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Dev Ittycheria

lines on the record: 72
first: 2024-05-14
most recent: 2024-05-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Happened, the blood burst. So it was a pretty tough time to start a business. So I had only $6 million wired to me. We were essentially trying to build a business using a direct sales force. It was a pretty tricky time to build a business from scratch. And ultimately, we raised $29 million of which seven was still in the bank when he filed our S1. So we're pretty efficient in how we use our capital. And that was a forcing function saying I didn't have time, the luxury of being patient with people who aren't working out. And one of the lessons I've seen, and I've also been an investor for a little bit, is that sometimes raising too much capital breeds bad behavior because it takes the pressure off. When I have very little capital, if someone wasn't working out, it wasn't like, hey, Joe, sorry, it's not working. I'm going to put you on this special project. I know you're a good guy. The answer was Joe's not working out. It's better for you and for us that we have this hard conversation now because I just can't afford for this not to work and treat the person with respect.”
2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I started my career at ATT in Bell Labs and then I moved into the business side. There's some very talented people there. And this is the old AT&T, not the AT&T of today, but there's some very talented people there. But I saw a lot of passive, aggressive behavior. And I saw there'd be a meeting and the senior person would essentially advocate for a decision. Everyone would nod politely. There wouldn't be any fierce debate. But then people leave the room and you can see people's eyes rolling saying that's never going to work. And to me, I view pass aggressiveness as a form of duplicity because you have to create a culture where people are free to say what they think constructively about a particular idea or a particular decision. Because I always believe all of us are smarter than any one of us. And one of our core values in MongDB is intellectual honesty because I abhor passive aggressive behaviors. That was one thing that I learned not to do. The second thing was when I founded Blay Logic, I got my first round of capital five days before 9-11. So 91.”
2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or induce a customer to make a decision sooner than later. So those three questions, I don't know how you can forecast a deal if you don't have answers to those three questions. So that's essentially how our sales process is broken down. Then there's certain interim steps in the sales process that tell you, are you on track to kind of getting a deal? Have you met with the economic buyer? Have you qualified how much budget is available? Have you qualified even that this is a priority for them? And because you're not just competing with your own competitor, you're competing with other vendors and other spaces for budget dollars. And so how do you know, is this problem that you're solving for as important as another problem that another vendor might be trying to address? And then obviously what is the decision criteria? One rule of thumb we have is you should never be answering RFP because invariably if you're getting an RFP,”
2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I hate deals where it's just a very long sales cycle because there's always chance for something going wrong. But if you think about any sales process, any sales process is essentially designed to address three core questions. Why does a customer want to do anything, i.e. what pain or prompt do they have that's going to force them to take action? So that's with the discovery part of the sales process. You try and discover what pain or prompt customers have that are relevant to what you can solve for. The second phase of that is why manga db, why is MongoDB the best choice to solve that pain relative to all the alternatives and substitutes available? And then the third part of the sales process is why now? Because you can do the first two things, but the customer can easily kick the can down the road. And in many cases, that's the struggle most salespeople have. It's not that they lose a deal, but the customer never makes a decision. Can you create a manufacturer or is there a compelling event you can use to force a customer”
2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Process around making sure that you're sending your team up for success. How do you think about one of the things we do is like cell division? So once you get to a certain number of reps per manager, you divide and promote or hire another manager and so on and so forth. And how do you do that and who's the right manager to lead that organization, et cetera, are all things that we spent a lot of time on.”
2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In closing that deal, how to forecast well? One of the things in a high growth business is your revenue forecast or your bookings forecast is a proxy for your expense forecast. So if you don't forecast well, you can burn through a lot of cash very, very quickly. So those are hallmarks to me of a great sales organization. And then obviously consistency in terms of execution. They're not like a yo-yo, one quarter that great, one quarter of the hair not. They consistently deliver on their numbers. So if you have those attributes, then that means you're doing something special. And it becomes even harder in a high growth business because not only are you trying to make the number, but you're planning for where the business is going to be two, three quarters out. So you're trying to recruit people because you have to assume roughly a six month ramp for someone to become productive. So how you think about territory planning? How are you making sure that the new people join the organization are set up for success and the old guys or gals don't have all the best accounts so that new people are kind of starving for good accounts?”
2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say a couple things. One, obviously, it starts with a leader in terms of how they've designed and architected the Salesforce. One sign of how good a Salesforce is is broad-based performance. You can always have one person who's knocking it out of the park, but you don't want the 80-20 rule where 20% of the reps are killing it 80% or not because obviously that doesn't create a great culture and a great environment. So you want to create an environment where people are performing well. So that's an output. So then what are the inputs to drive that output? So to me, the best organizations are very good at recruiting. They're very good at recruiting hungry people who are very smart and who really want to make a mark. The second thing they're really good at is developing those people. Just because you recruit someone doesn't mean that they're going to be great. How do you develop them? Not just on product skills, but how to prosecute a deal, how to qualify an opportunity, how to assess where you are in the decision process and the sales process and what potential risks there are.”
