EP 84: Dev Ittycheria’s (CEO, MongoDB) Leadership Lessons From Scaling MongoDB to $25B

Dev Ittycheria is the president and CEO of MongoDB, his third public company as CEO. In this episode, Dev discusses his take on AI, the importance of hiring, how to build an A-plus culture, and many other leadership lessons from scaling MongoDB to $25B. Overall, a really fun conversation with one of the absolute best operators in tech. (0:00) Intro (0:38) Taking the CEO job at MongoDB (2:34) First things Dev changed at MongoDB (5:53) When unicorns were actually rare (7:50) Overcoming Monetization Challenges of Open Source (9:54) MongoDB Atlas and the license change? (19:18) What is the job of the CEO? (22:49) Vulnerability is a strength (27:03) The power of self-awareness as a Leader (29:37) Building an A+ culture (32:43) Holding people accountable (35:04) Keeping feedback loops tight (36:22) How hybrid work helps MongoDB thrive (38:09) RIFs (40:20) 3 steps for holding people accountable (42:03) Why you should always be recruiting (43:55) Dev’s unique recruiting tactics (45:56) Favorite interview questions (46:53) Hiring internally vs externally (50:53) Finding passion for sales (52:58) The perfect job doesn’t exist (55:00) Running BladeLogic (57:18) Ben Horowitz, Mark Andreessen, and John McMahon (1:02:36) How does AI compare to past tech trends? (1:05:47) Conventional Silicon Valley wisdom Dev disagrees with Mixed and edited: Justin Hrabovsky Produced: Rashad Assir Executive Producer: Josh Machiz Music: Griff Lawson 🎙 Listen to the show Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-logan-bartlett-show/id1606770839 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5WqBqDb4br3LlyVrdqOYYb?si=3076e6c1b5c94d63&nd=1 Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zaW1wbGVjYXN0LmNvbS9zb0hJZkhWbg 🎥 Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCugS0jD5IAdoqzjaNYzns7w?sub_confirmation=1 Follow on Socials 📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theloganbartlettshow 🐦 Twitter - https://twitter.com/loganbartshow 🎬 Clips on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@theloganbartlettshow About the Show Logan Bartlett is a Software Investor at Redpoint Ventures - a Silicon Valley-based VC with $6B AUM and investments in Snowflake, DraftKings, Twilio, and Netflix. In each episode, Logan goes behind the scenes with world-class entrepreneurs and investors. If you're interested in the real inside baseball of tech, entrepreneurship, and start-up investing, tune in every Friday for new episodes. Executive Producer: Rashad Assir Producer: Leah Clapper Mixing and editing: Justin Hrabovsky Check out Unsupervised Learning, Redpoint's AI Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@UCUl-s_Vp-Kkk_XVyDylNwLA 🎥 Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCugS0jD5IAdoqzjaNYzns7w?sub_confirmation=1 Follow on Socials 📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theloganbartlettshow 📱 X - https://twitter.com/loganbartshow 🎬 Clips on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@theloganbartlettshow About the Show Logan Bartlett is a Software Investor at Redpoint Ventures - a Silicon Valley-based VC with $6B AUM and investments in Snowflake, DraftKings, Twilio, and Netflix. In each episode of The Logan Bartlett Show, we sit down with the people behind today’s most important startups and extract the tactics, lessons, and frameworks they’ve learned the hard way. Conversations span hiring to GTM, product, growth, fundraising and everything in between - collectively forming the ultimate playbook to make you a better CEO, investor or board member. Tap follow and enable notifications to stay ahead of the game.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Logan Bartlett?

  Welcome to the Logan Bartlett Show. On this episode, what you're going to hear is a conversation I have with Dave Acharia. Dave is the president and CEO of MongoDB, his third public company. In this conversation, Dave and I discuss the importance of hiring, how to build an A-plus culture, the power of self-awareness, and Dave's take on artificial intelligence, as well as the New York tech scene. A really fun conversation with one of the absolute best operators in tech. As a reminder, we do not do advertising on the show, but we would like for you to subscribe to this on whatever channel that you're listening to us on. Now, without further ado, here's Dave. Dave, thanks for doing this.

• 0:42Speaker 01

  My pleasure. Great to be here.

• 0:44Logan Bartlett?

  So, I want to start out in the midpoint of, I guess, your professional career, which is you taking the job at MongoDB. So MongoDB today, it's a juggernaut. I think everyone knows it in the public markets, but at the time of you taking the job, it wasn't quite the juggernaut it is today. What did you see in the business at that time that made you say, hey, this is a job that I want to do?

• 1:09Speaker 01

  Well, first of all, whenever you get a call for a CEO role, the first question I trained myself to ask is what's wrong? Because no one makes a CEO change when things are going perfectly well. And there were a number, when you help have a successful outcome and make investors money, invariably you get called for other roles. And I typically said no to a bunch of them because the problems were quite endemic in the companies that they had asked me to consider leading. I had been a VC for a while, for a couple of years, and I had looked at the next-generation database space. And actually, I looked at some competing investments to MongoDB. I ended up passing on those investments when I did my diligence. And again, this is a lot smaller scale. MongoDB still seemed ahead

• 1:50Speaker 01

  of everyone else in terms of developer momentum, mindshare, and even commercial traction. So when I got the call, I was intrigued. And frankly, one of the questions I thought to myself was maybe I have a chance to invest in MongoDB. And then when I met with the board and some members of the executive team and the founders, what I saw was that the product team was in pretty good shape, but I was dismayed at their go-to-market efforts and was a little underwhelmed with the leadership that was in place. And I thought to myself, normally that would scare people, but I thought to myself, if this company is the head of the pack... And it's clearly got at best a B team. Imagine what would happen if an A team came in. And so as I thought about that, I got more and more conviction and I decided to take the role.

• 2:35Speaker 01

  And that's how I ended up here.

• 2:37Logan Bartlett?

  When you came in, you can't do it all at once. You can't change everything the second you come in. What were the first things that you went about changing?

• 2:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a really good point because anyone who's trying to be a change agent, you can't try and fix everything all at once because you'll just fail. So you have to sequence things in terms of what you need to fix now versus later. So I took the approach of starting with a customer and working backwards into the core product. Because my instincts told me that the go to market organization was not very good. Kindly quite dysfunctional. I remember I hadn't actually started and I got a call saying, hey, we have this important meeting with a with a customer, a senior executive at Verizon. And so I said, would you mind taking a, you know, a call because they're trying to say you up and you join to meet with this customer? So sure, I'm happy to. And so I'm on the a call with this account team.

• 3:28Speaker 01

  And I could tell like the county didn't really, the leader of the team didn't really have all the facts. So I was starting to ask the rep more and more specific questions. And finally I asked the rep, so where are you based? I said, maybe, you know, we can just meet for a coffee just to get a little more detail, just so I could have a one on one conversation with him. And he said, he's based in Atlanta. I said, how can a rep who's covering Verizon be based in Atlanta? So that was one of many examples of what I saw with some of the dysfunction at MongoDB. So I started basically working from the customer backwards. And I said, as I fix the go to market and in particular, sales organization, then the fidelity of the feedback I get on product will be that much more clear than I'll know what exactly I need to fix on the product side.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  So methodically, we basically, actually in my first 90 days, we did a big rip of a bunch of the salespeople because they just weren't very good. The track record also showed that. Then I brought in a new CRO, I brought in new CMO, and then nine months later, after I started, I brought in a new CFO.

• 4:30Logan Bartlett?

  So the core atomic unit of the product was mostly working well and you had to make some changes along the way to make sure the product had the right fidelity?

• 4:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, so what we realized, and I knew this going in, was that the read performance for MongoDB was very good, but there were some limitations on write performance or people weren't really comfortable for using MongoDB for write intensive use cases. And we had to fix that. And the product teams and engineering teams were working on rewriting our storage engine, but that was a pretty big lift. And in the middle of this, we got to meet the Wired Tiger team, which is a bunch of ex-Berklee DB guys who were very, very sophisticated database architects and engineers who had 20-plus years in the industry. And they had actually had a storage engine that was optimized for both read and write performance. And so we got very excited and we were actually worried because some of the customers included

• 5:22Speaker 01

  AWS and a few other larger, you know, organizations. So we were nervous that that technology and that team could be acquired under our feet. And so we moved pretty quickly. The company didn't have a tremendous amount of cash, you know, even though it raised a lot of capital, it burned through a lot of capital. So we also had to do a financing at the same time to fund that acquisition, but we were able to pull that off. And then the Wired Tiger storage engine became the core storage engine for the product, which enabled us to really broaden our use case and, you know, be on the march to be a general-purpose platform.

