TiDB/TiKV's CTO here. I don't think so, the co-founding team is not ex-Googlers, but we're all big fans of the papers published by Google, especially, the Spanner/F1/BigTable...So it's no surprise that this project has a little bit `Google flavor`
Make this stuff so it "just works" with a one liner command to get started, and you'll have a commercial success.