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Dev Ittycheria

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72
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2024-05-14
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2024-05-14
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  1. “I think believing in me, as I share with you, I've always had this inner doubt about am I good enough and as many people believed in me when maybe I didn't think I deserved it, whether it's, like I said, Steve Walski believing in me when I had no experience building a software company, it's investors who believed in me and investing in MongoDB when there were questions about would MongoDB make it, whether it's people who believed in me coming and joining the company and trusting me on going on this journey. my wife who believed in me at times maybe I didn't always deserve that belief that's something I'm so so grateful for”

    2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Level. I said, so my goal is that the skills you gain here, the relationships you build and the experiences you have will shape who you are for the rest of your career. And hopefully that's taken hold.”

    2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “It's really this transition to AI. I think it's going to be a multi year transition, how we position ourselves and navigate this transition is going to be really, really important. I think it's really exciting. And if this is just another day doing the same job day in, day out, it can get a little boring. Obviously, we're also growing as a business. One of the things that gives me the most joy is when employees come to me and tell me how grateful they are because the value they've created at MongDube has enabled them to either put money away for their kids, buy potential home or a second home, and just give them a certain level of economic security that they didn't have before. And there's nothing that makes me feel better than to see the impact we're having on our employees' lives. And I always tell people, don't come to Mongi for a job, come to Mongibi to build a career. I draw this picture where the slope of the line before you come to MongDB, there's a black box where MongDB and then the slope of line, you're leaving MongoDB is at a very different.”

    2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Even though he was always the largest investor in MangDB, he would listen very carefully. And when he spoke, the signal to noise ratio was very, very high. And so I didn't try and use his ownership percentage to kind of pound the table and all that. He would really like to understand the business. And when I joined the company, the company was in quite a fragile state. So he was very, very supportive in making sure I was set up for success. And there were times when there were some challenges in the business when I would ask Roloff for help and he would help me in a nanosecond. And so he's always been there for me when I needed it. And I want to respect that. Again, back to the point that the CO job is a very lonely job. And so when you want your board to help, it's really helpful.”

    2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Sequoia has been historically our largest investor. I really admire Sequoia and Rula for a couple of reasons. I historically really respected Sequoia for how disciplined they are. Like a lot of venture firms out there saying we're very founder friendly. And I've been involved in some situations where investors don't want to shoot the CO because they're the founder because they worry about the reputational impact of them. So say you should get a COO and they do some weird things organizationally to preserve their good name, but in some ways hurting the business. I always respected Sequoi and how disciplined they are about everything starts with building a great business and working from there. Obviously, they want to be supportive of founders. One of the things I really respect by Ruloff, I've been on boards where the largest shareholder feels like they have to have the loudest voice in the boardroom. That can get a little tiresome because sometimes it's other people who have more insight than necessary the largest investor. And one of the things I really respected with Ruloff is that”

    2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Been a while since I read that book, but the takeaway from me was that if you're a startup, if you raise a little bit more money or require better talent than your competitor, that has disproportionate outcomes. Like an athlete, if you're an athlete and you get recruited, say you and your friend, you tried for like the A team and you're on the B team and one of you makes the A team, now all of a sudden that person is playing with a better set of players around them. They're getting better coaching. And all of a sudden their performance is increasing exponentially. So basically putting yourself in a position where you're working with the best people around you delivers higher performance. And I've seen that I have a son who's a division one athlete who I saw that happen as he grew in his career, his development grew exponentially with the better players around him. And the same thing with startups, the quality investors, the quality of people around you can have a disproportionate impact on the outcome that you have.”

    2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Do to really deliver a superior performance. And that's why we've really invested in customer success function because in a consumption business, it's not like we sell something and move away. We're engaging with the customers almost on a daily, worst case, weekly basis to understand what's going on. So we care a lot about that, even though inherently databases are very sticky. They're one of the stickiest technologies customers will use, but we don't take that for granted.”