• 5:56Logan Bartlett?

  So this was 2014?

• 5:58Speaker 01

  2014, 2015.

• 5:59Logan Bartlett?

  And so you're making plans to go public around this time?

• 6:04Speaker 01

  Not yet, no. When I came into the business, the company had raised, was actually one of the first unicorns, when unicorns were actually rare. And, but that fundraise was underwritten by a very aggressive operating plan. It was clear that the company had no chance of hitting it, which is why the board decided to make a CO change.

• 6:21Logan Bartlett?

  And you reset the plan when you came in?

• 6:24Speaker 01

  Yes. And for people, again, who are change agents, one of the things I also think is very important for people to feel like they're winning, and the plan was just so unattainable, the worst thing you can do is, you know, keep feeling like you're failing. So I went to the board and said, this plan is not realistic. Obviously, I have the benefit of not the one who actually wrote the original plan. And I went back to them and said, here's what I think is a more realistic plan. The board, in their wisdom, agreed. And then, once you have a new plan and then you start beating your numbers, all of a sudden, you know, you start, people feel like they have their mojo, suddenly they feel like they're winners again, and you just start building morale and momentum in the business.

• 7:01Logan Bartlett?

  So when you joined, how many people were there?

• 7:03Speaker 01

  There was roughly About 350 people and then with the riff, we went down to about 250 people.

• 7:07Logan Bartlett?

  Wow. So so laid off about 100 people to come in and then slowly built back up over the course of what? How long did it take you to get back to 350 people or so?

• 7:17Speaker 01

  I don't remember exactly, but my philosophy in the first phase was just we just had to get our go to market executions out. We had to be able to, you know, do what we say and say what we do. We could have to be able to forecast the business, be able to then meet and exceed those forecasts. We had to rebuild how we actually prosecute a deals. You know, you've talked to John McMahon about the whole, you know, a sales process at Blade Logic. So I had a lot of experience in that way. The first CRO was an ex Blade Logic PTC guy named Carlos Delatorre, who helped me kind of really restructure and put the basic foundations in place. And then low and behold, the business started, you know, growing very quickly.

• 7:53Logan Bartlett?

  One of the knocks on open source up until that point was that it was very difficult to monetize. Red Hat had been the one that had been able to make it and become a big public company, but there there weren't a litany of examples of open source companies in the public markets that I've been able to successfully scale in a meaningful way. How did you think about that? The the trade off between the ability to monetize the community, all of that stuff when you came in?

• 8:20Speaker 01

  It's a great question. And frankly, when I told my friends and people I trusted, I was contemplating taking this job, they thought I was crazy. They said, first, a database company in New York? That's crazy.

• 8:28Logan Bartlett?

  When was the last database company that went public before you? It was 25 years.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  25 years. Yeah. Yes. The second thing was like a open source, like this, you know, who's made money in open source? And then just the database space itself, forget about New York, there was a lot of, you know, next generation database companies that died on the vine, trying to be the next big Oracle killer. So all the kind of conventional wisdom was against that. And the big one, what I worried about was how to be monetized open source, because the traditional open source model is you have to define the paywall between what's free and what's paid for. And to some degree, it's a Thaustian bargain, because you you give away a lot of features to drive adoption. It's very hard to monetize. And if you don't give away enough features, then you don't have a lot of adoption. So there's not a lot of installed base to then go monetize. So you're kind of trapped in in this Thaustian bargain.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  One of the things I realized in actually watching AWS is that they were monetizing open source as a service really, really well because we're no longer defining a particular paywall. You're defining monetization based on usage. So that fundamentally changed the paradigm about how open source technology was to be used. And so essentially, we started recognizing that that had to be our long-term future, but you just couldn't go there overnight. Now, luckily, we had been investing in management tools because that was the existing way we were monetizing the technology. Whatever the developer needed to build applications was free, but whatever you needed to kind of monitor and manage and back up your infrastructure was paid for. So we were starting to build tools, which ended up being the ingredients for how we actually rolled out our cloud service.

• 9:57Logan Bartlett?

  What came first, MongoDB Atlas or the license change?

• 10:00Speaker 01

  MongoDB Atlas.

• 10:01Logan Bartlett?

  MongoDB's DB Atlas. So can you talk a little bit about that? Because you guys were one of the pioneers in coming out with a cloud-first kind of open core model around that, right?

• 10:11Speaker 01

  Yes, this was pre-snowflaking, popular, pre-confluent, pre-elastic, pre-a bunch of other companies trying to roll out cloud services. A lot of people thought we were crazy. A lot of people thought, how is it that you're going to partner and compete with hyperscalers? Because we just didn't have the capital to go build our own data centers and then try and get all developers to come to us. We had to leverage the existing infrastructure that the hyperscalers have built, but they also offer their own competitive database offerings. So a lot of people were incredibly skeptical. One of the things that changed with rolling out a cloud service is that we felt we were really talking to the people who loved our product. Because the existing monetization model was while the developers adopted MongoDB, the people who bought our proprietary software were the ops folks because they were trying to solve a DevOps problem. They really viewed MongoDB as a relationship of convenience.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  Developers had a relationship of love. So for them, it was just, I guess, if you have to deploy MongoDB, I should buy your tools. So it was always a very painful engagement with the customer. But once you start dealing with the development teams and saying, you can get out of the world of all this undifferentiated labor. You don't have to worry about provisioning, configuring, and managing, and backing up your infrastructure. We'll take care of all that for you. All you can focus on is what really is meaningful to your business is building amazing apps that transform your business. That suddenly got people's attention. And so what was also interesting is the launch of Atlas forced us to build a self-serve business. Because initially, we only offered on self-serve, where we basically, with a credit card, you could go provision a cluster. At first AWS, then we rolled it out to GCP and Azure.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  And that also enabled us to start acquiring customers in a much more frictionalist way. And even today, when you look at the Atlas business, the majority of our customers are quote-unquote "sales sold", but the origin of those customers, the majority of it just still self-serve. And that's a very interesting dynamic and in some ways a virtuous circle.

• 11:59Logan Bartlett?

  What was the hardest part about getting that going? Was it getting the sales reps to sell the product? Was it figuring out the pricing model? Was it actually building the product itself to service it?

• 12:10Speaker 01

  The way we framed it was building a startup with a startup. And then we were very emphatic that this, we could not fail. And so from the board on down, this was viewed as a very strategic imperative. And one of the challenges when you're starting something small, when we went public, Atlas was like 1% or 2% of our business. So the numbers really didn't matter that much. So consequently, it's very easy to ignore this little thing you're trying to do when you focus on the core business. So one of the other things I did was I disproportionately incentivized the exec team on the performance of our Atlas business disproportionately to the scale of the Atlas business, because it was so important to make sure that they had mind share. The other thing that we also really focused on was having a clear, single-threaded leader.

• 12:52Speaker 01

  So now was a guy named Sahir Azza, was now a Chief Product Officer. He had this unique ability of being very good on the product and technology side, but also really good in front of customers and kind of knew how to preach the gospel of Atlas. And changing behavior is hard. And looking back now, it says, wow, this ended up being a great success. But like any success story, when you zoom into the, up into the right line, there's a lot of jagged edges. And in getting the sales force to change behavior, because they knew how to sell the on-prem product and recognizing that your primary customer is no longer the ops person, but now it's the development team, getting to understand you have to sell the total cost of ownership, that getting to understand what is the true value proposition. Of a cloud service takes time and you just got to be, you know,

• 13:37Speaker 01

  maniacal about that execution and just constantly train and enable the sales force to do that. And that takes, that, that just didn't happen overnight. So we started with self-serve, then we migrated to kind of the SMB space and high-tech organizations who are more inclined to use Atlas. And then later we went into the high end of the enterprise segment.

• 13:57Logan Bartlett?

