Dev Ittycheria

“There are many attempts have been made by many folks to create next version of database. This and that or next disruptive database. Nobody has passed billion, and definitely nobody has passed two billion, and MongoDB did that.”

“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”

“When he took over, we had 50 to a hundred million dollars in revenue, and today there's two billion in revenue.”

“And actually, I led the B round at Datadog.”

“The business would then was roughly about 250 people trailing about 30 plus million in revenue, and today we're approaching 4000 people and about seven hundred million dollars in run rate.”

“In the early days when I joined actually my first CRO, my first CMO were actually on the West coast because I couldn't find enough depth and experience in New York city.”

“We've invested over seven hundred million in R&D since we started the company, and more than 50% of that goes with the free product.”

“It's a, it's not a secret, but since we've gone public three and a half years ago, we've had six C-level changes, right?”

“In the early nineties, the large companies had an enormous amount of account control. With customers. And so even though if you have the best mousetrap, it was still not easy to win business because these companies have such good account control. They take the…”

“And any seasoned investor, if they hear that things are going perfectly well, will either worry, one, that you don't know what you don't know, or two, that you're lying to them.”

“So with my board, I share bad news very, very early, and it does a couple things. One, they then trust me because I'm not trying to hide information. And two, now they're really motivated to help me actually solve all those problems.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“One of the classic mistakes I see a lot of people make is when they're assessing an internal candidate versus an external candidate, and the biggest mistake they make is they don't fully appreciate the asymmetry of data that they have between the internal cand…”

“And as I said, there's really two reasons why people fail. One is either they have the skills to do the job, or they don't have the will or the motivation to do the job.”

“It's those investors who've done drive-by diligence, just wanting to be part of a party round, they're the ones who are going to panic when something goes wrong because they just don't have that inner conviction about your business.”

“A lot of investors say, well, I have this portfolio of companies you can talk to and maybe they'll become customers. That never works because no company is going to buy from you because there's some interconnection between a common investor.”

“I found in many other companies, the largest investor always feels like they have the bully pulpit. They talk the most and they dominate the board conversations. Roloff was very different. He spoke very little. He listened very hard. And when he spoke, he had …”

“And to me, the real test of a investor and a board member is what I call the value to overhead ratio. Adding new investors and board members creates more overhead for the CEO. So why is that overhead worth it? Well, what's the value that they're providing?”