    2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Well, I would say in general, you always care about churn, right? Because by definition, your durability business is an inverse of your churn rate. So you always care about the churn in your business. But it becomes even more profound in consumption business, right? Because consumption business, you recognize revenue by usage. So consumption business gives you real-time view of demand. And sometimes your consumption goes down because anything you've done wrong, but customers online business is slowing down. Maybe they're selling 100 widgets a day. Now they're selling 80 widgets a day. And there's not much we can do about that because the consumption of our underlying platform has gone down by 20%. But sometimes you can also see, hey, something's going awry because either the performance of the system is not as good as it should be or maybe the cost is going up disproportionately to their usage. And maybe it's because they've misconfigured their database schema. Maybe they've misconfigured some parameters. Maybe the indexes aren't optimized. So there's things we”

    2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “big time. We're constantly getting pushed on product. We have a very scalable platform, but we have customers who are demanding even more performance and scale. We have a whole bunch of features that customers are asking for that we need to kind of work on. We're pushing ourselves on the go-to-market side to become more efficient as we scale. Investors want to see the classic rule of 40, high growth with increasing profitability.”

    2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “The biggest tell for me is them losing their team because, again, one of the actions I have is you can usually fool the people above you. You can sometimes fool the people around you. You can never fool the people below you. Why? Because they see how effective you are in resolving problems for them. They see how effective you are in the decisions you make. They understand the rigor and logic you're making or the lack of rigor your logic in making and making decisions. So they get to see who you really are. But you can kind of mask some of that to your peers and to your boss. So when I first joined MongoDB, one of the first things I did to assess the leadership I was inheriting was to kind of meet the whole leaders across the business and became very clear to me who were the good leaders versus the bad leaders by the quality of the team they had. And I look at like attrition data as well as the people they were hiring. The inverse of that is I find A's hire A's, B's higher C's, and C's higher F's. So as soon as you have a bad leader, all the good people leave and the quality of the people they're recruiting is far lower than the team they inherited.”

    2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Don't ignore bad news. In your house, if your dog poops on the floor, are you going to step over and keep walking? You're going to get your pooper scooper and come clean it up. Similarly, like if you see bad news, you can't just ignore it. Your responsibility is to investigate and really get at the root issue. And invariably, you always find out when you ask someone, hey, after you fired someone, oh my God, I found out so many more problems. The point is, again, like I said, bad news travels very slowly up the organization. So even you as a leader, you're only seeing a tip of the iceberg. What happens is that when that person leaves and you start really digging in, so there's so many other problems I didn't see. Another potential thing that I find is really, really important is a tell that I use is when a leader's not scaling.”

    2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Love Andy Grove. I think he was truly one of the SEML leaders of our industry. The best thing I've learned from Andy was that there's only two reasons why people fail. One, they fail because they didn't have the skills to do job. Or two, they fail because they didn't have the will or the drive to do the job. And if you net it out, that's the two reasons. And people overcomplicate things and all that. So we call that the skill will matrix. Do they have the skill to do their job and do they have the will? And invariably we find that if you ask people to on a two by two matrix to plot people, invariably let's say the high will, but kind of they don't have necessarily all the skills to the job. But then say someone who has the skill to do the job suddenly is not performing anymore. And why did their will change? Well, maybe they felt they should have been promoted and they didn't. And they get demoralized. Maybe something's going on in their personal life as affecting their performance. So that skillwill matrix is incredibly powerful way to assess your team and say what gaps or problems or issues do I have with my team.”

    2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “The end of the year, Patrick, I'm going to give you a meets expectation. You're like, Meets, I thought I was doing a great job. Well, you missed your end. And then you'll be like, well, why the hell didn't you tell me? It becomes a very dysfunctional conversation. You get demoralized. I don't feel great. And God forbid, maybe you start thinking maybe Mahadivi is not the place for you. So this is a thing that young leaders really need to develop. Young leaders know how to hold people accountable in a constructive way. They will have a dramatic impact in their career.”