  Were you spiffing the reps? Cause I assume the dollars between each, the long-term value of cloud Atlas and obviously the equity value it's created has been pretty significant. But the dollars upfront of selling Mongo on-prem, I assume had to be more. Is that how you kind of did the incentive alignment?

• 14:12Speaker 01

  It was similar in the early days because we paid the salespeople on commitments on ACV. But, but over time, we realized that was a mistake with a cloud business because a lot of the apps being rolled on Atlas were new apps. And so customers didn't really know how much would the consumption be? How big would the app grow? How many users would it have? How much data would be consumed? And so there was this lot of friction to force a customer to come into a commitment prematurely. So over time, we changed incentives to encourage customers just to get on Atlas. And then, once they felt like they had clarity on the growth trajectory, then they could come back and get a better discount based on some volume commitment. And we've constantly iterated on that, you know, sales incentive. In fact, now over the last four or five years, it's changed all the way

• 14:57Speaker 01

  to where we're all in on consumption, but it started by a more traditional incentive mindset.

• 15:04Logan Bartlett?

  Were you worried at all about cannibalizing the existing business? Or was it clear that this was just going to be the long-term future when you came in?

• 15:10Speaker 01

  There was a little bit of worry, but it was clear like our business wasn't that big that we had this like large installed base. I mean, remember I joined the company when there was about 30 million revenue. When we filed our S1, we were doing a little over 100 million revenue. And so it was not a huge business. And obviously today now we're roughly about at 1.7 billion dollar run rate.

• 15:27Logan Bartlett?

  That's wild. Now, now the other big change, I think that was notable that you guys helped pioneer was a license shift. And so for people that aren't nerds in the open source world, can you maybe talk through the difference between AGPL and SSPL and what was a fairly controversial decision at, at the time and how you went about making that?

• 15:48Speaker 01

  Right, so when you looked at what the cloud providers were doing, what they were doing was basically taking the free versions of very popular open source projects, MySQL and a bunch of other, for example, Postgres, etc. And basically plugging those technologies into their cloud and offering as a service, and they were making money hand over fist.

• 16:07Logan Bartlett?

  This is Amazon and Microsoft and Google and all them are.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  Correct. And so what we were concerned about was that the hyperscalers or someone else might do the same with us, what people in the industry call strip mining. And AGPL, it has more restrictions than, say, GPL or the Apache license, but there's still some ambiguity in the language. And what we said is, we've got the sense is as our success started to take off, we got the sense, you know what, someone's going to try and test how strict this license is, and we didn't want to find ourselves litigating this in court. So we made the decision that we need to come out with our own proprietary licenses, which adhere to all the principles of open source. You know, you can have access to source code, you can modify the code, you could obviously distribute the code.

• 16:56Speaker 01

  But what you couldn't do, or if you decided to do, was to offer MongoDB as a service, you had to open source all the extensions you made to MongoDB, as well as all the online infrastructure to offer that service. And we said that seems very reasonable, because if you choose to do that, you just need to give it back to the community. It was candidly quite a contentious discussion. We tried to socialize this and get the OSI, which was the body that approves open source licenses, and they were up in arms and said, we don't, this is not real open source. And a lot of people said, oh my God, we might risk our adoption, because MongoDB is quite popular, and our adoption might dry out, because people will not want to use a non-sanctioned open source product. And I thought about this problem,

• 17:37Speaker 01

  and I thought to myself, if you're a developer in Shanghai, or Mumbai, or Palo Alto, or New York... Yes, so long as it, you know, has remained consistent to the open source principles, are you really going to care that much whether or not it's an OSI sanctioned license versus a license that enables you to do what you want to do, but more importantly, the product is the best product to solve the problem that you're trying to address. And the bet was that developers wouldn't care about this. And ultimately, that bet paid off. But there were definitely some gnashing of teeth when we made that decision.

• 18:08Logan Bartlett?

  And now, a lot of people have followed suit, or other people is using actually the SSPL.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  Yes, a lot of people have used SSPL. There's a derivative called BSL, which kind of was the inspiration based on SSPL, where there's more protections around people strip mining open source data.

• 18:22Logan Bartlett?

  Which is basically, I mean, one of the beauties of open source is that it allows for distribution, it allows people to use it for their own intent, if they want a service, if they want to use it, however they see fit. But if you want to commercially use the product, you have to be willing to give back. And so, the only people this is really hurting, I think, are the big cloud providers that are trying to offer it as their own. Is that fair?

• 18:45Speaker 01

  Or regional cloud providers who also want to do some things like that. Yeah, and our belief was that, when you think about what's important for the end user, the end users are not going to care. So it's only people who have mercenary interests are going to, you know, be annoyed about this, so that that doesn't bother us. And what, you know, the whole strategy was, we want to benefit from the virality and the distribution of open source while building a moat like a typical software company. And that's essentially was our strategy, and ultimately, that strategy has paid off.

• 19:12Logan Bartlett?

  And this has allowed a lot of open source, open core businesses to now actually monetize and be able to build themselves into big companies as well.

• 19:20Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 19:21Logan Bartlett?

  I want to shift gears a little bit. Is this your third or fourth company as CEO?

• 19:24Speaker 01

  Third.

• 19:25Logan Bartlett?

  Third company as CEO, third public company as well, right? What do you view as the job of the CEO?

• 19:30Speaker 01

  I think there's different definitions for different types of CEOs. In my definition, and I'll give Mark McLaughlin from the old CEO at Palo Alto Networks, he kind of informed my thinking around what a CEO should do. And the basic point is that I can do a thousand things. I can do this podcast, I do a lot of customer meetings, I do a lot of employee meetings, I do review, have quarterly review sessions and QBRs to review, to attend sales forecast reviews, et cetera. But if I don't do three things well, and I do another 997 things well, I failed. And what are those three things? First, what is the company's strategy? What are we trying to do? Where are we trying to go? And how are we trying to get there? Two, do I have the right people, especially at the executive level, to go execute on that

• 20:15Speaker 01

  strategy? And three, have I removed all the obstacles, whether it's resourcing, whether it's culture, whether it's organizational alignment, to make sure that we can actually are set up for success? So I can do all those other things, but I don't do those three things well, in my mind, I failed. And so to me, that's essentially what I think is intrinsic to my job.

• 20:35Logan Bartlett?

  At some level, being CEO also means being like a super head of HR and recruiting talent and being able to get people within the org. How do you think about that and managing a team as a core component?

• 20:48Speaker 01

  Well, I tell my team, and I tell actually everyone at the company, we're not in the database business, we're not in the software business, we're in the people business. Because people are the means to an end to everything. And invariably, all the issues we're dealing with, you know, what's going well, what's going sideways, what's going really poorly, is all tied to people. In fact, I had an offsite with the leadership team a couple of weeks ago, and I did a review of all the projects that we've done really well, and all the projects that have struggled. And what was the root cause of those is that we didn't have what we call the right DRI, the directly responsible individual, who had the skills and experience to either lead those projects, or in some cases, it wasn't clear who the DRI was, so there was shared accountability.

• 21:30Speaker 01

  And as Jeff Bezos says, if you want something to fail, make it their part-time job. And so, to me, having the right people in the right roles is so critical to everything. And so a lot of people, a lot of organizations have this aspiration, I want to do X, I want to go Y. That's the easy part. It's the day in, day out, blocking and tackling, you know, having the right team, focusing on what good looks like, measuring progress, inspecting deeply on how things are going well, identifying issues, whether it are people issues, alignment issues, other problems, and just, you know, doing that day in and day out is what really differentiates companies that execute well versus companies who aspire to execute well but just don't.

• 22:10Logan Bartlett?

  So every strategic initiative you guys have internally has a DRI that's responsible and accountable for it?

• 22:16Speaker 01

  Yes, and that's a hot button for me. I mean, there's times when it's not clear and we say we need to have identify the right DRI. So that'll be like step one. And the role of DRI is to define ID, i.e. what does good look like and what timeframe? What is a plan to get there? And then what, how do we measure progress? And then ultimately, that person or that associated team will then come and report if it's an important initiative that will come and report to me and the exec team on progress. And I would candidly say we've done those, some of those really well, and some of those have been a little haphazard. And we're trying to sharpen our execution there to become even better.

• 22:52Logan Bartlett?

