Eliot Horowitz
Founder & CEO, Viam. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
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.
2shows
2appearances
31statements
9resolved
6supported
1contradicted
67%fully supported
Everything Eliot Horowitz said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
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 admits MongoDB is a "pretty terrible" relational database
“Now, MongoDB is definitely not a good relational database. It's a pretty terrible relational database, but we're moving in the, in that way where you can start taking some of these workloads and putting them more into a fewer, a few different products.”
MongoDB's AGPL license prevented AWS from offering it as a managed service
“It's an open source license, it's a free software foundation approved license, but it's the AGPL, and the AGPL gives us a little bit more advantage than other players, so Amazon can't quite do the same thing that they can with, ah, MySQL as they can with, so t…”
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…”
WiredTiger storage engine made MongoDB ten times faster in version 3.0
“Wiretiger was not a little bit better than the previous storage engine. It really was a complete leapfrog. It was, you know, 10 times faster.”
Horowitz: Pseudo-SQL NoSQL languages fail to support standard SQL-compliant tools
“The challenge with a lot of these SQL-like languages is they don't really let you use SQL-compliant tools, so you can't use your Tableau directly with it because it doesn't speak sort of standard SQL”
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.”
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: 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: 85% of MongoDB's engineering team is based in New York
“So most, about 85% of our engineering is based in New York, you know, in Times Square, 10 blocks away from here.”
Horowitz: Relational databases function like Microsoft Excel on steroids
“A relational database is basically like Microsoft Excel on steroids. If you take Microsoft Excel, and you've got tables and rows, and you've got, you know, columns, and it's kind of like a relational database, but what a relational database does is give you an…”
Horowitz: MongoDB's key innovation was enabling indexing and searching inside documents
“The key thing that we did is, you know, you can always just store everything about a person in a single cell in a relational database. The thing that we did that was interesting was let you actually index on it and search on it and modify it in sort of very sm…”
Horowitz: MongoDB does not plan to invest in a SQL-like query language
“We have not invested in, we don't really plan on investing in sort of a SQL-like language, because we, you know, I think SQL by itself is very useful, and then you sort of want the best possible language for developers to work with.”
Horowitz: Many database customers want to be cloud-agnostic
“A lot of people we talk to want to be cloud agnostic, right? They want to have a service that lets them run wherever they are.”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Eliot's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 MADLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Viam | 1 | 17 | 63% 5/8 | full record on the MAD Podcast → |
 a16zLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Viam | 1 | 14 | 100% 1/1 | full record on the a16z Podcast → |