2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To go with the large organization. And so I realized that not only do you have to build a great product, but you also have to build a ferocious go-to-market organization. And in those days, it was all about sales, but now go to market has become much more sophisticated with sales and PLG and so on and so forth. But to me, the magic happens when you can marry a great product with a great go-to-market organization. And that's where you can really differentiate yourself in the industry. And for example, at Blade Logic, my last company, we had such a great sales force that I think about 35 people out of that sales organization became CROs of Samuel Software Companies in our industry. I don't think another company's ever had that kind of track record. And so as much thought as we put into our product and how we position our products, and I'm not saying products are not important, in fact, it's very important. You don't have business, you even have a great product, but that's necessary but not sufficient in building a B2B business.”
2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everyone nods politely. But in the back of the mind, they said, this is probably not going to work. We work really hard to create a culture where we can be intellectually honest about what's working and what's not working, have fierce conversations about what to do or what not to do, who's performing, who's not performing, and then really focus on executing really well. I wouldn't say we're perfect. There's many times when we also make lots of mistakes, but that to me is one big thing. The second thing I've learned is in the B2B business, I find a lot of founders and CEOs focus a lot on the product side of the house, which makes sense because they typically are technical founders and they're very, very focused around like, if I build a great product, it will come. But the reality is that, and part of the way I grew up was that I grew up early in my career when the best technology didn't always win. You had large vendors like IBM and HP and others who had so much account control that even if you had a better mousetrap, the customer would always pick the safe decision.”
2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first of all, it's very nice of you to compare me to Frank. Frank, I think, is on a very different league. I have a lot of respect for him. He's just recently made the decision to... One of the big lessons I've learned is that to drive excellence, you need to be incredibly judgmental. And most people, when push comes to shove, are afraid to make the decisions they need to make to be truly successful. They're not willing to hold people accountable, that need to be held accountable. They're not willing to be extreme about the practices that need to be made, the way products are positioned, whether they're priced, and they're not also willing to be extreme about the go-to-market decisions. And what I find is most people fold with the pressure to make hard decisions. And I think that's why there's a lot of very average and mediocre companies out there. And I think really confronting problems directly and dealing with them directly, most people are social animals. Most people don't want to have a painful conversation. Most people don't want to point out the flaws and what people are doing. And so in many cases, you have these very passive aggressive meetings.”
2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Answers, probably not be talking to you right now. I do think you will need an online data persistence store. One of the things that's become clear with these large language models is the switching cost from going from one model to another model is actually quite low because you can go from open AI to anthropic toll fairly easily and start engaging with it. Now if those LLMs start embedding memory where now they have a history of what Patrick has asked maybe history of all of Patrick's activities all of a sudden if that foundational model has a history which is stored in some data persistent store, all of a sudden the switching cost now become greater because you don't want to lose all that history. So that's an example where like databases will play an increasing important role as people start using AI but leveraging also all the history of what you've done, what actions you've taken, who you've kind of communicated with, et cetera.”
2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“2040 is a long time away, so it almost feels, especially in this world of AI, it seems like three months is almost. I would say our whole goal, our whole strategy is to really actually get the database out of the way of the developer so that they could really focus on building great applications, embedding really great logic to enable people to do wonderful things. And so the problem with existing databases is that it takes such a tax in figuring out how to work with data that so much time and effort is spent by developers working around the constraints of the existing database. Our goal is to remove those constraints so they can just focus on building great business logic. Obviously with AI and all the reasoning capabilities that come with AI, the power of these applications will be far greater than what even we see today and how the transformative impact of what it will do to businesses, I think, is to be determined if I knew all the”
2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“History, et cetera. And so if you can keep all that information in the context of one document, all of a sudden, it's much more natural and intuitive to work with that data. And that's why MongDB's developer adoption really took off and truly, we are the most popular modern database in the world. So that's a reason why databases are so important. So when you think about an application, whether that's a gaming application using at home, whether it's a mobile app you're using on your phone, whether it's an enterprise app you're using on your computer, there's a database behind that application. That's the persistent data store that stores that information. And you can argue, I mean, the joke is every web app is basically an HTML wrapper or doing a CRUD function on a database. Databases are incredibly important and they're also very sticky. I don't think I'm telling any lies when I say Oracle is not exactly the most liked vendor in the world, but there's still tons of Oracle databases around because it's such a sticky application.”