  I've heard you say early in your career that you viewed, you didn't view vulnerability as a strength. But now it's, it's become something that you're, you're proactive about and being willing to say that you don't know the answer to something when that's the case. Can you talk a little bit about that?

• 23:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think for people listening, you probably have a lot of founders and first time CEOs who are listening to this podcast. And I can tell you that most people go through massive imposter syndrome. You know, investors wire them the money. Now there's a team in place and you're like, holy shit, you know, this is real. And if you've never done it before, this, it's not like you can suddenly like suddenly magically learn everything overnight. And so when I was a first time CEO, I felt this enormous pressure to be the all-knowing on every facet of the business, whether it's products, marketing, sales, finance, et cetera. And over time, I realized I was really frustrating my team because I felt like I had to have my imprint on every decision.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  And I would micromanage some decisions or I'd come in over the top and claim credit to decisions that other people had already come up with. And it was getting to be dysfunctional. I could sense that I was not being very effective. I could sense I was frustrating my team. And I had an epiphany one day and said, I don't need to have all the answers. What I need to do is one, have the right people around me and be able to ask good questions and make sure that the most important things are being done well. And what's interesting is I also realized like, you know, being in a meeting and, and being the village in a meeting is actually very powerful because If I ask a question that some people perceive as a dumb question like, hey, I don't understand what you're saying. Or this doesn't make sense to me. You could see the people in the room just relax and say, thank God they've asked that question because I had the same question.

• 24:32Speaker 01

  But I didn't want to look stupid in front of my peers by asking that question. And the problem with um um a lot, what holds people back is shame. Right? If you think about an innovative culture where people want to, you know, experiment and by definition, it's not an experiment. If you use a guaranteed success, so some experiments are going to work and some are going to fail. And so if there's a high, if shame is very toxic in your in your culture, then by definition, you're not going to take a lot of risk. And so being more vulnerable is really a strength because it enables people to to really take more risk. Talk about real issues, not talk about some, you know, highfalutin stuff, deal with problems as they come. And acknowledge that we don't have all the answers, but together we can get those answers.

• 25:16Logan Bartlett?

  How does that tie into being a student of the game and not a master of the game?

• 25:19Speaker 01

  So that saying comes into a philosophy high around leadership, which is like, as your leaders, you constantly have to adapt. How I was a CEO at La Logic in two thousand and one and how I am today are two very different people. And I think one of the lessons I've learned, and we've gone through lots of leadership changes here at MongoDB as we scaled from a thirty million dollar business to a one point seven billion dollar run rate business is that the business needs different styles of leadership at different stages of growth. And, you know, obviously managing two hundred and fifty people is very different than managing close to five thousand people. And when I see leaders fail is they don't adapt because they can't. And one of the signals for me on how effective leaders is going to be is can they introspect on what's going well? What they're doing well and also what's not going well?

• 26:04Speaker 01

  And then can they act on that introspection? A lot of people can do the first part where they can introspect, but a lot of people just can't adapt and evolve their style because they realize the way they were doing things is just not working anymore. I mean, candidly, uh, right after we went public, I had to, I parted ways with our CRO. And so that's a pretty, you know, if you think about it, pretty frightening thought. You're a newly minted public company and a quarter after you go public, you part ways with the CRO. And I became the interim CRO until promoting our existing CRO was Cedric Pesch, who was running Europe at the time. And he's done a fabulous job, but. One of the reasons is that leaders just can't adapt as the business is growing.

• 26:45Speaker 01

  And so, and so being a student of the game is meaning that you're very curious and you're also very coachable, right? But you're curious because I want to understand what I'm doing well, what more I need to do, how I need to adapt to different situations, domains, you know, and, and experiences. And then have the mindset that I constantly have to learn and grow.

• 27:06Logan Bartlett?

  How does self-awareness tie into that? And also the Steve Wolfsky two circles point?

• 27:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, so for those people trying to figure out what that meant was, uh, I remember, uh, I was having a discussion with Steve Wolfsky, who was, uh, the chairman, CEO of PTC and, um,

• 27:21Logan Bartlett?

  Mentor of yours.

• 27:22Speaker 01

  And mentor of yours. Yeah. So, uh, when I, when I started PlayLogic, I'd never worked at a software company and obviously I'd never been a CEO of a software company. So I very, was very clear that I had a lot to learn. So I went to my board and said, who's the best software CEO in Boston? And they all said this guy named Steve Wolfsky. They said, yeah, but he eats nails for breakfast. Here's the number, but good luck. So I kept pounding the phone either every week or every other week. Finally he returned my call. I met with him and for some reason we clicked and he decided first to be an advisor, then later he became a board member and then ultimately chairman of PlayLogic. So one day we're in, you know, having a debate and discussion about a person. And then he, he went to the whiteboard and draw two concentric circles. And he says, Dave, this is the meaning of life. And I looked at those two concentric circles like, Target? What's he talking about?

• 28:05Speaker 01

  And he goes, what he said was, the outer circle is how people believe they really are, who they are. The inner circle is really who they are. And the point he was saying was that people always have an overinflated opinion of themselves. Now it's fine because there's always going to be some gap between your own self-perception versus what others perceive of you. But when that gap is really wide, that's when real damage can be done. And, um, you know, one of John McMahon, who I've worked with on a couple of companies, one of his best lines in terms of assessing how self-aware someone is, is he asked people, what do you think people say about you when you leave the room? And the most self-aware people can be quite on point about what acknowledging their strengths and weaknesses. The most self-unaware people have no clue.

• 28:48Speaker 01

  They just have a completely different picture of who they are. And what I've found is that the best leaders are incredibly self-aware. Why? Because they can read the room, they can see what messages are landing, what messages are not, how they have to adapt their style. Maybe eight out of 10 people are bought in, but there's two peoples who look pretty grumpy are not happy. So he or she knows that they need to go talk to those two people to figure out what's going on with them. And also, also understand their own biases, what triggers them, and also what they may kind of have blind spots to. And so, being self-aware is incredibly important to being an effective leader.

• 29:23Speaker 02

  Hey guys, Rashad here. I'm the producer of the Logan Bartlett Show and wanted to take a quick second to make an ask. We are close to 10,000 subscribers and are trying to get there by the end of the year. If you're enjoying this conversation and these episodes, please consider subscribing to the YouTube channel. Now, back to the show.

• 29:40Logan Bartlett?

  I've heard from people that you work with, and even am prepped for this, that you all have built a very transparent culture here. How do you go about building transparency within the culture and honesty and all of that?

• 29:52Speaker 01

  I think it's also tied to vulnerability. One of my pet peeves, I started off my career at a larger company. I started, I came out of engineering school, I went to AT&T, Bell Labs division. And AT&T had some amazing people, but the culture there was very passive aggressive. And it's quite endemic, when Blay Logico acquired by BMC, the culture there was very passive aggressive. And to me, passive aggressiveness is a form of duplicity. You know, imagine you're in a meeting, the senior leader's running the meeting, you're, they're debating and discussing a topic, the senior says, "I think we should do this." And everyone nods politely and says, "Yes, that's the right thing to do." The meeting ends, everyone walks out of the conference room, and then they roll their eyes and say, "That'll never work." That to me is a form of passive aggressiveness. Like, I want to create a culture where we can have fierce conversations and debates constructively

• 30:37Speaker 01

  about what to do or what not to do. But at the end of the day, the best idea wins, not the most senior leader's idea wins, right? And that is amazing because it creates a culture of meritocracy. So no matter who you are, if you have, you know, an insight that you think is incredibly valuable, you should feel comfortable sharing it and, and, and people will buy in if they think that, that idea has merit. And so, um, so that's super important. And also transparency also means talking about the bad stuff. Lot of companies, and actually when I got here, the joke was the management team before me would only talk about good things, would never talk about bad things. And I always found when I was a younger employee that it insulted my intelligence when senior leaders kind of basically, um, you know, communicated in a propaganda kind of way.

