Years at Tinybird
I worked at Tinybird for 4 years, 2 months, and 21 days. It’s been an incredible experience that taught me a lot about startups, engineering, and myself. Still, it feels like I joined a lifetime ago.
At this point, you’re probably wondering why? Why are you writing this post about leaving a startup?
- One of the things I enjoyed most about my early days at Tinybird was the long-form writing culture. It allowed us to express ideas and thoughts, share knowledge, and collaborate. Something difficult to see nowadays where everything should be instantaneous and require low effort. So I see writing this down as a way to pay tribute to the culture that shaped all these years.
- I tend to forget things I’ve contributed to and things I learned. Especially on multiyear journeys like this one. I’m just using this post as a way to remember and reflect on my time at Tinybird.
- Let’s be honest, who wouldn’t want to read personal experiences from people who have been through the ups and downs of a startup before joining it?
- Last but not least, Raquel wrote something similar and I think it’s a good example to follow (I’ll probably steal the structure from her post)
Let me start with the basics.
What is Tinybird?
I struggled every time someone asked me what Tinybird is, especially for non-technical people. It was a challenge to explain the product in a concise way. I found myself directly explaining some use cases people can easily relate to.
Let me try to do better now that I have time to think it through. It’s going to be funny if this is the first time I manage to explain it well, since it’s going to be the last time I have to.
Tinybird is a managed ClickHouse solution that simplifies the process of building and deploying real-time data pipelines. If you are already familiar with ClickHouse, you can skip the next part.
ClickHouse is an open-source column-oriented database management system designed for fast analytical queries over large datasets. It is known for its high performance, scalability, and ease of use, until it’s not. Running ClickHouse in production can be challenging, especially when it comes to managing low-latency and high-throughput use cases.
Tinybird simplifies this process by providing a managed service that takes care of real-time data ingestion, database updates, query optimization, schema migrations, etc. It comes with a lot of developer experience sugar, so developers can focus on building their applications without worrying about the underlying infrastructure.
Why Tinybird?
The path to Tinybird wasn’t straightforward. I went through the interview process and didn’t make the cut initially. A few weeks later, Javi called me back with an offer. They had chosen another candidate who didn’t work out, and I got a second chance. I always remind him this as one of his biggest hiring mistakes, not because I was a bad hire, but because he almost let me go to someone else.
Getting that callback felt nice. People always say “we’ll keep you in mind if another position opens up,” but nobody actually does. They did.
At the time, I was Lead Software Engineer at Kognia Sports. The opportunity to join Tinybird was compelling for several reasons. Being from Spain, I knew Tinybird’s reputation, they were well-known in the Spanish tech scene. The product itself was amazing. I remember telling them during the interview that I would have used Tinybird at previous companies if it had existed. And the team was exceptionally talented. I didn’t know them personally, but I had colleagues like Matallín who had worked with some of them before and had only good words about the experience.
What struck me during the interviews was how passionate everyone was about what they were building. The talent density was obvious, these were people who deeply understood the problem space and were excited to solve it.
I joined in December 2021. The company was around 20 people at the time. Over the next few years, we’d grow to 100, then eventually contract back to 45.
My path inside the company was particular. I joined the Customer Success team, which was scary at first. I’d never been in direct contact with clients and wasn’t sure I could manage it. But the experience turned out to be amazing. Most of the people I worked with were technical, so it felt more like working as a Data Engineer collaborating with another team in the same company than traditional customer success work.
After collaborating with many companies and building very challenging use cases, I started learning ClickHouse internals on my own. After about a year, I moved to the ClickHouse team to work alongside Marín. It was an incredible learning experience, I went deep into low-level and systems-related work that I’d never touched before.
Eventually, I was promoted to Staff Engineer, where I led horizontal projects and important company-wide initiatives like Forward.
Culture
One of Tinybird’s defining characteristics was its emphasis on ownership and autonomy. You weren’t given a detailed roadmap with step-by-step tasks. Instead, you were expected to identify problems, propose solutions, and execute them. While working in Customer Success, it was common for me to fix any bug I found in the process. Del Amo was my buddy when I joined and embodied this mindset perfectly.
This level of autonomy was amazing, but overwhelming at first. I remember feeling like I was going to get fired during the first two weeks. Many people felt this way at Tinybird, not just because of the autonomy, but because of the sheer talent surrounding you. When everyone around you is exceptionally skilled, it’s easy to question whether you belong.