2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whether they're XML databases, in-memory databases, graph databases. A lot of my friends said, why do you think MongaDB is going to be the winner? And when I thought about this problem, one of the things that got me excited about MongoDB when I joined was that the developer adoption of MongoDB was very high because what developers were really excited by was that the way all other databases made you work with data was in a tabular format. A database is think about it as really like an Excel spreadsheet on steroids and everything is organized on rows and columns. What the founders among AV did was they came up with this novel approach of organizing data in documents. And the reason that that was novel was that it really aligned to the way developers think and code. So all of a sudden, I didn't have to go to this cognitive load of translating what a product looked like into a data setting, a bunch of tables or what a customer looked like and then decomposing that customer into a bunch of data sitting across different tables, whether it's name, location, or”
2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the very basic level, if you go to any website, once the shopping website or travel website, it's all about the data. So imagine going to a shopping website and there being no data. It'd be completely useless. Same with a travel website. So when you think about what a development team has to do, about 70% of their time is spent working with data. How do I present the right information or the right data at the right time to the right user with the relevant context? And so working with data takes an enormous amount of effort for a developer. So a database plays an important role for how people think about building and constructing applications because there's so much about the data. And one of the challenges in the database business is that if you don't have developer adoption, don't have a business. When I joined MongoDB, one of the knocks on MongoDB was there's been a whole generation of modern databases that have tried to be the next Oracle or potentially the Oracle killer, but they've all failed.”
2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As a public company, we obviously saw a big, big opportunity as a big driver of our growth. When I joined the company in 2014, we were doing about 30 million revenue. Now we're close to a $2 billion run rate business. So that's an example where we saw an opportunity and we really double down with this technology transition to cloud, the way people were consuming infrastructure as a service and felt we had a big opportunity.”
2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Platform. We think we have a highly scalable performing platform. We see thousands of startups building AI apps already on MongDB. So to me, that's a good crystal ball into the future in terms of where large enterprises are going, but it's still very, very early days. Then the question is, how much of the workflow do we need to own ourselves versus where do we need to partner? For example, when we launch our cloud business, this was in 2016 a year before going public. A lot of people thought we were crazy. We were the first infrastructure service that was launched across the hyperscalers. A lot of people thought, wait, you're going to partner and compete with like Amazon, Azure, and GCP. They said they're going to eat you for lunch. And what they didn't fully appreciate was that the product market for FomongDB was”
2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can be both exciting and scary. There's some degree of is this an opportunity and a threat? In some ways, it can be both. And I think obviously we're working on is trying to really understand for us our primary customer is the developer and how does the developer workflow change in a world of AI. I'm not one to believe that you don't need more developers because all of a sudden developer productivity grows 10x. There's no development team right now that doesn't have a backlog of things they want to do. And I think if you look at every generation technology transition from the mainframe to client server to the internet to cloud and mobile, the cost of building apps went dramatically down. So one, you had far more apps and a lot more data. And I think with AI, you can see a step forward increase in developer productivity, which means that you'll see that many more applications. Consequently, I think we're going to be a beneficiary of that. But that being said, how do we position ourselves to be a winner? We think we have the flexible.”
2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can essentially, when I'm not from my computer, I can use my phone to do work, which is pretty profound when you think about where we've come. So I think the same thing is going to happen in the AI world where we're going to go from these simple chatbots that give you answers to questions and tools that help you summarize and research information to doing things far more profound, leveraging real-time data to really make smart decisions about how you're running your business.”
2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the ROI equation, but the returns will come in through the apps that customers see in terms of whether you deliver great customer experiences, whether you drive a lot of costs out of your business through automation, or whether you either create new business models or disrupt existing business models with the use of AI. So I think that's on the come. The analogy I use with my team is the iPhone App Store when it first came out came out a year after the iPhone was released. The first set of apps are incredibly trivial. You may remember the flashlight app. You may remember stupid apps like IBR where you could simulate drinking a beer from your phone. Why people would build those apps was still not clear to me, but they were very simplistic and trivial. But then all of a sudden, when people really viewed the iPhone as an important computing device and people were running businesses from their phone or consumers were really having amazing experiences, you had things like Uber and Airbnb and enterprises building iPhone apps.”
2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Feel thought there were a linchpin of building out the broadband internet, and everyone wanted high-speed internet access. But March 2000 is also when the bubble burst. And people look back and said, was Cisco really values fairly when it was valued like, I think, like 300 times P multiple, which doesn't make obviously a lot of sense. So the obvious question is that now people look at NVIDIA and saying, is NVIDIA really the Cisco of 2000 or some people asking, is NVIDIA the Google of 2003? even though they accrued a lot of value, they're on the cusp of being the seminal company for the next 10, 15 years. I don't know the answer to that question, but one thing NVIDIA is not trading at 300 times their PE multiple. There's obviously tons of demand of compute. And one thing we do know is that the more compute you have, the bigger breakthroughs you can have in these AI models. So one is the value is definitely first accruing at the bottom layer of the stack. But I do think, and that's where the I is going.”
2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Obviously, the transition we're talking about now is this transition to AI and what it means. Obviously, when OpenAI released ChatGPT, it kind of made AI feel real for people because all of a sudden you can use general common English language to engage with a computer and give you answers and generate content that never happened before. So it kind of made things feel much more real where before AI was the purview of machine learning and engineers and data scientists. I've learned a couple lessons because I've been through a number of these, I would say I've been through three transitions, the move to the internet in the mid late 90s, obviously cloud and mobile about a decade ago. And now obviously we're going through the AI transition. A couple lessons learned is one is value always accrues first at the bottom layer of the stack. Think about telephony or the internet. In March of 2000, Cisco was the world's most valuable company.”
2024-05-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source