MongoDB ft. Dev Ittycheria - How an Early Pivot Catalyzed an Open Source Movement

MongoDB, founded in 2007, originally aimed to create a platform-as-a-service system with a new database layer. Facing competition from Google, the founders pivoted to focus solely on their database product, MongoDB—a new kind of database built for the scale of the internet era. Founder Dwight Merriman built a product that developers loved, but scaling the company proved challenging until Dev Ittycheria took the reins as CEO in 2014. As cloud computing grew, MongoDB transitioned from on-premise software to Atlas, a fully managed-cloud service. Despite initial skepticism, Atlas now represents 70% of MongoDB's revenue. As Atlas scaled, MongoDB faced another controversial decision: whether to change its open source license model to maintain its commercial moat. These pivotal decisions transformed MongoDB from a niche database to a nearly $2 billion in annual revenue.

Host: Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital
Featuring: Dwight Merriman, Dev Ittycheria and Tom Killalea

00:00 - Introduction
05:30 - The NoSQL movement
09:52 - Scrapping the platform for the database
14:57 - Launching as MongoDB
19:52 - Moving to the cloud with Atlas
24:52 - Assigning a directly responsible individual
30:15 - How Atlas changed MongoDB
35:03 - Updating the licensing model to avoid “strip mining”
39:50 - Evolving back into a platform
41:26 - Executing on points of leverage (edited

[SophyYan]

A Masterclass on Open Source Licensing

[KurtLibby-ke]

Irony: Deprecating the platform the same week that this episode aired.

41:40 - "It's kind of ironic that it is kind of a platform. The founding mission of being a platform business is now what is shaping our future as we've gone from being a compelling database solution to now thinking of ourselves as a developer data platform and offering many more of the tools and capabilities as a single point to make life easier for developers and to really help their problems."

INCREDIBLY OUT OF TOUCH. The bulk of what made MongoDB into a developer data platform was deprecated on Monday. Not open sourced. Deprecated.

This episode was released on Thursday Sept 12. Three days earlier on Monday Sept 10, MongoDB blindsided developers by deprecating Atlas App Services, Atlas Device Sync, Data API, Atlas Edge Server, HTTPS Endpoints, Atlas Data Lake with incredibly thin rationale as to why they are deprecating the platform. They buried this news by announcing it during the iPhone event so it wouldn't hit the news cycle. If Dev Ittycheria really believes what he's saying, he has no idea how developers actually feel.