    2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Every week I say, Patrick, I need an update from you on what's happening. Say you're running customer service success function and saying, I need an update every Friday on what happened the week and what trends you're seeing. And Friday goes by. I don't get anything from you. So I'll come to you and say, Patrick, maybe I wasn't clear on why this is important to me. The reason this is important to me is really gives me a picture of what's really happening with the customers, what the feedback is on the products, how the buying behavior may be changing, what potential competitive dynamics are happening. Our competitors may be underpricing us, et cetera. So Patrick, are you clear on why this is important? Yes, okay, I got it. Now, the third step is now, if you miss it again, it becomes very easy for me to hold you accountable because I've done steps one and two. I've made it clear what the expectation was. First time was missed. The onus was, I made the mistake, not you. Next time you make a mistake, there's no place to hide. But most people don't do step one and step two. So then you can barely get.”

    2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Again, most people struggle with knowing how to keep people accountable. So we have this three-step process that we encourage people to consider. The first one is you need to be very, very clear on expectations. That's the first mistake people have. They're not very clear on expectations and expectations very fuzzy. By definition, if you have a fuzzy expectation, then you're setting your person up for failure because they don't know what good looks like. So one needs to be very, very clear on expectations. Two, when they miss an expectation The initial approach you take is that the onus is on you, their manager or their leader, that you weren't clear enough on the expectation so they misunderstood why that expectation was important or why the expectation was partially met or unmet. And the point is that you're not being them up. You're saying, you know what, I wasn't clear. I should have done a better job explained the why. I should have liked, so I'll give you a simple example. St. Patrick, you run a team.”

    2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Don't absorb. Maybe you can learn from observation. But if you have a program that can help people develop those skills, that becomes incredibly powerful. So we spent a lot of time on leadership development. It's actually scaling that middle managed layer becomes a very, very important role in terms of the culture you create and your ability to execute. Because at the end of the day, I'm not really making lots of direct decisions myself. I'm leading through others. And ultimately others are really driving the business day to day.”

    2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Most of my issues are people related. I joke with my head of HR that I feel like I'm a glorified head of HR because 70 to 80% of my time is all around people. Who's moving up and why? Who's moving sideways and why and who's moving down? Why is there a lack of alignment between different teams? And we're all kind of imperfect creatures. Like everyone has their strengths and weaknesses. And in times of stress and tension, you see people's weaknesses showing up. And so a big part of my where I spend my time is all around people issues, whether it's with my direct team or with structural issues around people issues around comp, people issues around like culture. We spend a lot of time, for example, on leadership development. What I said is one of the struggles young leaders have is knowing how to hold people accountable. I tell people, if a leader is incredibly self-aware, knows how to recruit and knows how to pull people accountable, they will be a fantastic leader. But those are skills that you just”

    2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Yes. And so to me, that's a space that unfortunately is a tax, but it was tax that we all have to pay because we all care so much about security and naturally so. But to me, the security vector is something that will just continue to be incredibly innovative. And now with AI and the notion of potential deep fakes and all the implications that come with AI, I think the security vectors will have to expand to figure out, is Patrick who he really is when he's calling me or sending me this email or the Slack message? And I think that's going to continually be an area that requires a lot of investment.”

    2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “I think security is an area that will always be important. And as you come out with new solutions to existing problems, people find workarounds to find new ways to break into”

    2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Is it to make that sale? Because if it's a very complex go-to-markets process and you have to jump through 17 hoops, then I would worry about, is this like a unicorn that very few customers will go through all that pain to acquire? Or conversely, is it really easy? So one of the things that got me very interested about Datadog was I invested when they were doing about a million in revenue. And now they're north of 2 billion. What I saw was the month over month growth of existing customers was five percent month over month, which is phenomenal. And so what that told me was not only it was easy because they were closing a lot of customers with a fairly junior sales force. So it wasn't a very complex sale, but the customers were also growing very, very quickly once they bought. So that to me was a great sign that this was that they had really nailed product market fit.”

    2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “To me, if the customer comes back and buys more because any customer can buy something as a science project, and this is a trap I see a lot in the database space. So I'll get calls, diligence calls from investors saying, hey, do you see this company? They have some single purpose functionality, and they have a nice logo set of logos. This space is so big. Someone's going to try something for some corner case. The question I would say is, yeah, but can they prove that they can repeatedly get more business from that customer or show a pattern of getting that for that same use case winning other customers? And so to me, one hallmark is like a product market fit is the customer coming back and buying more. So, you know, people call that NDR or for public companies, you want rates of 120% and higher, where if you look at the same core a year later, they spend net of churn, are they spending 20% more than the previous year? And so that to me is a very good sign of the fact that you have something real. How easy or difficult?”

