Every atomic assertion extracted from the underlying record, ranked by evidence strength.
MongoDB made an early decision to drastically reduce its scope and pivot from a platform to a single product.
Dwight Merriman realized the scope of building a full Platform as a Service (PaaS) was too huge for a startup, requiring more runway than a startup could get.
The company began considering a wholesale move to a fully managed cloud-based solution called Atlas.
Atlas represents 70% of MongoDB's revenue today.
The proposed SSPL (Server-Side Public License) would require any organization offering a service using MongoDB's code to either obtain a commercial license or make their own source code publicly available.
MongoDB powers thousands of companies worldwide.
In its early days, MongoDB faced questions about translating early traction with developers into a sustainable business.
The company migrated its business model from open-source on-prem software to fully managed cloud services.
MongoDB gambled on a change to its licensing model that risked community and user revolt.
Dwight Merriman was co-founder of DoubleClick in 1995.
Merriman, Kevin Ryan, and Elliot Horwitz were interested in doing a startup as their next venture after DoubleClick.
The founders observed recurring scaling and fragility issues on the tech side in the design and development of systems.
Traditional tools, including programming languages and databases, were not designed for horizontal scaling in cloud computing.
The original idea for the company, then called TenGen, was to create an open-source Platform as a Service (PaaS) system with a new stack of modern technologies.
TenGen had new ideas and tools at the application layer and its own data layer, which was called MongoDB.
For decades, dating back to the 1970s, applications were powered by relational databases commercialized by companies like Oracle and Sybase, using SQL.
Relational databases are structured as rows and columns, which can be thought of as a spreadsheet.
Relational database systems powered many applications built in the 1980s and 1990s.
With the advent of the internet, the scale of applications grew beyond what relational technologies were originally built for.
PayPal experienced outages because its Oracle database could not cope with the scale needed.
DBAs used sharding to break databases into many smaller databases to serve the scale needs of internet companies, but the database was fundamentally not built for that scale.
Dwight Merriman and his co-founders designed their data layer, MongoDB, to address these shortcomings, notably not using SQL.
MongoDB was at the forefront of the NoSQL movement.
MongoDB uses a document as the central unit, encapsulating all details like an invoice.
MongoDB's document model makes it flexible and easy for developers to add new fields, unlike legacy relational systems.
TenGen released its Platform as a Service beta within 12 months, receiving good feedback and sign-ups.
Google released App Engine as a beta around the same time as TenGen's beta launch, which was conceptually very similar.
Merriman concluded that only large companies like Microsoft or Google could afford the runway and long-term thinking for a full PaaS.
Users of the TenGen PaaS beta provided positive feedback specifically on the data layer (MongoDB).
The decision to pivot to database-only was difficult because the original PaaS was in beta and people liked it.
Elliot Horwitz, co-founder and CTO, agreed with the pivot to database-only after an hour of consideration.
Kevin Ryan, the third founder, pragmatically supported the pivot once Merriman and Horwitz agreed.
The pivot involved laying off employees not working on the database layer and discarding application layer code.
Founders building truly successful companies are able to make difficult 'crucible decisions' like letting go of wrong ideas.
The speed with which founders are willing to make difficult decisions is one of the best predictors of ultimate success.
After the pivot, MongoDB's first step was to write drivers for every programming language to allow interaction with the existing database.
In 2009, MongoDB launched for public use as an open-source product.
MongoDB used an open-source go-to-market plan, leveraging meetups and conferences for free marketing across many cities and languages.
Sequoia Capital intersected with MongoDB in 2010 and saw it as the likely winner in the NoSQL category.
MongoDB had developer love, positive references, and rapidly growing download numbers in 2010.
At the time of Sequoia's investment in late 2010, MongoDB had 12 employees.
In 2013, the company officially changed its name from TenGen to MongoDB.
In mid-2014, MongoDB's revenue run rate was approximately $40 million.
The board felt an opportunity to hire a CEO who could scale MongoDB from $40 million to multi-hundred million dollar revenue.
Dave Ittycheria joined MongoDB as President and CEO.
Ittycheria had previously passed on investing in MongoDB's competitors due to MongoDB's significantly better developer traction.
Ittycheria found MongoDB was generating momentum but also struggling with a dysfunctional leadership team and ineffective go-to-market efforts.
Ittycheria believed MongoDB could achieve much more with an 'A team' in place, despite its current struggles.
When Dave Ittycheria joined MongoDB as CEO, the company offered open-source on-prem software.
MongoDB saw increasing users accessing software as a service directly through the cloud.
Customers were building applications with MongoDB on cloud infrastructure but without an ongoing relationship with MongoDB.
MongoDB was missing out on building a business around the cloud delivery of its solution.
Offering a cloud service would let customers outsource undifferentiated labor and focus on core business.
There was skepticism about Atlas because MongoDB was the first independent company to offer an infrastructure service on the cloud.
Building Atlas required MongoDB to transform from a product-shipping company to one with operational skills for running databases.
Dave Ittycheria believed not pursuing Atlas would be a 'giant mistake, kind of borderline disaster'.
Tom Killalea, a key executive at AWS, was recruited to MongoDB's board to guide its cloud strategy.
Killalea initially had concerns about Atlas's product positioning, fearing a 'jack-of-all-trades' approach compared to AWS's specialized services.
Killalea became convinced of Atlas's advantages, seeing value in a data platform for many use cases that would obviate data extraction and shifting.
In December 2015, MongoDB's board debated whether to launch Atlas 'now or later', with urgency prevailing.