Dec 13, 2024 · 40m · a16z
Building a $20B+ Open Source Business with MongoDB and Viam's Eliot Horowitz
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this episode of 'My First 16', MongoDB co-founder and Viam CEO Eliot Horowitz shares strategic insights on open-source monetization, grassroots community building, and enterprise sales execution. He reflects on scaling MongoDB into an industry leader and applying those foundational go-to-market playbooks to his new robotics company, Viam.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. How this is scored →
The host as informed peer 2.9 Guest teaching 5.0 Guest disagreement 1.3 The host pushing back 1.4
speaking balance: gold is the host, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 13:33 Eliot Rejects General Meetup Lures
Eliot pushes back against Seema's premise that meetups require perks like pizza and beer or general marketing lures, asserting that their meetups worked because they catered purely to educating existing users.
Hardest push from the host ▶ 8:49 Seema Presses on Trial Conversion FrictionSeema challenges Eliot's assumption that developers easily spend a week trying a new tool, pressing him on how they convinced teams to dedicate actual time and resources.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 15:53 Eliot Reframes the 'Hobbyist' CategoryEliot explicitly reframes Seema's question about hobbyist developers, explaining that the true distinction is a developer's appetite for risk rather than whether a project is personal or corporate.
The host holds their own ▶ 14:05 Seema Frames Community Strategy TaxonomySeema demonstrates strong strategic expertise by taking Eliot's explanation and cleanly categorizing community strategies into top-of-funnel acquisition versus user retention/education.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | The host as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | The host pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Open Source Strategy and Business Models | 2 | 5 | 1 | 1 | Seema prompts Eliot to explain how open source strategy integrates with business models. Eliot delivers an extended explanation on why cloud and consumption pricing make open source infrastructure viable, while Seema primarily listens and asks gentle follow-ups. | |
| Developer Engagement and Product Excitement | 3 | 5 | 1 | 2 | Seema asks pointed questions about measuring developer excitement and getting enterprise teams to allocate trial time. Eliot reframes developer psychology, describing developers as inherently lazy and detailing the necessity of a 5-minute time-to-value experience. | |
| Grassroots Meetup and Guerrilla Marketing Strategy | 3 | 6 | 2 | 2 | Seema suggests meetups usually require lures like pizza or beer for top-of-funnel lead generation. Eliot corrects this premise, explaining that MongoDB's meetups succeeded because they focused strictly on educating an existing, highly engaged user base. | |
| Broad Use Cases vs. Developer Side Projects | 3 | 5 | 2 | 1 | Seema inquires about transitioning from hobbyist side projects to enterprise deals. Eliot pushes back on the term 'hobbyist', clarifying that the distinction is risk tolerance rather than project scope, and highlights recruiting as an executive sales lever. | |
| Customer Education and MongoDB University | 2 | 5 | 1 | 1 | Seema asks about early GTM hires and milestones for hiring enterprise sales. Eliot educates on why defining a 'customer' is nuanced in open-source consumption models and notes sales reps were brought in when engineers felt out of depth in deal negotiations. | |
| Land-and-Expand Enterprise Sales Strategy | 4 | 4 | 1 | 2 | Seema asks detailed probing questions on identifying non-critical entry projects and lessons learned for Viam. Eliot outlines his land-and-expand framework and details his no-slides live demo strategy. | |
| Uncovering Customer Pain Points and Deal Stories | 3 | 5 | 1 | 1 | Seema asks for tactical discovery questions and enterprise closing stories. Eliot shares his go-to roadmap questions and recounts a story where a two-year silent evaluation turned into a multi-million dollar enterprise expansion. |
Statements from this episode (14)
Horowitz: No closed-source database will ever be popular again
“There will never be a Really popular database that isn't open source ever again. That just can't happen.”
Horowitz: All future serious infrastructure software will be open source
“But open source, I believe is the only way to build infrastructure software. I don't think there's going to be a serious piece of infrastructure software that people actually use and deploy that isn't open source again.”
Horowitz: Support and consulting are terrible open-source business models
“Open source in the nineties and early in the, you know, 2000, you know, open source business models were usually considered, okay, maybe you'd have some like really expensive enterprise features or sell soft, you know consulting and support. And those are terr…”
Horowitz: Monetize open source by commercializing unavoidable infrastructure costs
“Both at Mongo and at VM, the way I always thought about it was, you know, the core product is open source, and that things you'd have to pay for anyway should be commercialized, and by making it really easy and making it the best way to use the product, you ca…”
Horowitz: Developers are inherently lazy and write software to automate tasks
“Developers, I always joke about this, developers are inherently lazy, right? Why do you write software? You write software to automate things that you don't want to do, right? You write software to make your life easier.”
Horowitz: Developer products have 30 seconds to capture user attention
“So my whole belief on developer led products is you've really got about, you know, five seconds, 30 seconds, maybe to convince someone that like they should spend two minutes listening to you or 10 minutes. And then you got two minutes to convince them to spen…”
Horowitz: MongoDB was first to offer an embedded in-browser shell
“Mike, he had an early idea at Mongo where we, and this is before we were the first people to do this. I believe we had a little try Mongo shell embedded in the website where you can actually just go to the website and type a few queries and understand what the…”
Horowitz: MongoDB intentionally avoided targeting specific industry use cases early on
“We were pretty intentionally not use case driven. And we had a lot of people telling us to try to be more use case driven. And we got a little bit more use case driven as we built more of an enterprise sales team. But in the beginning, we were very, very broad…”
Horowitz: Adopting MongoDB helped legacy enterprises recruit engineers avoiding Oracle
“In 2012, 2013, no engineer coming out of school was really excited to go work on Oracle. And so using MongoDB was actually a huge win for some of these sort of older enterprises. Where developers were like, oh, I can go work at this real company, make real mon…”
Horowitz: Developer enthusiasm drives corporate tech adoption through recruiter feedback
“And look, recruiters are pretty good at knowing what, why they're losing candidates and what gets candidates excited. And so if you can just, you know, get, again, get developers excited about it, recruiters are gonna, you know, eventually bring that up the fu…”
Horowitz: Early product development years should not count toward GTM maturity
“Like I think years into the company is always tricky because, you know, both at Mongo and VM, they're pretty deep tech companies. So you spend a couple of years up front where you're really pretty heads down building. So I think you can't really count those co…”
Horowitz: Viam customer sales calls use live production demos without slides
“My customer calls. There's no slides. There's no PowerPoint. There's no speech. The 1:05 minutes are me just demoing the product, not like demo where like real world production systems that you can look at and see interacting in real time and actually doing th…”
Horowitz: Onboarding a $1k customer takes similar effort to a $100k customer
“Bringing on a new user, whether they're gonna pay you a thousand dollars a year or a 100,000 dollars a year, the amount of work to onboard them and make them successful is pretty similar. And so you might as well focus on the bigger deals”