The long-form writing culture I mentioned earlier was more than just a communication preference, it was a way of thinking. We wrote RFCs, postmortems, and design docs. But we also documented insights from deep analyses and explorations. At the time, we were using Basecamp, and its structure naturally encouraged thoughtful, long-form writing instead of quick, throwaway messages. Writing forced clarity. You couldn’t hand-wave through a proposal or hide fuzzy thinking behind jargon. If you couldn’t articulate your reasoning in writing, you probably hadn’t thought it through.
After we migrated to Slack, we lost this. It was a significant cultural loss.
The most important value at Tinybird was bias toward action. Many people would join the company and start suggesting things we could do, creating tickets and waiting for consensus. The culture was to just do things. Don’t wait for permission or perfect alignment—build it, ship it, learn from it.
We had a strong CI/CD pipeline, so we deployed to production every day. This came with risks, but it was the fastest way to move. We believed in putting things in front of clients as soon as possible to start collecting feedback, rather than discussing and theorizing indefinitely.
Another thing that surprised me from the beginning, every opinion mattered. It didn’t matter if you were junior or senior, new or tenured, if you had a perspective, people listened.
Remote
Remote work sounds great in theory. No commute, work from anywhere, flexible schedule. The reality is more nuanced.
Tinybird was remote from the beginning, the company started during the COVID pandemic. While the flexibility was amazing, the lack of in-person interaction made certain things harder. Building relationships with new team members was difficult. You can’t replicate the spontaneous hallway conversations or the quick desk drive-by to unblock something. Everything becomes scheduled, formal, asynchronous.
There’s also a persistent feeling of solitude. You’re alone at home, working through problems by yourself. The casual conversations where you might share frustrations or uncertainties simply don’t happen when you don’t know people yet.
Working remotely with exceptionally talented people comes with its own challenge: impostor syndrome. It’s much harder to get to a reasonable pace when you’re remote and starting out. When everyone around you seems to effortlessly ship complex features, solve hard problems, or grasp concepts faster than you, it’s easy to feel like you don’t belong. The remote aspect amplifies this as you don’t see others struggle, only their polished output. And you’re sitting alone at home, wondering if you’re the only one who doesn’t get it.
And the gossip?
If you know me, you’ll be expecting a bit of gossip but I’m sorry not this time. Instead, there are a few hard truths about things that didn’t work so well. After 4 years, 2 months, and 21 days, it was time to move on. Not because of any single catastrophic event, but because of accumulated weight.
- The leadership structure added its own complexity. Tinybird has five founders. Having that many founders can make certain situations difficult, especially when they disagree. During some periods, I was considered middle management, which was challenging to navigate and didn’t work well. There wasn’t much space for that layer, especially when the founders already covered everything at the company’s current size.
- The company grew, new people joined, and the old ways of doing things were replaced with new ones. The culture I started with slowly changed or disappeared. The thing that hurts me most is the loss of the long-form writing. Once we started using Slack people started to communicate in short messages, which made it harder to have deep conversations and keep decision-making focused in a single place.
- Much of the great talent that brought me to Tinybird eventually left. It’s normal at companies like this. Rotation is something you have to accept, but at some point, you look left and right and see that everybody you’ve been working and learning from is gone.
- Startups evolve. Priorities shift. Strategies change. That’s expected, even necessary. But we had at least one major product direction change every year. While this is understandable for a startup trying to find product-market fit, it takes a lot of energy. I don’t mind throwing away work, that’s part of the process, but the constant context switching and reorientation is distracting and draining.
- Four years at a demanding startup is a long time. The demand came from constant firefighting. The initial excitement that fuels you through the first year or two eventually gives way to fatigue. The problems you’re solving start to feel familiar. The pace that once energized you starts to drain you.
- Recent organizational changes made it clear it was time for something new.
What I’m looking for next is clear: technical challenges and a seat at the table to have real impact.
I’m grateful for the experience. I grew more as an engineer in these four years than I could have imagined. I developed deep systems knowledge and low-level technical expertise I never had before. I’m proud of many projects, Forward and the Query Booster among them. But also of thoughtful investigations, difficult bug discoveries, and especially being able to have an impact on colleagues’ careers.
Most importantly, I managed to have fun while working hard. And I made really good friends along the way.
To everyone still at Tinybird: I appreciate the founders tremendously, especially Ochoa and Javi. And to the many team members I’ve worked closely with over these years, thank you.
Me, Raquel, Nuria, and Enric
Filete, me, Del Amo, Javi, Rafa, and Nuria