Building a $20B+ Open Source Business with MongoDB's Eliot Horowitz

**Eliot Horowitz** (0:00)
Let enterprises work the way they do. You go to Market Strategy, you can't just be going after really big enterprise deals because sometimes they take three years. And so you just have to really understand these things and let developers be developers. Because trying to change the way developers work, it's never gonna happen.

**Seema Amble** (0:28)
Hi, thanks for listening to my first 16 I want to start today's episode by setting the scene. It's 2007, the cloud's fairly new, most databases are on-prem, and Oracle is the 800-pound gorilla leading the market. But managing databases was challenging, as our guest today, Eliot Horowitz, will tell you. Eliot is a co-founder of MongoDB and Viam. When MongoDB began, the team knew they couldn't win against Oracle's developer headcount, so they embraced the open-source community. What follows the discussion about how they built the developer community scaled a bottoms-up sales motion and established trust in the enterprise market. Let's dig in. Eliot, thanks so much for joining me today. Really excited to chat about your journey.

**Eliot Horowitz** (1:11)
Thanks for having me, Seema. Excited to be here.

**Seema Amble** (1:13)
MongoDB was not like an open-source project that got commercialized, the story that you often hear with open-source. But like, open-source was what I would view as a very effective strategy to get where you guys wanted to from day one. I'm curious just how you guys thought about the open-source side.

**Eliot Horowitz** (1:31)
My fundamental belief, and I've had this belief since we were starting MongoDB is that open-source is a really powerful thing for the world, for developers. It's a way to make sure that the systems are stable, are secure, outlive companies. It keeps enterprises and big companies in check, so they can't be completely nefarious. The cat's out of the bag. Even in 2007, when we were first starting to build MongoDB, there were really great open-source databases.
Our fundamental belief was that there will never be a really popular database that isn't open-source ever again. That just can't happen. Today with Viam, same thing. We don't believe that it's possible to build a software system like ours, a platform that doesn't have open-source at its core. Open-source is here. And so open-source is really important for many reasons. And so that's just a given. And then you have to then figure out what the right business model is to attach yourself to open-source to actually have a really good business also. But open-source, I believe, is the only way to build infrastructure software. I don't think there's going to be a serious piece of infrastructure software that people actually use and deploy, that isn't open-source again.

**Seema Amble** (2:55)
And how do you think about just the open-source side interacting with the product that you're selling?

**Eliot Horowitz** (3:02)
So one of the great things about sort of the modern world we live in is that, you know, people are very comfortable with consumption-based pricing, with SaaS-based tools and with the cloud. And so I firmly believe, and I've talked about this many times, is that this is the absolute best time to go into open-source, right? Open-source in the 90s and early in the 2000s, open-source business models were usually considered, okay, maybe you'd have some really expensive enterprise features or sell consulting and support. And those are terrible business models. In this world, right, if you look at MongoDB and where a lot of its revenue is coming from these days, if you look at what Viam is doing, open-source cores where the product you're using on your devices, on your machines, in your app is open-source, but then you're using cloud services to make your life easier. Things that you have to pay for anyway is such a no-brainer for users because it just makes our lives better and it's a really great business strategy for companies.
Both at Mongo and at Viam, the way I always thought about it was the core product is open-source in that things you have to pay for anyway should be commercialized and by making it really easy and making it the best way to use the product, you can charge premium pricing. If you're using a database, you have to pay for storage. You have to pay for compute. There's no way around it. So if we make that easier for you and better for you, you'll pay us for it. At Viam, same thing. On your devices, you want open-source for security, for safety, all the things I mentioned before, but if you need network connectivity, if you need storage and compute, you're going to have to pay someone for it. So why don't we make it the best way for you to do it, and you'll happily pay us for it, it'll be integrated, and it'll work really well. So I think the challenge, and I think why you don't see more open-source companies doing this is that you have to be good at both. You have to be good at actually writing infrastructure software and building big Cloud systems, and that's a challenge. But I think if you can do both of those things, which is frankly different skill sets, but if you can do both, you're in an unbelievably good position.