Continuations

Yesterday I did a fireside chat at our portfolio company Shippo and someone asked the question how a company can continue to be successful and grow over a long period of time. My answer was: continue to innovate. A company that wonderfully represents that spirit is MongoDB. Eliot Horowitz, the co-founder and CTO of MongoDB, just announced in a blog post that MongoDB 4.0 will support multi-document transactions. You should go read the post as it is great, including the epic title “MongoDB Drop...

I spent much of yesterday morning at the NASDAQ for the IPO of our portfolio company MongoDB (now trading as MDB). This is a big milestone for technology companies in New York. We have had New York IPOs before, including Etsy in our portfolio, but MongoDB is the first core technology (as opposed to applied technology) company that’s based in New York city to reach this milestone. As someone who came to New York in 1999 at the height of the dotcom bubble, when it first felt like the city could...

Nearly 10 years ago, I wrote a post titled “I Want a New Platform” which led to our investment in MongoDB. At the time the company was called 10gen and had developed a Platform as a Service: a Javascript application server with a built in database. It turned out that we were ahead of the times (this was before Google App Engine and before Node). People wanted infrastructure as a service and AWS grew by leaps and bounds. 10gen found little adoption until the team decided to mothball the applic...

When investing in consumer services, we try to be active users of the services. That tends to provide a fair bit of insight about what is working and what is not (as long as one keeps in mind that one may not be the exact target user!). To do something similar for our more developer directed investments, I have long been meaning to build a little project using MongoDB and Twilio. But usually the extremely rare cycles that I have available for code go into fixing something on DailyLit. Over La...

As I wrote last week, I created Preditter as a project to use some of the technologies that we have invested in. I blogged on Monday about how amazingly easy it is to use the Twilio API. Up today: MongoDB (which has been created by the team at 10gen). Here too, I was blown away by the ease of getting going. You can literally be up and running with MongoDB in minutes (on my Mac laptop I just downloaded and on my Slice running CentOS I used yum). But the thing that I was most pleased about is h...

For the longest time I would have said that the right way to design a cloud application or service is as multi-tenant. But yesterday I was having a conversation with Peter Soderling from NY-based Stratus Security, which provides a secure managed API proxy (in closed beta). Peter said they had chosen to architect their service from day one as a multi-instance solution for added security and performance. If you are unfamiliar with the terms, a multi-tenant architecture commingles the data and p...

The NoSQL movement has been gathering a lot of steam lately (despite some folks misgivings about the name). There have been meetups in major cities around the world – most recently in Berlin – and there is a big conference coming up in Atlanta. I am happy to say that MongoDB has been extremely well represented at all of these and is generating a lot of interest. But what if you can’t make it to any of these places and yet want to learn more? Fear not, the fine folks at 10gen (which sponsors M...

When we invested in 10gen last year, the team was working on a very ambitious approach to deliver an integrated cloud platform a la Google App Engine. While they made amazing progress on that, it turned out that developer interest was focused around the MongoDB datastore. Instead of having to buy into a complete stack, most folks (at least for now) want to continue using a broad choice of technologies and combine elements as they see fit. This appears to be one of the key factors in the treme...

Our portfolio company 10gen has released the core of its MongoDB database under the GNU Affero General Public License (the drivers are licensed under Apache). Some people react to the Affero GPL by saying something along the lines of “that’s a new license which I don’t want to understand or bother with." I have some sympathy for that initial reaction (who wants to figure out legal stuff), but most of the same people would happily use GPL licensed code without checking whether it is v2 or v3. ...

Yesterday I attended MongoDB World here in Manhattan. There was a huge turnout and excellent sessions but the most exciting part of the day for me was the announcement of MongoDB Atlas. Atlas is MongoDB as a service (part of the DBaaS, data base as a service, category). This means you no longer have to worry about configuring servers, you get backup with point-in-time recovery, and your cost is usage based. The reason I am especially excited about this is because we are beginning to come back...