    2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “They would listen. Sometimes we'd agree, sometimes we wouldn't agree, but it was a very healthy conversation. And they were both very, very motivated to build great businesses”

    2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “I look for a big market because by definition your outcome is directly correlated to the size of market you're going after. Two, I look for is what is the defendable technology advantage that the company has and what proof points are there to prove that it really has a durable advantage? Three, I look for investments as a CEO who's smart but also coachable and the coachable part is important to me because I don't believe that there's a compression algorithm for experience. Some people just learn faster than others and I don't expect a CO to do everything that I'm telling them to do because that's why they're in charge. But to me I worry a lot if someone feels like they have all the answers. And I think vulnerability is a strength, not a weakness. And so Joti at AppDynamics and Olivier at Datadog are two incredibly sharp people and they both build fabulous multi-billion dollar businesses, but they're also, while we would have fierce conversations.”

    2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Be able to leverage the best legal minds, the best accounting minds, the best financial minds, much like the S&B companies could take advantage, the best software that only the top tier Fortune 500 companies could do so before. So I think this would be a net positive for everyone. But I do think it's going to take some time”

    2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Those technologies will be, but I definitely believe AI is going to be incredibly transformative. I think the way it's going to show up for people is back to where we started this conversation. It's around the applications. A lot of people thought software would be really disruptive and dislocate a lot of jobs. But if you look at what happened with software, pre-cloud and pre-SaaS, only the largest companies in the world were able to access the best software, the best CRM software, the best HR software, the best supply chain software, et cetera. When software became democratized, the small companies could take advantage of the best software. And so it just grew the market overall in such a big way. So a lot of people worry that AI will go after the white collar jobs, the services jobs, legal, accounting, finance, et cetera. I would argue, and that's potentially a pessimistic view, I would argue, yes, the cost of delivering those services will come down, but now small businesses will”

    2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Exactly. How much is AI really impacting life? Yes, you may get some hints about writing this note, maybe a little bit more crisper than you originally thought. Yes, if you drive a Tesla or something, you can see the benefits of autonomous driving. But it's not really impacting your life on a day-to-day basis. But I always believe people overestimate the impact of new technology in the short term, but underestimate in the long term. The reasons for that is that I think technology adoption happens in S-curves. And so it's very easy to take a couple data points on the rise up and extrapolate too much. Conversely, it's very easy to take a couple data points on the downward slope and extrapolate this illusion too quickly. But if you look at the S-curve adoption for technologies that have really taken hold, it over time goes up and to the right. Now, there's clearly technologies that have not done that. I think blockchain and crypto, the jury is still out about those technologies, AR and VR. I think there's still some questions about how impactful.”

    2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “No, I think AI is going to have a massive impact, but I think you raised a really good point. I was just telling people yesterday, I said, when I wake up, how much is AI influencing my life? Like the internet today has had a massive impact on our lives.”

    2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “People feel like Mongdebee is not the right architecture for the best AI applications. Now, I don't think that's going to happen. It's kind of like people think about using Oracle for a new modern application. I can't think of a startup today who's building on Oracle. It would worry me a lot if the next generation of companies and the next generation of apps people felt like MongDB was not suitable for those applications. That means like we need to work on our product roadmap, make sure we're building out the right capabilities, being responsive to customers because it's very easy to become complacent.”

    2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “I mean, how we navigate right now the AI wave is something that is really important. It's really the future of how software will be built. And we want to make sure that we're a key component of the tech stack.”

    2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Deepest, darkest worries and be able to put them on the table. And one of the things I realized is being a CEO is a very lonely job because you really can't open the kimono always to your board because you're worried about how they're going to react. You can't always open the kimono to your team because sometimes you may be thinking about an org change that could actually marginalize someone on your team and they're not going to be too happy about it. So having someone you can go talk to is super important. Steve play that role for me. I will be always very, very grateful to him.”

