A podcast about the inflection points that shaped some of the most significant companies of our time. Crucible moments are pivotal decisions that determine your trajectory. In Season 2, hear from founders and leaders like Steve Chen of YouTube, Drew Houston of Dropbox, Frank Slootman of ServiceNow and Tony Xu of DoorDash, Steve Huffman of Reddit and more about how they navigated the challenges and opportunities that defined their stories. Hosted by Roelof Botha of Sequoia Capital.
The content of this podcast does not constitute investment advice, an offer to provide investment advisory services or an offer to sell or solicitation of an offer to buy an interest in any investment fund.
All content for Crucible Moments is the property of Sequoia Capital and is served directly from their servers
with no modification, redirects, or rehosting. The podcast is not affiliated with or endorsed by Podjoint in any way.
A podcast about the inflection points that shaped some of the most significant companies of our time. Crucible moments are pivotal decisions that determine your trajectory. In Season 2, hear from founders and leaders like Steve Chen of YouTube, Drew Houston of Dropbox, Frank Slootman of ServiceNow and Tony Xu of DoorDash, Steve Huffman of Reddit and more about how they navigated the challenges and opportunities that defined their stories. Hosted by Roelof Botha of Sequoia Capital.
The content of this podcast does not constitute investment advice, an offer to provide investment advisory services or an offer to sell or solicitation of an offer to buy an interest in any investment fund.
MongoDB ft. Dev Ittycheria - How an Early Pivot Catalyzed an Open Source Movement
Crucible Moments
44 minutes
1 year ago
MongoDB ft. Dev Ittycheria - How an Early Pivot Catalyzed an Open Source Movement
MongoDB, founded in 2007, originally aimed to create a platform-as-a-service system with a new database layer. Facing competition from Google, the founders pivoted to focus solely on their database product, MongoDB—a new kind of database built for the scale of the internet era. Founder Dwight Merriman built a product that developers loved, but scaling the company proved challenging until Dev Ittycheria took the reins as CEO in 2014. As cloud computing grew, MongoDB transitioned from on-premise software to Atlas, a fully-managed cloud service. Despite initial skepticism, Atlas now represents 70% of MongoDB's revenue. As Atlas scaled, MongoDB faced another controversial decision: whether to change its open source license model to maintain its commercial moat. These pivotal decisions transformed MongoDB from a niche database to nearly $2 billion in annual revenue.
Host: Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital
Featuring: Dwight Merriman, Dev Ittycheria and Tom Killalea
Transcript: https://www.sequoiacap.com/podcast/crucible-moments-mongodb/
00:00 - Cold Open
00:19 - Introduction
05:30 - The NoSQL movement
09:52 - Scrapping the platform for the database
14:57 - Launching as MongoDB
19:52 - Moving to the cloud with Atlas
24:52 - Assigning a directly responsible individual
30:15 - How Atlas changed MongoDB
35:03 - Updating the licensing model to avoid “strip mining”
39:50 - Evolving back into a platform
41:26 - Executing on points of leverage
Crucible Moments
A podcast about the inflection points that shaped some of the most significant companies of our time. Crucible moments are pivotal decisions that determine your trajectory. In Season 2, hear from founders and leaders like Steve Chen of YouTube, Drew Houston of Dropbox, Frank Slootman of ServiceNow and Tony Xu of DoorDash, Steve Huffman of Reddit and more about how they navigated the challenges and opportunities that defined their stories. Hosted by Roelof Botha of Sequoia Capital.
The content of this podcast does not constitute investment advice, an offer to provide investment advisory services or an offer to sell or solicitation of an offer to buy an interest in any investment fund.