• 31:21Speaker 01

  Like, I was like, okay, come on, that's not really true. And I think most people can see right through you. And so I always felt it's really important to build credibility is to really talk about both what's going well and what the real issues and problems are in the business and how are we going to talk about them? Because once, what was interesting, and I do that with the board as well, and I mentor younger CEOs, saying, when you tell an experienced board member that everything is going fabulously well, they either will immediately think one or two things. Either you don't know what you don't know, or you're lying to them. Because every company, even the best run companies, has something blowing up somewhere. Right? And so I start my meetings, always talking about problems. Here's the issues and challenges I'm struggling with. Here's what's going on, team dynamics, here's, you know, people I'm worried about. Um, you know, when the team comes in, this is where I encourage you to probe, blah, blah, blah.

• 32:06Speaker 01

  And what's interesting is the more, um, my commitment to the board is they should, will typically never hear any bad news, uh, you know, um, they'll typically hear bad news from me first. What it does is it disarms the board because the board never feels like I'm trying to hide information and then they're leaning in to help me. And in fact, the board has commented, I give them a lot of access to people, multiple levels below me, so I have teams come in based on, say, we're talking about a particular project or picked a particular function. So they love that they have visibility, many levels, layers into the organization for, you know, one, more transparency, two, they can see the, the depth of our bench and get a sense of, you know, the culture that we have. And I find that incredibly powerful.

• 32:46Logan Bartlett?

  I spoke to one of your former board members and he said that you are one of the best people he's ever worked with on doing what you say you're gonna do and holding people accountable so that they actually execute on whatever said is actually gonna be done. How do you go about building a culture of accountability and actually making sure people follow through on what they say they're gonna do?

• 33:06Speaker 01

  This is tied to something else. I always believe bad news travels very slowly up the organization but very quickly down the organization. Good news will find me anywhere. I could be in a beach in the south of France, I could be in Hawaii or Tahiti and good news will find me. But bad news I have to go looking for. And so whenever I hear bad news, I immediately assume two things. One, I'm the last to know. And two, it's far worse than what people are telling me because invariably people always modify or shave a little bit of the truths to be a little bit more diplomatic. And a simple example would be you have a customer who's threatening to throw you out, the sales team tells their sales manager, "We have a problem at Acme Company," you know, over multiple layers, the way it comes to me is that we're dealing with a slight problem

• 33:51Speaker 01

  at Acme Company, but then two months later the customer returns. And you're like, "How the heck did that happen?" Now, we don't do that here, but that's an example of what happens in most companies. So we try to really encourage sharing of bad news and we try not to shoot the messenger. Sometimes, you know, some people are not good at that, but that's really important because you can't get people to share bad news that feel like they're gonna get punished for it. And then what that also does is that it elevates problems quickly. And I always believe that people don't perform, always perform to what you expect, they perform to what you inspect. So if you have a high culture of inspection, "How is this project going? What's happening in the forecast? What's happening with that person? What's happening with that team?" You end up invariably finding out what's going on.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  And the more inspection you have, not micromanagement inspection and you do part of your operating rhythm, the more quickly you can identify problems. And so, and this is back to the DRI thing, like if you have a good DRI who's very clear what good looks like, has bond from key stakeholders and you're clear on the measurements, then when they come and report, it's very easy to now... Report on progress against the metrics that we think we defined as success. And when things are, you know, say falling behind plan, then you start escalating that and saying, I have a problem, you know, we need to fix these issues.

• 35:07Logan Bartlett?

  Feedback loops, keeping those very tight. It's super important with companies in general, but certainly fast growing companies so that you can be held accountable to what you say you're going to do and also be able to iterate pretty quickly. How do you go about keeping feedback loops tight within Mongo?

• 35:22Speaker 01

  I think feedback is a gift. I think in every facet of life, feedback's important, whether it's feedback in your personal life, if your partner's annoyed at you, you want to hear that feedback because then you don't know what's irritating or upsetting them. And then in the business side, the shorter the feedback loops, the more responsive you can be, especially to customer needs or market opportunities, you know? And the classic example is look at government functions. The feedback loops are very long. Imagine going to the Department of Motor Vehicles, you know, you want to pull your hair out because they're not that attuned to customer feedback. And so to me, feedback is very, very important. And that again, it's created by a culture of high trust, being comfortable sharing bad news, having positive intent, and then actually acting on it. Because the worst thing you can do is give feedback and no one does anything about it.

• 36:06Speaker 01

  And so then you say like, this company doesn't care, or this person doesn't care. So you have to have a bias to action. Now, sometimes you can say, I hear you, but this is not as important as some other things we're trying to do and we're going to sequence this later and make them understand that in the overall scheme of things, it may not be as important as you think it is, but it's important to have that discussion in line on what to do now versus later.

• 36:25Logan Bartlett?

  You guys maintain hybrid as a work environment today. How have you thought about that? How do you make it work?

• 36:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I don't believe, well, what's happened, especially here in New York, a couple of years ago, there's a notion of quiet quitting, or people believe that anyone who's worked from home is not working as hard as someone in the office. I don't believe that. I think that, you know, how the productivity of someone is defined by how aligned they are to the mission of the company, how aligned, how clear are the objectives of what they're, what they're trying to do and how closely, you know, how well they're held accountable. And so I also, when I talk to employees, they value the flexibility. In a world where the boundaries of when work stops and when your private life begins in the day is now blurred, right? So people value, I had an employee telling me the most important part of my day is being able to pick up my child from school.

• 37:19Speaker 01

  That's a very important moment for me, but this person works incredibly hard and is a high performer. But that flexibility makes her much more committed to MongoDB because she has that flexibility to be there. Other people love the fact that, hey, in the middle of the day, I've got to go see the dentist or have a doctor appointment or take care of an errand. Now, we do also believe in the importance of in-person meetings. But I think, you know, it's not like people are talking to each other every minute of the day. There's times of this burst of activity and then you come in to calibrate, whether it's a QBR, a planning session, you're kicking off a project, or you're coming in and assessing the state of the project. So I don't think you need to be in the office four or five days a week. I think the toothpaste is out of the tube with the pandemic.

• 38:00Speaker 01

  And I think the way you hold people accountable is to their leadership. And if you have a high bar and high standards, you can still drive high productivity, even if people are working at home or in the office.

• 38:12Logan Bartlett?

  We touched on you did a riff when you first got the MongoDB. But during the pandemic and when everything kind of reverted back over the course of as interest rates went up, you did not do a broad-based riff. And I think philosophically, you're against riffs in general, not for some moral reason, but because it masks a bunch of performance and management-related considerations.

• 38:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's important. I think riffs have a place if there's suddenly some structural cost structure problem you have in the business. Imagine if 50% of your customers disappeared overnight. There's no amount of performance management that can right-size the business quickly and you have to make some hard decisions. But the reason I am allergic to riffs in general is because to me, and it's happened here at MongoDB, when we got a sense in 2022 that the world was changing and things were going to become very different, a lot of people came to me and said, why don't you just do a riff? You know, that'll be so easy to do that and we're, you know, we'll be all good and it'll probably be even more quick and more efficient than just doing this performance management process.

• 39:22Speaker 01

  And what I said to them is that, but they're not teaching anyone any muscles, right? And we're not teaching people, one of the biggest weaknesses of new managers and even existing managers is knowing how to hold people accountable. And I have a three-step process on how to hold people accountable, but I'll tell you that later, if you're interested. But we want to develop the muscles of knowing how to hold people accountable. And what was interesting is that I had people who came up to me after the process and said, you know what, Dave? It was surprisingly easy to find the bottom 5%. And I said, what did that tell you? It said that either we hired the wrong people or we didn't develop them, but we clearly had a problem. And it was the men put us, so me pushing you is you caused you to deal with that problem. You weren't dealing with that problem proactively and that there in itself is a problem.

• 40:07Speaker 01

  And we need to be much more proactive in dealing with performance issues because the best people get very frustrated when they work with people who are either not as committed or not as competent as them. Because now you're actually penalizing all the good people who are working hard to cover for the people who are not producing at the rate they should be. Now I want to hear your three steps for holding people accountable. Yeah, so the first step is you've got to be very clear on what you want, right? And so, you know, for a project, for the role, in this period, whatever, you've got to be very clear. Here are my expectations. And so a simple example would be, say, I expect you to send me a report every Friday on the week's activities. I'll just make a trivial example. And the first Friday, you don't send it to me.