    2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Of tech, investors are very skittish because they had just seen their portfolios crumble and any new investments, if there was any sign of hint of trouble, they'd panic because the last thing they want to do was see a new investment start struggling. So I felt a lot of pressure and he was really helpful to me in terms of understanding what it meant to be a CEO. And he really informed my leadership philosophy around marrying product with go-to-market excellence, thinking about how to build a great sales force. He helped me recruit a bunch of CROs, including one guy named John McMahon, who's a legend in the space. It was a CRO at Blade Logic, Ultimate COO. And then he also worked with me and joined the board at MongoDB. So he was incredibly helpful to me. And the thing I really liked about him is I always felt safe that I could ask him any dumb question and he wouldn't belittle me. And I think one of the advice I give people is to really have someone that's a mentor to you. You got to be able to open up the common. You got to be able to really share your.”

    2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Kept pestering him, and then he finally returned my call me and my co founder went to visit him. We had a good conversation. But then he kind of said, okay, let me think about it. I'll give you a call back. And I kind of said, oh God, is this the I'll call you? Don't call me kind of response. Turned out he did call me back. And I used to go visit him about once a month at his house in Chestnut Hill in Massachusetts and just walk him through what's happening in the business. And he was so valuable to me because he obviously had built, if you look at PTC, they were one of the great companies in the 90s that built an amazing business. They delivered 40% offering margins and grew north of 100% for literally like, I think like 10 years straight. And they had also built an amazing Salesforce. And so he was very helpful to me to kind of understand how to think about building a business, how to think about dealing with a board, how to think about capital raising, because it was a very tough time. As I said, raising capital right before 9-11, we're in the nuclear winter.”

    2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “I would say one of my key mentors was a guy named Steve Walski. So I had raised money for Laid Logic, but I had never actually worked at a software company. And obviously I'd never been a CEO of a software company. I was very self-aware to say there's a lot I don't know. So Bessemer and Battery were my two lead investors. So I went to the Bessemer folks and said, who's the best CEO in the Boston area that you can refer me to that I want to go speak to? This guy named Steve Walski, who was the chairman and CEO of PTC. I said, great, give me his number. They said, here's the number, but good luck. He eats nails for breakfast and he might never return your phone call.”

    2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Oh, it definitely persists. I don't think you lose your upper game, any setback. You all start questioning, oh my God, am I good enough again? Any bad decision, you start questioning yourself. And so I don't think that ever disappears. I think sometimes you can suppress it for a while if things are going reasonably well, but I think it's always there.”

    2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “And prove to others about am I really good enough? I've got all this baggage and background. And so that's, I think, one of the reasons back to why I asked what motivates people. My motivation is to prove to people that I'm good enough, the proof to people that I'm just as good as people who graduated from a elite college and may have had a more quote-unquote normal family childhood. Looking back, I think it really served me well.”

    2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “Am I good enough? Because in some ways I had this very weird upbringing. I'm a Christian Indian, so I'm a minority in my own country. Only about 2% of India's population is Christian. So even though 1.3 or 4 billion is still a lot of people, but you're a very small minority coming from a broken family, I always had this stigma about being good enough. And then when I was applying to college, my parents were living in Africa. My dad worked for an oil company and decided he wanted to emigrate to the United States. They kind of viscerated the balance sheet. He went back to grad school, got a job in the aerospace industry's income level basis. They look like a fine middle class family, but the balance sheet was eviscerated because they'd used all their funds to kind of pay for going back to school. And so I had a chip on my shoulder going to a state school when I got accepted to some quote-unquote more elite colleges. And now I look back, I'm so grateful for that chip on my shoulder. But like it was always like, I want to prove to myself.”

