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Eliot Horowitz

Founder & CEO, Viam · 1 appearance on the record.

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founderengineerexecutiveinvestor@eliothorowitz ↗LinkedIn ↗eliothorowitz.com ↗Wikipedia ↗

Horowitz co-founded MongoDB in 2007, authoring its core codebase and serving as Chief Technology Officer for over a decade as it grew into a public company. In 2020, he founded Viam, a platform providing software and data infrastructure for smart machines and robotics.

14statements → 5claims → 1claims resolved → 4.07/5average certainty → 2.43/5average debate potential →

1 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 4 not checkable as stated how the 5 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

3 predictions · 2 assertions · 2 opinions · 6 insights · 1 disclosure · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 5 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved, and 4 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Eliot argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
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…”
Eliot Horowitz Dec 13, 2024 ▶ 9:30 Building a $20B+ Open Source Business with MongoDB and Viam's Eliot Horowitz

How they sound: speaking style how? →

285 words/min while actually speaking · 7.9 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Eliot Horowitz: no usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 6,173 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

Everything Eliot Horowitz said on the a16z Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Prediction Not checkable as stated
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.”
Eliot Horowitz Dec 13, 2024 ▶ 2:42 Building a $20B+ Open Source Business with MongoDB and Viam's Eliot Horowitz
Prediction Not checkable as stated
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.”
Eliot Horowitz Dec 13, 2024 ▶ 2:07 Building a $20B+ Open Source Business with MongoDB and Viam's Eliot Horowitz
Opinion
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…”
Eliot Horowitz Dec 13, 2024 ▶ 3:24 Building a $20B+ Open Source Business with MongoDB and Viam's Eliot Horowitz
Insight
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”
Eliot Horowitz Dec 13, 2024 ▶ 30:50 Building a $20B+ Open Source Business with MongoDB and Viam's Eliot Horowitz
Insight
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…”
Eliot Horowitz Dec 13, 2024 ▶ 4:12 Building a $20B+ Open Source Business with MongoDB and Viam's Eliot Horowitz
Opinion
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…”
Eliot Horowitz Dec 13, 2024 ▶ 18:52 Building a $20B+ Open Source Business with MongoDB and Viam's Eliot Horowitz
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Horowitz: Trying to change how developers work will never succeed
“Let developers be developers because trying to change the way developers work, it's never going to happen.”
Eliot Horowitz Dec 13, 2024 ▶ 38:42 Building a $20B+ Open Source Business with MongoDB and Viam's Eliot Horowitz
Insight
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.”
Eliot Horowitz Dec 13, 2024 ▶ 7:13 Building a $20B+ Open Source Business with MongoDB and Viam's Eliot Horowitz
Insight
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…”
Eliot Horowitz Dec 13, 2024 ▶ 9:01 Building a $20B+ Open Source Business with MongoDB and Viam's Eliot Horowitz
Assertion Supported
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…”
Eliot Horowitz Dec 13, 2024 ▶ 9:30 Building a $20B+ Open Source Business with MongoDB and Viam's Eliot Horowitz
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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…”
Eliot Horowitz Dec 13, 2024 ▶ 15:53 Building a $20B+ Open Source Business with MongoDB and Viam's Eliot Horowitz
Insight
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…”
Eliot Horowitz Dec 13, 2024 ▶ 20:25 Building a $20B+ Open Source Business with MongoDB and Viam's Eliot Horowitz
Insight
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…”
Eliot Horowitz Dec 13, 2024 ▶ 21:56 Building a $20B+ Open Source Business with MongoDB and Viam's Eliot Horowitz
Disclosure
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…”
Eliot Horowitz Dec 13, 2024 ▶ 28:23 Building a $20B+ Open Source Business with MongoDB and Viam's Eliot Horowitz

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
Building a $20B+ Open Source Business with MongoDB and Viam's Eliot Horowitz Dec 13, 2024 27m
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