• 40:50Speaker 01

  And then I see you on Monday and say, hey, Logan, where's that report? He goes, oh, yeah, I forgot about it. I'll get it to you and then you send it to me. And I go to you and say, Logan, listen, I may not have been clear of why that's important to me, but I use those reports to really understand what's going on in the business. You and your team play a really critical role and it's not just make up work. This is really important to me. So what I'm really doing is I'm making the prompt. That was my fault to not making clear to you what the importance was for why I'm asking you to do this. And then I said, now are you clear, Logan? Does everything make sense? And you go, yes, I got it. Now, the next time you forget to send me that report, now I can hold you accountable. So you can't hold someone accountable if you don't do steps one and steps two.

• 41:32Speaker 01

  So most people get terrified of holding people accountable because, one, they're not clear on what they want and they've not been giving clear feedback on when there's been missteps. And when you don't give Feedback, you're basically sending messages not just to Logan, but to everyone else. You know, what I want is not really that important. There's not a really a culture of discipline. I am okay to let people cut corners. And that by itself is sending a message that maybe this is not as a high performance organization as it is. And so going to that three step process, at least for me, makes it much more easy to to hold people accountable.

• 42:06Logan Bartlett?

  I've heard you say that recruiting is like pipeline management. Once you stop it, even for a bit, it dries up. How much of your time do you spend recruiting today?

• 42:13Speaker 01

  Today, not as much, obviously for senior level recruiting. I spent a lot of time. We just hired a new CTO. So I was obviously intimately involved in that recruiting process. And I was pleased that I actually had beat my own ambitious goal by a month, but that's a different subject. But obviously recruiting, it all starts with recruiting. And if you can't hire the best people, then nothing else really matters. In my mind, a leader has to essentially do three things. One is recruit the best team possible. Two, develop them to get them to do what you want them to do. And three, make make sure they consistently meet and exceed their commitments, right? So recruit, develop and execute. But it all starts with recruiting. And I think McMahon has said this before.

• 42:55Speaker 01

  If you hire mediocre people, but do a great job in development and really monitively focus on execution, you'll still have a mediocre outcome. If you hire great people and do an okay job in development, an okay job in inspection, you can still have a pretty good outcome. So it all starts with recruiting. The point about the pipeline is that like a sales pipeline, a recruiting pipeline dries up pretty quickly. So you're talking to candidates, you're screening candidates. But then if you say, you know what, I'm not going to put focus on recruiting, those candidates will slowly wither away and go somewhere else. So they say, oh, my God, I need to hire 100 people next quarter. You can't suddenly like magically produce 100 candidate, 100 qualified candidates very quickly.

• 43:36Speaker 01

  So constantly being in the market and talking to people, even if you don't have roles to fill and getting a sense of who's great, who's out there. You know, selling the message and the value proposition among you be is important for us because we're planting seeds. Sometimes we need to harvest those seeds very quickly. Sometimes we're planting seeds because you know, in the future, we will want those people to consider joining us.

• 43:58Logan Bartlett?

  One of the things I heard you say in your interview process is that you inspect how thoughtful everyone was in switching between jobs. Why is that important? How do you go about thinking about it?

• 44:09Speaker 01

  To me, the most important professional decision you can make is what company to go to. Right? So, so when I look at a resume, I try and understand why did they go from company A to company B? Or why did they even start a company A? Why did they go to company B? And then maybe C or D? I'm trying to understand the decision process. And what I'm really trying to assess is how thoughtful were they in making that decision to go from company A to company B? Because, as I said, that's a very, very important personal decision for that person. And if that person is pretty cavalier, oh, I followed my boss. Oh, I got a call from recruiter and they offered 20% more. Then I'm thinking to myself, you know, okay, those might be interesting signals, but that's not a very thoughtful process. Then I'm thinking to myself, how thoughtful are they going to be when they're in that job?

• 44:53Speaker 01

  Making day-to-day decisions about what products to build, what marketing programs to execute on, how to prosecute, you know, sales deals, et cetera. And so that, to me, is a really high-quality signal about the kind of person they are. Whereas conversely, if they're incredibly thoughtful and saying, I was really happy here, but I saw this new emerging trend. I was really intrigued by this new technology trend. I talked to five or six different companies. Of those five or six companies, this company seemed the most interesting. I cold-called them, got a bunch of meetings, and then they ultimately offered jobs. And now that's a person who is incredibly thoughtful. I automatically assume if someone's been in a job for two years and less, they failed. Unless there's clear evidence that there was another reason why they left.

• 45:37Speaker 01

  You know, I either got married and had to move to another city, or there's some personal event in their life, or the company got acquired and they shut down that operation, whatever. Why two years? Because in most companies, it takes about a year to figure out that someone's not working out, and then another year to get rid of them. So if you've been at a company for less than two years, unless you can convince me, clearly convince me, why, I automatically assume you failed.

• 46:00Logan Bartlett?

  Any favorite interview questions or things you try to tease out in an interview besides the thoughtfulness by which they switch jobs?

• 46:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would say, um, understanding, um, both why they switch jobs. The other thing I like to probe on is, give me an example of something you're really proud of. You know, what is, what is a really proud accomplishment? And they'll tell me they closed this deal, they got this product out the door, blah, blah, blah. Then I'll start drilling in and tell me more and go into excruciating detail. And if they have the details at their fingertips, that tells me they were directly involved. If they were like a tertiary team member or some project that was successful at company, then very quickly I can figure out that they weren't really involved, but they were just, you know, trying to, um, essentially get credit for that, you know, that project or that initiative that the company undertook. So that tells me again, how intimately involved they were in those, and quote unquote,

• 46:50Speaker 01

  their most proudest moment, right? If it's your most proudest moment, it's gotta be something that you should be directly and intimately aware of.

• 46:57Logan Bartlett?

  If a job opens up internally and you have an internal candidate versus an external candidate, obviously you have a disproportionate amount of information about the person you've worked with in the past and you're comparing to him to someone externally. How do you think about evaluating those two people for the job? And how do you think about, uh, discounting or maybe factoring in how much you know about the internal candidate versus the external one?

• 47:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, so just stepping back, I always, and with the thing I've said here on Manga TV and I said at Blade Logic was, I want people to come here to build a career, not to come here for a job. But the problem, here's the problem that most leaders run into is that they have their own existing team, now they have a job opening. You know, Joe or Sally are interested in that job, but you have a very nuanced opinion of them because you see what they're good at, but you also see some of the things that maybe they're not so good at in some of the wards. But it's a very nuanced perspective on Joe and Sally. Meanwhile, John shows up with a pristine resume, you know, comes in, presents the best sense of him, uh, of his self. Um, and now all of a sudden you're like, wow, John's got all this credentials, he's

• 48:03Speaker 01

  got this track record, he's got all these results, maybe I should hire John. What happens is you end up hiring John because You have an asymmetry information. You only see the good stuff about John, but you have a much more nuanced view of Sally and Joe. And then six months later, you realize, well, you know, John can't, doesn't walk on water either. He's got things that he's good at and he's got things that he doesn't good at. But what you've done is now you've demotivated Sally and and Joe. And now all of a sudden they say, maybe this is not the place for me. Now all of a sudden they say, maybe I should contemplate going somewhere else. So I'm not suggesting that you never hire from the outside. Of course, we've hired from the outside. But you want to make sure your people inside the company, especially the people who are performing, are given a fair shot for growth opportunities.

• 48:44Speaker 01

  You, what you also don't want to do is just have blind spots and say, I'm only going to, you know, promote someone internally. You want to make sure that you assess the town pool and the marketplace. And that, to me, is the best way to really make the right decisions for the business. But ideally, if push comes to shove, I'd much rather promote within because it creates a meritocracy, you retain the culture. And you basically know what you're getting far better than anyone from the outside.

• 49:05Logan Bartlett?

  In a fast growing company, uh, the, the slope of the business oftentimes will outpace the slope of the individual in that role. How do you make decisions about if someone's been good for up to that point in time? But it is time to maybe move on and bring on someone from the outside. How do you think about the, that, that balance and trade off?