    2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “I set myself up for that question. I've shared this before I came from a broken home per se. My natural father was not a very good person. He was a misogynist. And so my mother really had a tough time when I was very, very young in the early late 60s, early 70s in India, divorces are very unspeakable things. My parents, my grandparents were reasonably well-to-do people. And so it was a black mark in the family. So my mother faced a lot of pressure to stay in the marriage. And I give her so much credit for refusing to do so. So I grew up in an environment. My mother ended up marrying my stepfather and who I consider my real father. And they decided to leave India because my mother realizes stigma being divorced would be too painful for both her and for me staying in India. So we end up emigrating and I lived all the world and then lived in Africa, lived in Canada, lived in the UK for a while and then moved to the US. Part of me has always felt like”

    2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Intrinsically motivated, we should joke at Blay Logic if someone has some character flaws, if the parents can fix their character flaws growing up, there's no way we're going to be able to do so at a company where they may spend X number of years at. So for us, trying to really understand the person and who they are and what they want is important. So now one way to qualify that is trying to ask them questions about, okay, help me understand what school you went to. Help me understand what major you picked and why'd you pick that major. Help me understand why you went to this company and then why did you go from company A to company B? Because in some ways those are some of the most important professional decisions you can make in your life. And if someone is not very thoughtful about why they went from company A to company B, then the question I'm going to say is how thoughtful they're going to be prosecuting a deal or when they're making a decision on a product or when they're thinking about a new idea to come up with. And so that gives me a sense of how thoughtful they are.”

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  39. “Psychological as human nature doesn't change. That was like words out of my mouth, how you manage grit, how you manage your ego, are you comfortable with low status? Are you comfortable being unconventional? Can you delay gratification? Do you have long-term orientation?”

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  40. “I think one of the things about recruiting, most people make the common mistake of just focusing on what the person's background experience is, where they work, what skills they had, and maybe like what successes that they can talk about. I think a big part of recruiting is trying to figure out what makes a person tick. What is it about them? What is it about their upbringing? What drives them? What motivates them in terms of who they are and where they want to go and what they want to be? And I think if you don't really understand that underlying psyche of the person, how do you know what you're really getting? It's one thing to say like, hey, do you have experience building product? Do you experience selling enterprise software? But how do you assess someone's values? Do you believe in the value of hard work? How do you measure grit? One of your common guests that I love made a statement that I completely agree with was Jeremy Giffon, who talked about that the only enduring edge in life is.”

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  41. “Take an orientation around what's generating the return. So I've been old enough where I've seen good markets and bad markets. So obviously for the last 10 years until 22, now with the benefit of hindsight, everyone realized that was a really good market. But for us, because we had seen bad markets, we never really spent money like drunken sailors. Just to put things in perspective, when we went public, we had trailing $100 million in revenue and negative 38% operating margins. Our numbers weren't exactly like super compelling. But as a public company, Last year we did 16% opering margins and I said we're now approaching a $2 billion run rate business. We've shown almost pitch back percent plus operating margin improvement while growing the business very, very quickly. So our capital allocation process is all about where do we get the best returns, having good discipline about investing here and not investing, divesting on certain investments when they're not working out and just constantly asking ourselves what's working, what's not working.”

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  42. “That much. And they go, Dave, that's a good thing. Because if you heard from us a lot, that means you'll be having serious problems. And it took me a while to appreciate that. But I would say that your question around capital allocation.”

    2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “I mean, it's all about where do you get the best returns? I will just step back and say being on boards and being an investor really helped me appreciate being an investor's shoes when they're coming to my board meetings because it's very easy for management to get frustrated with investors, but then you really appreciate the pressures investors have in terms of they're under the gun for their LPs and so on and so forth. And it's easy to say, but it's really hard to understand until you live in their shoes where you've been in a partner meeting and you're doing a portfolio review and you're seeing why some companies are being successful and why they're not. One of the interesting lessons I've learned at being investors is there's an inverse correlation between work and outcomes. Your best performing companies, you show up, kind of eat the donuts and leave because they're doing so well. And where are you doing a lot of work? You're helping the mashing team rebuild the business, maybe helping them hire people. That may be the companies that are struggling. So it's a very weird dynamic. Blade Logic, I should go to my investors. I never really hear from you.”

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  44. “Market sales force. We have a self serve channel, and then we have a partner channel. All of those organizations play an important role. We also have expanded our customer success functionality. And so our customer success people, because you're selling the cloud service, play an important role in understanding and assessing customer health. Then they have some upsell opportunities as well when they see opportunities that the customer could take advantage of with MongDB. It's a fairly complex go-to-market. I'm not necessarily saying it's great that we have it so complex, but it's just a virtue of we're going after a very large market and a one-dimensional channel model wouldn't work for us because how big our market is.”

