Ten years is a long time span in tech and a lot can happen and change. Ten years ago, MongoDB was just beginning to come into view, and most people didn't know about it. Now, 10 years later, NoSQL databases have become a well-known concept, and few companies can bypass them.
At the same time, in ten years, many companies have collapsed. Especially in the field of science and technology, enterprises come and go in a hurry, because the technology is changing too fast, blockchain, the metaverse, in the past two years, has cooled down a lot, in contrast, AI large models have become a trend. MongoDB, as a startup, has not sunk in the past decade, but has grown into a company with revenue of nearly $2 billion.
All of this is directly related to a man named Dev Ittycheria.
Dev Ittycheria has been the CEO of MongoDB for 10 years, during which time Ittycheria has led MongoDB to market, increased its customer base from a few hundred to 50,000, and led the company's transition from an open source model to a more commercial cloud computing space. In recent years, MongoDB has introduced vector search capabilities to support the processing needs of AI and big data. At the same time, the company partnered with startups to expand the ecosystem by launching MongoDB Ventures. Let's take a look at how MongoDB, under the leadership of Ittycheria, is keeping ahead of the competitive database market through strategic alignment and technological innovation.
A lot has happened since Dev Ittycheria took on the role of president and CEO of MongoDB, a $26 billion database company, in September 2014. Ittycheria led MongoDB into cloud computing, led the company to a successful IPO, drove its transition from open source to a more commercial model, founded its venture capital division, and grew its customer base from a few hundred to nearly 50,000.
"When I joined the company, I wasn't sure if people would trust us as a key technology," says Ittycheria. At that time, we had about $30 million in revenue, and now we're close to $2 billion. ”
Still, not everything is going well. Five months ago, MongoDB was hit by a security breach that, while contained in time without causing large-scale damage, briefly threatened its reputation in a reputationally valued industry.
At a time when the AI revolution is sweeping across nearly every industry, TechCrunch sat down with Ittycheria at MongoDB's new London office in Blackfriars last year to discuss the challenges and opportunities presented by this technological revolution.
Embrace vector databases
Databases have come a long way since IBM and Oracle first introduced relational databases half a century ago. The rise of the Internet has driven the need for flexible, scalable, and cost-effective data storage and processing solutions, which have set the stage for success for businesses like MongoDB.
Founded in 2007 by three veterans from online advertising technology company DoubleClick (later acquired by Google for $3.1 billion), MongoDB was initially known as 10Gen and changed to its current name six years later with the name of its flagship product. Since then, it has become one of the leading NoSQL databases, helping businesses store and manage huge amounts of data.
Prior to joining MongoDB, Ittycheria founded and successfully sold server automation company BladeLogic in a $900 million deal, after which he served on several boards and invested in several companies (including 16 months at Greylock) before eventually becoming president and CEO of MongoDB about a decade ago, succeeding Max Schireson, who resigned for family reasons.
MongoDB is built on a document-oriented model, driven by the explosive growth of mobile and web applications, where flexible, dynamic data structures come into play. The current wave of AI is driving a similar shift, making vector databases the new darling of the current tech landscape.
Like NoSQL, vector databases focus on unstructured data types (e.g., images, videos, social media posts), but they are particularly well-suited for LLMs and generative AI. This is because they store and process data in the form of vector embeddings, transforming the data into numeric representations that store relationships between data points through space, making it easier to retrieve semantically similar data while allowing AI to better understand context and semantics in conversations.
While many specialized vector database startups have sprung up over the past few years, existing large companies have also begun to embrace vectors, including Elastic, Redis, OpenSearch, Cassandra, and Oracle. Cloud providers, including Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, have also increased support for vector search.
In the case of MongoDB, last June the company introduced vector search in its flagship database-as-a-service product, Atlas, signaling that the company is preparing for the AI wave. This reflects the historical trend of databases emerging as stand-alone solutions for specific functions, such as time series databases, but are better suited for integration into larger, multi-purpose database systems. That's exactly why MongoDB introduced support for time series databases a few years ago, and why it's doing the same thing now.
Ittycheria commented, "A lot of these companies are actually packaging features into products. He explains, "We're bringing these capabilities into our platform, and that's the value of it – not using a vector database alone, with an online transaction processing (OLTP) database and a search database, but all three in one platform, greatly simplifying the lives of developers and architects." ”
His point is that a database vendor with a multi-faceted strategy can centralize all data and simplify the developer's work.
Ittycheria adds, "There are about 17 different types of databases and about 300 vendors. "No customer wants to manage 17 different databases," he noted. Such complexity comes with significant learning, support, and management costs, and also hinders innovation because it increases the burden of complexity. ”
Too much hype
Despite her preparation, Ittycheria believes that the current hype around AI is overblown.
"AI hasn't changed my life," he says. Yes, these assistants may have made it easier for me to write emails, but they didn't fundamentally change my life. And the internet has completely changed my life. ”
In theory, despite all the hype, it will take time for AI to permeate our daily lives – and when it does, it will be through the building of AI-integrated applications and businesses.