• 49:25Speaker 01

  So my philosophy on that 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. And the biggest tell for me, if a leader is not scaling, is how frustrated is their team becoming? Are good people starting to leave? Is the quality of the new people that the leader's recruiting is now no longer A's, but now like Bs and B minuses and Cs? That, to me, is a huge tell about what not a leader scaling. Because the people who work for you clearly know how effective you are, clearly know the quality of decisions you're making. Clearly know if you're being a hindrance or an asset in terms of enabling them to get their jobs done. And so that will show up very quickly to them. And so that, to me, is the best tell. And in fact, when I joined MongoDB, one of the first thing I did was review all the organizations.

• 50:10Speaker 01

  And I tried to understand, you know, who was in these teams, what the level of turnover was. And the quality of the people in those teams. And that gave me a great. Map about where the problems were in the organization and that also informed my decision of where to focus first. And I think that just remains and and it may seem awkward to say this, but we've gone through many leadership transitions. I've been through three CMOs, I've been through two CFOs, I've been through three CROs. I've been to two chief product officers, I've been through three CTOs. And that's just a function of the business scaling very quickly, but not everyone scales at the same rate. Now, now, some people left on their own volition, they were tired and they, you know, want to take some time off.

• 50:53Speaker 01

  But in many cases, the people just couldn't scale to the next level.

• 50:56Logan Bartlett?

  Now, your parents gave you two options professionally, you could either be an engineer or a doctor, right? And ultimately, you found your way, finding religion in sales as well. How did you discover sales as something that you you had passion for? And what would you tell the CEOs that maybe view it as a black art or something unbecoming?

• 51:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, my dad was a rocket, a true rocket scientist. He designed rocket engines and satellites. And so he always viewed sales as like a bunch of used car sales guys and thought it was not a very honorable profession. So, so what was interesting is when I started working, I was in this rotational assignment at AT&T, where they gave me exposure to different functions. And the functions that were closest to the customer, where I could see the intersection of business, technology, coming together was where I got really, you know, interested and excited. I personally knew that I didn't want to be like a hardcore developer or some engineer in a back room designing, you know, circuit boards or something like that. So I felt like I wanted to be where the business and the technology came together.

• 52:00Speaker 01

  And then, as I started learning more and more about business, I realized sales is so important to, to the success of any business. AT&T being having its monopoly roots, didn't really actually have a great sales force. And I went to a smaller telecom company called Teleport, which is a CLEC. They also had an okay sales force. So one of the reasons I I reached out to Steve Wolfsky is because PTC had this reputation of having a great product and also an amazing sales force. And Steve and I talked about that. And as he framed it, which I live today is like if you marry a great product with a great go to market engine. Obviously, the old days only sales for us is now self-service and various different sales channels. That's where the magic happens.

• 52:43Speaker 01

  And what I tell people is that as much thought as we put into product, we also think about very hard about how we're thinking about how we go to market. How customer buying behaviors changed. And I believe that if you can make product and go to market competitive advantage, that really differentiates you from other companies in the industry.

• 53:01Logan Bartlett?

  Now, I, I, every job I've heard you say, and I agree with, has something that you hate about it. I think we live in this culture of people looking for this perfect thing out there and job hopping and all of that. Is there, can you elaborate on that point? And what advice would you have for young professionals that are maybe trying to find the perfect job with nothing that they, they hate in terms of their profession?

• 53:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't think the perfect job exists. I think there's things you can find that you love to do, but it's always to be fast at that job that are maybe not as enjoyable. And I, I find when I, the other thing when I talk to people why they move from say, company A to company B. What I'm also trying to understand is are they running away from something or they're running to something? And what I find is a lot of people, especially this younger generation, they don't necessarily have the skills to deal with adversity. So their inclinations to run away from adversity and go to somewhere else where they think the grass is greener. And I, and I tell my own boys, happiness and success is not the absence of problems, it's the ability to deal with them. You may have a boss that you don't get along with. You may have, you know, you're dealing with a difficult customer and they're very unreasonable.

• 54:08Speaker 01

  You know, what are you going to do? You may have a product that doesn't always work and you're frustrated because it's awkward. It's embarrassing you in front of, if you're a salesperson, in front of your customers who trust and respect you. There's going to be always situations and difficult things. You can choose to run away or you can say, how am I going to fix this problem? Or how am I going to elevate this issue that's someone who can fix this problem, fix this problem? To me, those are really important life lessons. Now, obviously, if a company's in like a debt spiral, no one's suggesting you keep staying there. But I think it's important for people to learn how to deal with adversity. You know, obviously grit is something that we think a lot about. Uh, and you know, one of the characteristics we look for is are these people, these people have grit.

• 54:50Speaker 01

  And one of the things or as some people call, do they fight or flee? I'm a fighter and uh, and I hope to find other people who uh, who have that orientation to, to buckle down when things get tough.

• 55:03Logan Bartlett?

  No, we've referenced McMahon and Walsky, but I want to back up to the uh, to the original days of Blade Logic. So can you tell the story of how Blade Logic came to be? And then maybe the fortuitous timing of the fundraise and that journey?

• 55:15Speaker 01

  Sure. So I had been at a company called Breakway Solutions, which, and I'd started a company called Aplica, which is the corpus of their cloud computing business. So we were like a first generation cloud computing. Being telco guys, we called ourselves application service provider. So it was a very sexy term.

• 55:29Logan Bartlett?

  Yes.

• 55:30Speaker 01

  And being telco guys, we thought it was all about the sophistication of the network, not anything to do with the application. So while Benioff was launching Salesforce and thinking about a radically new multi-tenant architecture, we were thinking about it's all about the network and, and because we're, we were data broadband networking guys, the network could solve the whole problem. Obviously we were wrong. Um, we ended up taking that company public and then um, 70% of our customers are dot coms. And then obviously we saw the rise and fall of the first bubble.

• 55:56Logan Bartlett?

  What was the peak market gap of that?

• 55:57Speaker 01

  Uh, about five billion.

• 55:58Logan Bartlett?

  Wow.

• 55:59Speaker 01

  And so um, that being said, we were, we had um, essentially like 11 data centers around the world. They were colo sites, but we were provisioning and managing all the infrastructure. And as the business was scaling, I was constantly throwing people at the problem to provision, manage infrastructure. Because with the first generation of internet architecture, the complexity was moving from the desktop to the backend, within clients. And um, and I was like shocked. So when things started getting tougher, I said, there's got to be tools to automate this because we just can't keep throwing people at the problem. And I was shocked to find out that there were no tools. Most of the tools were desktop tools. It just didn't really work in a server oriented world. So then I left Breakway, I ended up being an EIR at Bessemer, and I kind of worked on this idea, and my co-founder was an EIR battery.

• 56:41Speaker 01

  And we both decided to work together. We basically worked on this idea. And that was the corpus of starting Blade Logic was coming out with a new server-based orientation to provision and configure servers in data centers. And so this was in the summer of 2001. And, you know, we had done a bunch of market research and obviously the bubble had just burst. So investors were quite skittish about like funding new companies because they were just dealing with the trauma of all the companies that were basically struggling. So the bar was quite high and the valuations were not great. So it was quite expensive to raise capital. We end up raising our first round five days before 9/11.

• 57:16Logan Bartlett?

  Oh.

• 57:16Speaker 01

  So you probably would not be talking to me today if I'd waited five days longer, right? Because that deal probably would have fallen apart.

• 57:21Logan Bartlett?

  Nir Jaggaral wrote a blog post, "Who Let the Servers Out?" After the Baha men, "Who Let the Dogs Out?" I think it's still somewhere on the internet if you can dig it up. But going through that journey, you guys competed head to head with Opsware, which for people that don't know is run by Ben Horowitz.

• 57:38Speaker 01

  And Mark Andreessen.

• 57:39Logan Bartlett?

  And Mark Andreessen. And it was a legendary battle, I would say. That I don't know if there's anything that's even quite like it today of the culture. And you had John McMahon, they had Mark Cranny. It was a very...

• 57:53Speaker 01

  It's interesting. So actually, so I competed with LoudCloud, which is the first version of Opsware when I was running, you know, at Breakway. So they were another cloud computing company. And then they decided to repurpose their software provisioning tool into a software company, where I decided to start from a clean sheet of paper. And by definition, I felt we always had the better product. But Mark and Ben are great marketeers. And so what was interesting is that they had a flagship account at EDS. And then they started trying to go after other customers, but they kept running into us and we were beating them everywhere. So they realized, you know, what are these Blade Logic guys doing that, you know, we just don't know? And they realized we had a PTC guy running. Actually, it wasn't McMahon then. It was a guy named Steve Sforhan, who was another PTC guy.