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  45. “We are building and selling a very technical product. And there's obviously other companies who have very technical products. What I would say is we've had to deal with the open source dimension and then we've also had to deal with like building a traditional enterprise software. Well, now it's a subscription software delivery model and then a cloud model. So I would say one of the challenges I worry about in our business is that we are like a multi-product, multi-channel business. Yes, we're 2 billion in size, but there's a lot of $2 billion companies who have one poor product and one core channel. So how we think about like organizing, doing capital allocation across the different product sets, as well as different channels is something that we spend a lot of time and energy on. And my worry constantly is, are we over complexifying the business? I think there's value and simplicity. So always trying to figure out, do we really need to add in any channel? So for example, go to market channel, we have a direct high-end sales force, we have a mid-market.”

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  46. “Well, to be clear, on a certain scale, I can't be involved in every meeting or every decision that comes another approach. But at the face level, it is exhausting, right? This is one of the reasons why people don't want to do it is that it takes energy to say patrick, what's going on? This project is not tracking. What are you doing? What's breaking down and really having a very frankly hard-to-heart talk about why is this project not tracking? And most people have a very superficial conversation. You'll tell me, Dave, it's okay. This is just a temporary setback. We're all good. And if you don't really ask the next set of questions, it's very easy to assume, oh, Patrick, you got this. And then three months later, the project fails. And so it does take energy and effort. And I think that's one of the reasons why people don't like doing that. But with regards to as the business scales, one of my other axioms is that bad news travels very slowly up the organization, but very quickly down the organization. So imagine a situation where a sales reps in front.”

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  47. “Who thrive in those kinds of environments love it because saying, hey, when this problem is, this company really cares and wants to solve them. But it starts from really understanding what's going on and deeply inspecting what people are doing relative to the goals and expectations you have.”

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  48. “The short answer is that if grown adults were supposed to do what we ask them to do, you wouldn't need that many leaders or managers. You would have theoretically one leader and a bunch of individual contributors. But the reality is that human nature doesn't operate that way. And you need people who can challenge and push you. And when people know that there's a high degree of inspection, there was a joke at Blade Logic was that Blade Logic is placed with this a lot of sunshine because there's no place to hide because we constantly inspect what's going on. And when people know that their performance will be inspected, that there'll be constant review of what's going well, what's not going well, which is healthy. It's not mean that the person's bad, but sometimes they're running into an issue. Sometimes that issue is bigger than they can solve. It elevates up and saying, hey, we got to figure out a way to respond to this issue because this person has it. We're going to see this with other people. That just creates a very healthy dynamic and it also creates a bias to action. So people.”

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  49. “Things I've learned in life is that if you see a problem and don't act on it, that problem is no longer that person that thinked that promise you. If you have the authority to solve that problem and you're not doing it, then you're the problem. I always feel like whenever I see something bad, if I don't act on it, then I'm actually accepting mediocrity or I'm secting poor performance. And that's contrary to everything that we're trying to do. And in some ways, you're penalizing all the good people who are working really hard because you're accepting mediocre performance from the other person and they're actually penalizing all the good people who have crowned the constraints or the limitations of this other person.”

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  50. “You move on. And so that builds muscles in terms of dealing with problems directly, not kicking the can down the road. And so many management teams kick the can down the road. If you ask anyone, did you ever fire someone too quickly or too late, 99.9% of the time, they'll say they fired people too late? Why? Because they introduced hope into the process. And we still do that even at MongoDB. People say, oh, give that person more time. He or she just needs more time to get a sense of how we do things. And invariably the answer was staring at you in the face, but you just didn't want to acknowledge it. And so that was also another lesson I learned is deal with prompts head on and quickly. And at BlayLogic, I went through multiple rounds of leaders. And not that I was purposely looking to change leaders, but leaders can come and go because they're good for a certain stage of growth, but then they tap out. Even at MongDB, the leadership team I inherited is no longer here. When a business scales, not everyone scales at the same rate.”

    2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source