"I think that in the early stages of any new technology adoption, the value is first accumulated at the bottom," Ittycheria said. Clearly, Nvidia is making huge profits, and OpenAI has become the most talked about company since the launch of ChatGPT. But the real value will come from people building applications on top of these technologies. That's what we're doing – we help people build apps. ”
Currently, as Ittycheria puts it, the focus is on "simple applications". This includes chatbots for customer service, and MongoDB has developed a system called CoachGTM in-house with its vector search capabilities to help sales and account teams stay up-to-date on product information. In a sense, we are currently in the "calculator app" phase that the iPhone faced almost 20 years ago, when the concept of the App Store began to gain popularity.
"Truly sophisticated AI applications will leverage real-time data and be able to react instantly to real-time events. "Maybe there's something going on in the stock market, and now is the time to buy or sell, or to hedge." I think we're going to start to see more of these complex applications where you can combine real-time data with all the logical reasoning. ”
The road to SaaS
One of the big developments in Ittycheria's tenure was the shift from a self-hosted model to customers, to whom the company sells features and services. After launching Atlas in 2016, MongoDB embarked on the familiar SaaS path by removing all the complexities of self-hosting. At the time of the IPO the following year, Atlas accounted for 2% of MongoDB's revenue—now nearly 70%.
"It's growing really fast, and we're really building this business as a public company," Ittycheria said. The popularity of Atlas shows that people are willing to consume infrastructure in the form of services. This allows them to delegate what they consider to be 'non-strategic functions' such as configuring, configuring, and managing MongoDB. So they can focus on building apps that really change their business. ”
Another significant development was the move from an open-source AGPL license to an available source SSPL (server-side public license) a year after its listing. In some ways, this is a bellwether for future trends, with countless infrastructure companies subsequently dropping their open source credentials to prevent cloud giants (e.g., Amazon) from selling their own versions of the service without giving anything in return.
"We are very happy about it. "The reality is that while it's open source, 99.9% of the development is done by our own people — not the community." It's not some simple, trivial application – it's very complex code, and we need to hire senior, competent people, who are very costly. We think it's unfair that we spend so much money to build this product and then someone makes money with this free product without giving us anything in return. It was quite controversial in 2018, but looking back, our business just grew faster. ”
And growth does. Like all tech companies, MongoDB's valuation soared during the pandemic, reaching an all-time high of $39 billion at the end of 2021, but plummeting to less than $10 billion in a year — roughly the same number as before the pandemic.
In the 18 months since, MongoDB's share price has been rising, reaching $35 billion just a few months ago, and then falling again to $26 billion today – which is the volatile nature of the stock market. But considering the company's relatively modest valuation of just $1.8 billion at the end of its first trading day in 2017, MongoDB is doing quite well for public market investors.
Dev Ittycheria 与 MongoDB 同事一起参加 2017 年的 IPO
Four months ago, though, MongoDB revealed a data breach that revealed "some customer account metadata and contact information" — involving a phishing attack via a third-party corporate tool (which Ittycheria didn't confirm). This caused its stock to fall by 3%, but in the following months, MongoDB's valuation recovered to a two-year high. This underscores the negligible impact of the breach on corporate affairs, certainly compared to the data breaches that everyone at companies like Equifax and Target have focused on, which forced the departure of senior executives from these companies.
Although MongoDB's cybersecurity incident was significantly less wide-ranging, it's worth mentioning that the whole incident disappeared very quickly — it was only covered in a few media outlets, but the story faded away as quickly as it came.
"Part of the reason is that we're very transparent. "The last thing you want to do is hide information and act like you're misleading." We have a lot of bank customers who have a lot of very sensitive information stored in our data platform, and we have a lot of other corporate customers who have a lot of sensitive information. So what's really important for us is to make sure that our structure is sound and solid. I would never claim that we will never get hacked again, but we are doing everything we can to make sure that doesn't happen. ”
Try your hand at venture capital
Launching their own investment vehicles is nothing new for big tech companies, and we've seen it over the years with Alphabet (with multiple investment armies), Microsoft, Amazon, and Salesforce, all of which have strong ties to the start-up world. Now a new generation of businesses like Slack, Workday, Twilio, Zoom, HubSpot, and Okta are also jumping on the fray.
In 2022, it was MongoDB's turn to launch such a fund, and in the two years since, MongoDB Ventures has invested in about eight companies.
"It's about building deeper relationships with more partners – we're in an ecosystem of big and small companies. "When we find a small company that has potential to work with, we say, 'Hey, we want to invest in you,' and that creates additional value." We also benefit from this. ”
MongoDB's corporate development team, while small in size, focuses primarily on venture funds, and Ittycheria emphasizes that MongoDB usually keeps a distance in its investments. It also typically invests alongside other venture capital firms, just as it did when it first invested in 2021, quietly joining Insight Partners and Andreessen Horowitz in their $130 million Series D funding round at Apollo GraphQL.
"We always have minority stakes, we don't sit on the board, and we don't set terms. "But startups are interested in us because they want to leverage MongoDB's brand." With thousands of on-site employees, startups can scale their business through our distribution channels. ”
Original link:https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/28/mongodb-ceo-dev-ittycheria-interview-ai-hype-database-evolution/