• 58:36Speaker 01

  So then they decided to basically follow the same playbook. They actually did reach out to John. They end up hiring a guy named Mark Cranny, who also kind of took the PTC playbook. And at the same time, Steve Trahan, again, another example of who did great work in the beginning, but then I realized wasn't scaling to the next level. That's when I recruited John. And so, yes, it ended up being two PTC sales guys running two very aggressive sales teams going after the market. And, you know, obviously, Mark and Ben ultimately sold out to HP. And then we ultimately got bought a year later by B and C software.

• 59:14Logan Bartlett?

  And got bought, what, right before Lehman collapsed? You sort of bookended both crises?

• 59:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the day we closed our deal was the day JP Morgan bought Bestraun for three bucks a share.

• 59:25Logan Bartlett?

  And the culture of Blade Logic, the sales culture, like the number of people that have come through there, I mean, not just Mongo, but Datadog and Snowflake and Okta. And we can sort of go down the list of other people that are Zscaler, that power enterprise selling in Silicon Valley. Did you recognize at the time how talented the sales folks you had within the organization were? Or is it sort of a fish in water and you didn't totally, like, these were just the people around you?

• 59:50Speaker 01

  No, I consciously wanted to build, I remember, I believed in Waltski's philosophy that if you marry a great product with great distribution, that's when the magic happens. So I was very conscious, which is why I ended up chasing after McMahon, because he was already, even then, a legend and saying, would you consider joining Blade Logic? And some people were actually shocked that I was able to get him. And then I would say the credit goes all to John because what John makes, what makes John really unique is I think, one, he's an amazing listener. You know, if you talk to people, when he interviews people, people feel like he looks into their soul. Second thing, he's a fabulous recruiter, so his eye for talent is off the charts. So that's why the team was so good, because he could really pick out the best people,

• 1:00:33Speaker 01

  even if people with limited track records, but figure out they had something really special about them. Third, he's an incredible developer of talent. So it's not just recruiting them, but constantly training them. And John and I would work together. What do we, what does the sales force need to learn, you know, this quarter versus next? Some of them would be sales specific issues, other would be product and market issues. How to differentiate, you know, Blay Logic versus Ops and all the other tools out there. So developing talent was something that he was really good at. And then he was maniacal in execution. And so again, recruit, develop and execute, right? And John was A plus on all those categories.

• 1:01:08Logan Bartlett?

  And what about Wolski as a mentor? How did he influence you? And yeah, why was he so good for you along the way?

• 1:01:15Speaker 01

  Um, so Wolski, um, I, you know, I, I give him a lot of credit for informing my leadership philosophy. All the way from product and go to market and bring the two together. How to think about like leadership, how to think about like fundraising, how to think about like managing the board.

• 1:01:33Speaker 01

  You know, it was so, because as a first time board member, this was all new to me. And you just can't learn that quickly on the job. Now there's a lot more data, you know, in those days, the data was quite sparse. And so you really had to talk to people. So I do encourage first time founders, whether you have a board member or not, but find mentors who you can talk to. Because the CRO is a very lonely job, right? Because everyone's advocating for something. It could be your team and not that they're, they're being malicious, but they're advocating things that are important to them. Then you have your board and there are things that they care a lot about too. So when you're thinking about things, you want to run something by a board member, how it affects them. Or maybe, you know, their equity position is going to have some function of how they respond to that idea.

• 1:02:15Speaker 01

  Similarly, if you're thinking about a restructuring the organization, if you want to socialize it with a few people, if it's going to potentially marginalize some people, they're not going to be very happy with that. So the CRO is a very, very lonely role. And so having people you can go to where you can just get unvarnished advice. Be very comfortable, you know, laying out what the issues are, bearing your soul, and not worrying about it being used against you is so, so important. And Walsky played that role for me.

• 1:02:40Logan Bartlett?

  I wanted to ask about the topic as you're right now, which I think is on Evergorn's mind, artificial intelligence, and you guys are playing an important role in that. How do you think about AI? How does it compare to past trends that you've seen along the way?

• 1:02:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, the risk is of being a cliche. I definitely think it's the next big profound platform shift in our industry. I think that what's interesting is, I would say, AI 1.0 was all about focusing on data scientists. I think AI 2.0, where you'll see much more broad-based adoption, especially around developers who have to build smarter applications and incorporate these new smarter technologies. We feel like we are well-positioned because it will unlock a lot of opportunities where a lot of people have been OK with keeping these legacy platforms in place, but now with the advent of AI, it might be the catalyst for them to rethink about modernizing a big part of their infrastructure. We obviously have announced some capabilities around vector and so on and so forth, where

• 1:03:33Speaker 01

  people can obviously leverage RAG to marry public data with private data to build these smarter applications. But I think, you know, it's very, very early days. What I'm really interested in understanding is how does the developer workflow change with the advent of AI? And I think we're just at the early days of figuring that out. And obviously, we want to play a big role in enabling that developer workflow.

• 1:03:53Logan Bartlett?

  Now, you've been in New York City tech for a long time, right? Now, were you up in Boston for Blade Logic and then moved down?

• 1:04:00Speaker 01

  No, I lived here.

• 1:04:01Logan Bartlett?

  You were here a long time.

• 1:04:02Speaker 01

  Actually, we had our first child, who just graduated in May, in July of 2001. And so moving was impractical, so I was commuting up to Boston, which wasn't easy, but basically, you know, figured out a way to do it. I tried to start Blade Logic in New York, but it was just too difficult because the ecosystem wasn't placed and the culture. When you try to talk to Wall Street people, they say, "Yeah, I worked for a startup," but they want to keep their salary and still get a big equity, you know, position in the company, which obviously wasn't practical. Now, I think it's very different here in New York. But yes, I commuted up there and then obviously have always lived in the New York.

• 1:04:40Logan Bartlett?

  So what's been your perspective of how New York's changed over the last, what, 22 some odd years working in tech and ASP way back when and now software today?

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I went from the lone B2B guy to now surrounded by, you know, companies like Datadog, which I'm on the board of, and comes like UiPath.

• 1:04:58Logan Bartlett?

  I'm glad you retired from being a VC, by the way. Datadog is one of your only investments as a VC, pretty good one.

• 1:05:04Speaker 01

  Yes, well, Olivia and the team there get all the credit. And Etsy, obviously, has also been a very successful company. So to me, New York is a fabulous place, right? Because, one, your customers are literally outside your front door. You have these amazing, large companies, financial services companies and other types of companies all in your backyard. Two, New York is a gateway to really anywhere in the world. You can get to Europe very quickly, it's like a West Coast flight. You can get to the Middle East, you can get to Asia. And going to Asia is not that much longer from New York than it is, say, from San Francisco. I think there's obviously a whole other dimension of New York in terms of culture. Not everyone's in tech, there's so many other things. To me, I've been to almost every major city in the world and I still think New York's

• 1:05:45Speaker 01

  the best city, so I'm stoked that New York is such a big tech center now.

• 1:05:50Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, that's great, that's great. Last one before I let you hop. Is there a piece of conventional wisdom, Silicon Valley wisdom, that you adamantly disagree with, that you hear get shared quite a bit?

• 1:06:02Speaker 01

  Well, the one thing, I think there's a pejorative perspective on professional CEOs, but what's interesting is if you look at like Nikesh Aurora, look at like Frank Sutman, I think I've done reasonably well.

• 1:06:13Logan Bartlett?

  I think so.

• 1:06:13Speaker 01

  Professional CEOs have had major impact. Mark McGlocklin before Nikesh have some major. Now, the founder-friendly kind of orientation makes a lot of sense. Obviously, you know, these companies don't start without founders who think differently and see problems or opportunities that other people don't see. But I think most people have this very pejorative view. They almost think, oh, the company's lost its way, we have to bring in a professional CEO. But when you look at some of the biggest companies in the world, and some of the most successful companies in the world, you know, having the right professional CEO is not exactly a bad thing.

• 1:06:47Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, good. Well, Dave, thanks for doing this.

• 1:06:49Speaker 01

  My pleasure, it's great to be here.