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Eliot Horowitz

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

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

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.

17statements → 11claims → 8claims resolved → 63%fully supported → 4.18/5average certainty → 1.71/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated →

5 supported 2 partly supported 1 contradicted 3 not checkable as stated how the 11 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

11 assertions · 1 opinion · 2 insights · 3 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 11 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 8 are resolved, and 3 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
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.”
Eliot Horowitz Mar 18, 2016 ▶ 10:04 A Fireside Chat With MongoDB CTO Eliot Horowitz (Data Driven NYC / FirstMark)

Their most notable contradicted claim

Assertion Contradicted
SourceForge adopted MongoDB before the term NoSQL was introduced
“That was actually before the term NoSQL, I believe, by about a month or two.”
Eliot Horowitz Mar 18, 2016 ▶ 4:46 A Fireside Chat With MongoDB CTO Eliot Horowitz (Data Driven NYC / FirstMark)

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
25% certainty 3
83% certainty 4
100% certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

How they sound: speaking style how? →

310 words/min while actually speaking · 10.2 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Eliot Horowitz: only 6 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. Their coarse estimate from 6 raw tape exchanges is ≈4.5/5, shown at half point precision because the sample is small.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 5,883 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 MAD Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Opinion
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.”
Eliot Horowitz Mar 18, 2016 ▶ 14:34 A Fireside Chat With MongoDB CTO Eliot Horowitz (Data Driven NYC / FirstMark)
Assertion Partly supported
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…”
Eliot Horowitz Mar 18, 2016 ▶ 25:58 A Fireside Chat With MongoDB CTO Eliot Horowitz (Data Driven NYC / FirstMark)
Assertion Supported
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.”
Eliot Horowitz Mar 18, 2016 ▶ 10:04 A Fireside Chat With MongoDB CTO Eliot Horowitz (Data Driven NYC / FirstMark)
Insight
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”
Eliot Horowitz Mar 18, 2016 ▶ 16:01 A Fireside Chat With MongoDB CTO Eliot Horowitz (Data Driven NYC / FirstMark)
Disclosure
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.”
Eliot Horowitz Mar 18, 2016 ▶ 1:21 A Fireside Chat With MongoDB CTO Eliot Horowitz (Data Driven NYC / FirstMark)
Insight
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…”
Eliot Horowitz Mar 18, 2016 ▶ 5:37 A Fireside Chat With MongoDB CTO Eliot Horowitz (Data Driven NYC / FirstMark)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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…”
Eliot Horowitz Mar 18, 2016 ▶ 7:20 A Fireside Chat With MongoDB CTO Eliot Horowitz (Data Driven NYC / FirstMark)
Disclosure
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.”
Eliot Horowitz Mar 18, 2016 ▶ 16:41 A Fireside Chat With MongoDB CTO Eliot Horowitz (Data Driven NYC / FirstMark)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”
Eliot Horowitz Mar 18, 2016 ▶ 26:50 A Fireside Chat With MongoDB CTO Eliot Horowitz (Data Driven NYC / FirstMark)
Assertion Supported
Horowitz: MongoDB has grown to around 550 employees in 2016
“The employees are about 550 employees now this year.”
Eliot Horowitz Mar 18, 2016 ▶ 0:58 A Fireside Chat With MongoDB CTO Eliot Horowitz (Data Driven NYC / FirstMark)
Assertion Partly supported
SourceForge ported its entire platform to MongoDB prior to version 1.0
“About four months after we launched SourceForge decided to port their entire platform to MongoDB, which was sort of a crazy move. I mean, this was in 2009, so it's been a while. But they ported the entire platform to MongoDB prior to MongoDB one point oh.”
Eliot Horowitz Mar 18, 2016 ▶ 4:26 A Fireside Chat With MongoDB CTO Eliot Horowitz (Data Driven NYC / FirstMark)
Disclosure
MongoDB acquired storage engine startup WiredTiger in fall 2014
“So we ended up acquiring them in the fall of 2014, and then that became the storage engine for MongoDB in three point oh, last March.”
Eliot Horowitz Mar 18, 2016 ▶ 9:51 A Fireside Chat With MongoDB CTO Eliot Horowitz (Data Driven NYC / FirstMark)
Assertion Supported
Horowitz: MongoDB 3.2 introduced join support via $lookup operator
“In three, two, we added a join operator. We call it dollar lookup, but it's fundamentally the same thing as a join, to sort of let you do some of the workloads you would take from a relational database.”
Eliot Horowitz Mar 18, 2016 ▶ 14:24 A Fireside Chat With MongoDB CTO Eliot Horowitz (Data Driven NYC / FirstMark)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Horowitz: MongoDB saw a huge amount of Azure adoption over the past year
“What we see is a lot of, ah, a huge amount of Azure adoption in the last year.”
Eliot Horowitz Mar 18, 2016 ▶ 26:34 A Fireside Chat With MongoDB CTO Eliot Horowitz (Data Driven NYC / FirstMark)
Assertion Supported
Horowitz discovered SourceForge's 2009 database migration through a blog post
“So, we learned about it from their blog post, and we were very worried that it was not gonna work. Yeah, it was completely, we had no idea. We had not talked to any of them before it launched.”
Eliot Horowitz Mar 18, 2016 ▶ 27:45 A Fireside Chat With MongoDB CTO Eliot Horowitz (Data Driven NYC / FirstMark)
Assertion Supported
MongoDB launched its standalone database in 2009 after pivoting from PaaS
“We were, ah, eight people at that point, and we realized that This was way too big of a space for us to take on, and decided that the database was the most interesting part of the platform, and so then in February of 2009 was the first version of MongoDB that …”
Eliot Horowitz Mar 18, 2016 ▶ 3:20 A Fireside Chat With MongoDB CTO Eliot Horowitz (Data Driven NYC / FirstMark)
Assertion Contradicted
SourceForge adopted MongoDB before the term NoSQL was introduced
“That was actually before the term NoSQL, I believe, by about a month or two.”
Eliot Horowitz Mar 18, 2016 ▶ 4:46 A Fireside Chat With MongoDB CTO Eliot Horowitz (Data Driven NYC / FirstMark)

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
A Fireside Chat With MongoDB CTO Eliot Horowitz (Data Driven NYC / FirstMark) Mar 18, 2016 21m
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