The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 31 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 4 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
McMahon: Dev Ittycheria's intimidating style limits critical information sharing at MongoDB
“Dave is very intimidating to a lot of people, really intimidating... Brian can get probably more information out of you, whereas I think that some people, if they're intimidated by Dave, they don't give him the information that he should get as a CEO”
Lemkin: Only infrastructure SaaS companies are winning two-pronged AI customer growth
“To be a two-pronged AI beneficiary, you have to be able to monetize your AI, and you have to attract new customers. There's two prongs, and the ones that have done it so far are close to infra, right? Cloudflare, Twilio, Mongo, Datadog and even DigitalOcean”
Lemkin: Top 25 public software stocks slowed every quarter since Q1 2022
“Every single quarter since Q one of 20, 22 growth has slowed for the, for all public software stocks. Every single quarter it has slowed and it continues to slow. And there are a handful of folks that have reaccelerated like Mongo and Palantir. And there are a…”
Lemkin: Three of today's top six B2B stocks will retain 2026 leadership
“My Pekumumusukus, Pekumumusukus, Palantir, Cloudflare, Mongo, Shopify, CrowdStrike, Snowflake, I'll bet you 10 grand, three of them are in the top six of this cohort at the end of next year.”
Lemkin: Demand environment is worsening for Salesforce, MongoDB, and Workday
“Yamini got on the last call a couple of weeks ago and said, yeah, we saw a little bounce at the end of the year and HubSpot had a great quarter, but it's not any easier. She said, it's not one lick easier right now. So HubSpot, not any easier Mongo worse. Sale…”
Ittycheria: MongoDB had broken GTM and leadership when he joined as CEO
“And when I started doing some diligence, what became clear to me, it was while the company had great product market fit, there were a lot of things that were broken inside the company. Its go-to-market was broken, and frankly, the leadership team, there were a…”
Bussgang rejects requirement for day-one positive unit economics for startups
“I totally disagree with that VC, and I'll give you an example. So, and the reason I disagree is that there are cases where equity value creation is achieved through adoption-focused strategies. I'll give you two examples. One is in our portfolio, one is MongoD…”
Degnan: MongoDB and Wiz sales leaders excel at developing MEDDIC-trained talent
“Because their sales leaders although tough are incredible, you know, medic disciples who develop the crap out of their people and hold them accountable, and that's what I'm looking for.”
Rory O'Driscoll: Supabase Will Become a Legacy Database Within 10 Years
“Over the next five years, that will mean adding complexity, adding functionality. And in 10 years time, someone, and it won't be me at that point, will be saying, oh, my God, those legacy Superbase products, they're almost as bad as MongoDB, and there'll be a …”
Lemkin: Refuses to invest in Snowflake or MongoDB because they lack founders
“The only reason I ding Snowflake is, and this is no, I couldn't do better is it's not founder led. And it's just, that's my thesis today. Like I can't pick Mongo or I killed Mongo or Snowflake just on not being founder led.”
Lemkin: Public SaaS companies are re-accelerating growth through AI
“I'm glad to see that just literally this week, we were seeing Mongo even Okta, which had been struggling, Box last, the other day, Zoom, which is, you know, which is not exactly a rocket ship anywhere, but seeing growth re-accelerate because of AI, it's like, …”
Isolated MongoDB Sales Reps Had a 4x Higher Attrition Rate
“At MongoDB, we hired a lot of people, and our attrition was higher than we wanted it to be, and so we did a lot of analysis on attrition, and what we found is that lone rangers, and we meant that meaning when we have a single employee in a You know, if we have…”
Lemkin: MongoDB is no longer a growth stock as growth hits teens
“Competitive position, despite a lot of competitors, stronger than ever, but then saying, Hey, growth has plummeted to the teens. It's not a growth stock anymore.”
Only Two NYC Startups From the Last 30 Years Hit $25B
“The monetary answer is Mongo by far, you know, Mongo's worth twenty five billion dollars. There's only two companies started in the last 30 years in New York that are worth twenty five billion dollars.”
Investors rejected MongoDB initially over founders' adtech background
“And actually, when we started Mongo, the reason we had trouble raising money, even though we had already had a very successful company, was because people said, you've never done a database before. You have, you, three of you have ad tech backgrounds. It's not…”
O'Driscoll: MongoDB stock dropped 25% due to 40x EBITDA valuation
“Yamango had a very strong quarter, modest delta in terms of future guidance versus expectations, dropped 25%. Why? Answer, it was trading at 40 times next year's EBITDA.”
Peet: MongoDB has the best sales training of any at-scale company
“MongoDB at scale. Has the best training and development of any at-scale sales organization I've ever seen. It's a world-class place.”
Chris Degnan: MongoDB and Wiz built world-class sales organizations
“Yeah, I look at companies like MongoDB, companies like Wiz, or, you know, Dolly Rogic, you know, or Cedric Pesh. Those guys built world-class sales organizations. They developed those people. There's grind in a lot of those young people that they've developed.…”
Kevin Ryan refused early acquisition offers for MongoDB targeting $10B-$20B valuation
“We were never open to selling Mongo, no matter what, because we really thought we were building a 10 or twenty billion dollar company, and so we had confidence.”
Kevin Ryan Predicts MongoDB Will Eventually Reach a $50B Valuation
“And still growing, and I think we'll be a fifty billion dollar company someday.”
Lemkin: Atlassian and MongoDB are bouncing off business bottoms
“When I look at what Atlassian is saying, like, they're bouncing off the bottom, and Mongo's bouncing off the bottom, and other folks are seeing things improve.”
MongoDB successfully pivoted from top-down to product-led sales
“MongoDB has always impressed me, but it, to go from tops down enterprise led to product led sales you know, in the last couple of years, that's a really hard transition. I don't think I've ever seen anybody do it and they've done it really well.”
Ittycheria: MongoDB holds just 0.5% of the $100B database market
“The market is estimated to be about a hundred billion by 2023, and we have a little over half a percent share.”
Ittycheria: Scaling leaders must be 'students of the game', not masters
“One of the attributes I think of is really important for leaders who can scale is that they're students of the game and not the master of the game. And what I mean by that is that you have to have the attitude that you don't have all the answers. That you have…”
Ittycheria: Bad news travels slowly and is always worse than reported
“Bad news travels very slowly, especially up the organization. And it's far worse than what people are telling you. So whenever I see bad news or hear about bad news, I assume two things. One, I'm the last to know. And two, it's far worse than what people are t…”
Dev Ittycheria: Leaders must sometimes be inefficient to build team buy-in
“There's times when I do think that being a little more patient and recognizing that sometimes you have to be inefficient to be effective is an important attribute, and that's something I constantly need to work on. That the best answer is not the shortest path…”
MongoDB Atlas reached a $200M+ run rate following its 2016 launch
“Literally from a standing start, that business was started in 2016 now is north of a two hundred million dollar run rate business, and it's really helped fuel our growth.”
Ittycheria: 75% of MongoDB inside sales leads originate from self-serve
“And what's interesting now is that self-serve channel is creating an amazing flywheel effect for our sales because now three out of four leads to our inside sales team is coming from a self-serve channel”
Ryan: MongoDB grew revenue from $50M-$100M to $2B under Dev Ittycheria
“When he took over, we had 50 to a hundred million dollars in revenue, and today there's two billion in revenue.”