Horowitz: MongoDB was first to offer an embedded in-browser shell
Eliot Horowitz · Building a $20B+ Open Source Business with MongoDB and Viam's Eliot Horowitz · Dec 13, 2024 · at 9:30
Eliot Horowitz, co-founder of MongoDB, recounts early product features created to reduce developer evaluation friction.
0:00 / 0:18exact quote · 18.3s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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 data model looked like.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Eliot Horowitz
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: 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: 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: 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”
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: 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…”