The Exchanges

Q note, and so one of our long-term Partners is Brex, and they're all about performance, spending smarter, moving faster, and I believe a large part of performance is who you surround yourself with. I mean, you have quite the career, and you've been surrounded by industry legends, but I'm really curious from your standpoint, who are some of those people that have mentored you or inspired you along the way?

A There are quite a few, right, ah, I go to different mentors or leaders for different type of advice. When, because I started my career at Oracle, ah, what I saw with Larry Ellison and the team that he had at the time, ah, very focused on always creating the best product. And also very focused on having the best go to market teams as in How do you sell? How do you serve customers? Top notch. Like they would have this bar on talent or you should only hire software engineers from these colleges in the United States or in the UK or wherever the case might be. That's what they would do and that's how they would operate. So you learn quite a few things on how they would do communication in the company and so on. So that was my first learning. I also learned a lot when I was at Symantec. Great CEO. Uh, his name was John Thompson, uh, and legendary CEO. Uh, he had a very storied career at IBM and then became a first time CEO at Symantec. And how do you work with customers? How much do you, uh, listen versus how much do you talk? Because everybody wants to pitch their products and he definitely had a way with customers that I learned. He also dressed really, really well. And so, uh, because he's like, hey, if I'm showing up in front of customers, I want them to know I respect them, and I'm going to show up with my best self, right? So that was John Thompson. And then ServiceNow founder,…

AI assessment note: “There are quite a few, right, ah, I go to different mentors”

Q So for people who are not familiar with MongoDB, which I'd be very, very surprised, how is, what is your differentiation between the likes of Snowflake and Databricks and the other people out there?

A So MongoDB is a operational database or a real-time database. So credit card transactions or anything real-time, that's what we do. The category is called Online Transaction Processing or OLTP. But we are a document database, modern database that was created in 2007, so we are 19 years old. Database industry Molly has existed for 60 plus years, ok? And regardless of the internet era, mobile era, after iPhone, now the AI era, you always need a data layer. So if you want real-time data layer or online data layer, That's MongoDB and some other databases. If you want analytical data layer, where you can ask a question, a business analyst internally will ask a question, for those kind of use cases, you use those other companies, ah, databases, ah, they are called online analytical processing, so they are not real time, and we are real time.

AI assessment note: “for those kind of use cases, you use those other companies... they are not real time”

Q Okay, so we, again, we're here at Raise. Um, you were on the stage earlier with Laura from OpenAI, so what were you guys talking about?

A Just, ah, you know, Laura is very focused on, from the startup ecosystem, founders, what OpenAI does, how do they work with the founders, ah, and specifically, what is the approach MongoDB has taken, because a lot of AI-native startups, whether it's Emergent, Base-Forty-Four, both are wide-coding platforms built on MongoDB, but then you have also Metal.ai, Uh, specifically, 11 Labs, uh, that is currently running all agentic workloads on, uh, MongoDB. So we talked about how do you truly partner with founders? How do you stay close to them as they are scaling their enterprise or they are scaling, um, just the hyper growth era? And how do you, what are some best practices in working with them when they need you the most? So that was basically the focus, and The data layer is typically the unsung hero, but we feel that models and data both are needed to create a great agentic application, and we talked about that.

AI assessment note: “So we talked about how do you truly partner with founders?”

Q that handle expenses automatically, enforce policy before spend happens, and close your books in minutes. That's why Sorcery runs on Brex, so I can spend time on building and not busy work. It's time to get Brex AF. Learn more at brex.com slash sorcery. That's B-R-E-X dot com slash S-O-U-R-C-E-R-Y. Bye. What excites you most about what's happening in AI right now and how you come up as the leader?

A Yeah, so, um, when I see the Frontier Labs using us for different use cases, and they are creating agents, so one of the Frontier Labs, they use us for inference, they use us for certain voice products they have, they have also video and image creations going on, so they use us for that. That gives me a lot of confidence that we have the right architecture, that we can Save all this unstructured data very efficiently real time. We can act as a memory layer. So Frontier Labs is like, I would consider the holy grail for us that really we understand because their scale and how fast they are growing is like not even linear in some of the cases when I see weekly active users or daily active users is almost literally a vertical Uh, spike like this, right? So that's one, but even when we look at the 11 lab story, I mean, it is a lab, so you could argue that's a frontier lab, great success story out of here in Europe, right? Out of London, and they have north of fifty million agents, depending on when you look at it, all running on MongoDB. So that also gives us a lot of confidence that we have the right architecture, For agentic workloads. And then coming back to Fortune 500 or Global 2000, of course we have the right architecture, we have embedding pieces, vector pieces, a lot of cool technologies in our Atlas database or on-prem. And that's where it's still a lot of experimentation,…

AI assessment note: “gives me a lot of confidence that we have the right architecture”

Q So you are a winner, a downstream winner of everything that's happening in AI. And I think it was like a little unexpected too, because people were just so focused on the models. But guess what? All these models and all these agents are creating so much data. So where does MongoDB fit in with the AI supercycle and all the agentic economy?

A Yes, I would say, um, the way I see the world is pretty simple. So, many people say it, but they are truly not behind it, and here's what I say. Like, people like to say, companies, they like to say, oh, we are truly customer-obsessed culture, or we care about customers, customer-focused, but I'm really, really Customer obsessed, and in a typical week Molly, I feel it's not a good week unless I have spoken individually to 10 to 12 customers, sometimes even more, ah, even if it's a short week. So I'm constantly learning from customers on what they are trying to do with AI specifically, and when you look at MongoDB today, so MongoDB, Mongo stands for humongous. Which most people don't know. So, humongous database. That as you scale, you should feel comfortable as an AI company that you can scale with MongoDB, right? That is the whole idea. That it is a scale-out, humongous database that can store lots and lots of data. Now, in terms of customers, we have seen on the AI supercycle three classes of customers, specifically to AI. One, Frontier Labs are using us for a multitude of use cases. So that's Frontier Labs. We cannot disclose which, what use cases.

AI assessment note: “it is a scale-out, humongous database that can store lots and lots of data”

Q know if you picked it, but you joined as CEO at one of the most chaotic times ever, which I would assume is one of the most fun and energizing times. So how do you, like, what is your strategy? Like, how do you come in every week and like, do you have a plan? Do you work on a plan? Like, what is the roadmap look like for you?

A Yeah. Um, You know, one of the advice I got from somebody who was a great CEO before, um, told me, CJ, make sure that things that you do, only CEOs can do, right? Don't try to spend time on things that others can do, but there are things that only a CEO can do, right? Whether it's spending time on strategy, working with the partners, uh, Making sure you stay close to the customers, largest customers, fast-growing customers, and so on. I would say the pace of innovation and the compounding change that is happening with customers. I have seen the internet transition, right, internet applications that got developed late nineties, early 2000, then the mobile era, cloud era, now the AI era. I have never seen a pace like this, and customers have a lot of questions, and as you see, Molly, over the last eight weeks, a lot of announcements from hyperscalers on forward deployed engineers. They are using Palantir's playbook from my perspective, right, and the reason is because customers are going through so many changes, they need help, and that's what they are realizing, And they see that as an opportunity. Every hyperscaler made an announcement in last, I think, eight weeks, ah, to do that. So, what I'm seeing is, I have never seen, it is truly unprecedented in terms of changes happening with customers, but even the innovation speed. When software writes software,

AI assessment note: “things that only a CEO can do, right? Whether it's spending time on strategy”