MongoDB

“And, like, Devin just ran a bunch of stuff for a few minutes, and then fixed it. And then, like, sent Walden a message, like, hey, I got it, it's up now. Walden didn't really, he didn't really believe it at first. I think we still have the video recording of t…”

“The first task that Devin did was spin up MongoDB.”

“Yesterday I was with a customer, and they said, hey, I just want to tell you, we are not, and it's a large customer based in Paris, we are not going to move our workloads to public cloud. We are going to run it on-prem. Data sovereignty is highest priority. Fr…”

“These hyperscalers, some of them, are running out of capacity, and they're running out of capacity, so this large customer in Texas, speaking to them, they have really good partnership with one of the hyperscalers. They wanted to move more workloads in cloud, …”

“Out of London, and they have north of fifty million agents, depending on when you look at it, all running on MongoDB.”

“In database world, when I was at Oracle, the most expensive person you can get is called Oracle DBA, database administrator, and they were the most expensive people that you have to hire when you're running Oracle, and now These AI companies are saying, we don…”

“There is no, like, standardization even when it comes to these models, right? It goes anywhere from open source to closed source, small to large, horizontal to domain specific based on the use cases.”

“The first task that Devon did was it like set up MongoDB for us.”

“If you look back over the past 20 years, probably the only database companies that have really managed to do well Ah, Firebase and Mongo, and they did well because they targeted these day zero workloads that you kind of would choose them before you even knew w…”

“10 years ago, we invested pre-IPO at a billion dollars. We distributed the shares, I think, at three or four billion, and then it went to fifty billion over, you know, the course of the next 24 months, and we had people who called us who said, well, why didn't…”

“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.”

“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”

“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 …”

“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.”

“Airbnb, DoorDash, Unity, Snowflake I'm sure I'm missing a few others. Mongo, Square.”

“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.”

“On average, over his, like, ten-year lifespan as the CEO of Mongo, there were two C-level, two C-levels turned over per year.”

“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…”

“So yes, wipe coding will allow you to create an app fast. You have a great use case. You have some disruption in mind. That's excellent. But then there is a lot of things that you need from a go-to-market perspective to be able to break in, pass all their chec…”

“AI will still go on, and this is a layer you must have. That's it. So TAM must have layer, no risk of disruption.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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”

“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.…”

“And by the way, even in more recent memory, if you look at the last ten-ish years, Palo Alto, ServiceNow, HubSpot, MongoDB, these companies have all been 10 Xers as public companies.”

“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, …”

“I think there's like two types of startups. There's innovation startups and execution startups. So an execution startup is like a rippling or a MongoDB, where it's just like, if you build a better database or a better HRIS system, you have line of sight to bil…”

“MongoDB is really good when you're vibe coding, especially when you're building a vibe coding platform, because schemas change a lot and it's not necessarily like users, LLMs don't always understand what the user is trying to send. So they keep changing the da…”

“So there's always like this convergence, but MongoDB kind of, it sticks, but I don't think that for Pinecoin that was originally leading that movement, it won't like stick in the same way. It's too narrow. It's too, too narrow.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“And I would expect there to be even more in AI. We'll have kind of like the MongoDB, the Elastic, the Red Hat of AI, which are going to be like open source AI, AI companies.”

“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.”

“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…”

“Do you really need a, you know, a specialized database to do that? Or in a context where some of the more general purpose players like the MongoDBs of the world have started announcing vector capabilities, you know, is that good enough? The answer to that ques…”

“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.”

“And still growing, and I think we'll be a fifty billion dollar company someday.”

“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…”

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

“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.”

“The only way to do, to build infrastructure to build a successful infrastructure company in the long run in, in, in the cloud today is, You have to appeal to the entire spectrum, right? Or at least like the enterprise, like you have to capture the enterprise m…”

“It's great that they've seen the light too. It's a bit late though, but it's like a, you know, good for them.”

“And back then I remember that the CPO of MongoDB and today Atlas, their product is the most successful cloud product out there, arguably.”

“And proactively reached out to the CPO there and regularly had conversations, hired him as an advisor at Confluent and was very helpful in avoiding some of the problems that they ran into and learning from the experience that they were, they had because they w…”

“MongoDB, which is another one, you know, they just had their best quarter in six years. They're just rocking it. Right? They're rocking it. Some of their strongest revenue growth they've seen since IPO.”

“So we started each company with a million dollars. So 500,000 from each one of us. And that was for Gilt, Business Insider and Mongo. And then we, I did after that Dwight semi-retired. And so I did that with Nomad. I did that with Zola. And now, by now I put a…”

“I mean, Mongo, between being a private and public company, raised and lost a billion dollars before they had a profitable quarter. And now already make three hundred million dollars a year in profits.”

“So that's why it's so valuable is because it's an, it's just an incredible company growing quickly, enormous market share, and is going to grow for the next 10 years. It'll be a fifty billion dollar company.”

“For three years, we had zero revenue.”

“Then finally, Sequoia came in and then we raised a lot of money and now it does getting close to a two billion dollar run rate.”

“You got to think of yourself as you are the coach. You are not the player. And if you're a coach and if you manage to persuade, you know, LeBron James and Kevin Garnett and a bunch of people on your team, your team's going to do well. That's actually the job.”

“Like Mongo, you got to take years to build a good enough product, and there's no way to bootstrap that. You know, it takes 20, 50, you know, there's a hundred million dollars generally for those types of companies to get there.”

“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.”

“So this type of query in a relational database or something like MongoDB is going to be very hard to run. You've got a lot of joins and you've got very complicated queries.”

“Great example of this is MongoDB. I advise for them for a long time and I love their freemium. Which is really a trial in disguise, but it's not a time-based trial. It's a usage-based freemium. They allow for a free cluster to be developed completely for free,…”

“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.”