Building platforms, ecosystems & open-source communities: Lessons from Viam & MongoDB w/ Eliot Horowitz @ Viam #213

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We're doing a special in-episode feature with our friends and sponsor Swarmia on engineering effectiveness.

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Is engineering a good investment? Is it helping the business move forward? What elements make a great software engineering organization? And how can we get there from our current situation?

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Stay tuned for later in the episode, Otto Hilska, founder and CEO at Swarmia, shares actionable strategies to understand developer sentiment, eliminate friction, and make better investment decisions that enhance your developer experience.

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We were trying to build all sorts of different things from autonomous boats to bread making robots, to sprinkler systems, to cat food feeders. Why? Just so we had enough examples to start finding those extraction layers. We talked to probably a hundred potential clients. We weren't really to sell anything. We were just talking to them. Basically make a really good mental map of all the things people are trying to do in the space. By the space, I mean everything from IOT to robotics to smart home to industrial automation. In our mind, it's all the same. And so it actually at the end of the year kind of started to become kind of more obvious. But it's because we spent all this time together just talking to people and building.

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I'm Jerry Lee, founder of ELC.

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And I'm Patrick Gallagher, and we're your hosts. Our show shares the most critical perspectives, habits and examples of great software engineering leaders to help evolve leadership in the tech industry. This episode is packed with insights on platform building, fostering ecosystems, and driving user-centric innovation. Eliot Horowitz, CEO and founder at Viam, joins us to share stories from his journey founding MongoDB, and how those insights are shaping Viam's approach to platform ecosystem development, user-centricity, and open-source strategy. We explore the origin story behind Viam, different principles for platform design for hardware and software development, modular systems, seamless APIs, and finding the right abstraction layers for your product. Plus, we get into cultivating developer communities and frameworks to anchor your business model and pricing. Let me introduce you to Eliot and Viam. Eliot Horowitz is the founder and CEO of Viam, an engineering platform unlocking AI, automation, and data for devices in the physical world. Eliot leads Viam in helping companies build solutions across robotics, food and beverage, climate, marine, industrial manufacturing, and more. Eliot co-founded MongoDB in 2007, writing the core code base for the pioneering database and leading the engineering and product teams for 13 years as CTO. MongoDB, which went public in 2017, has since reached a market cap of over $20 billion.
Before MongoDB, he co-founded the e-commerce company Shopwiki and served as CTO, and he began his career in software development in the R&D group of ad tech firm DoubleClick. Enjoy our conversation with Eliot Horowitz. Eliot, we just want to say welcome. Thank you so much for joining us. How are you doing? What's going on in your world right now?

**SPEAKER_3** (3:02)
No, thanks for having me. Things are busy. We have a lot of stuff going on. Viam, we just announced around. We've got a lot of clients that we're onboarding. Lots of fun projects. I still am getting to code quite a bit, which is great. And I actually build things, which is probably my favorite thing to do in the world. So, having a lot of fun.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:17)
This is the founder dream. New clients, closing the funding round, building cool products. You're still deep and immersed in it. I feel like those are kind of like the four things of happy founders. It's like you get a... All of those things are going.

**SPEAKER_3** (3:27)
Yeah, you can do those things. You're in pretty good shape.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:30)
Awesome. Well, let's get right into it. We'd love to start off with the origin story of Viam. Can you walk us through, specifically, the moment where you realized this was the problem that you wanted to solve? Bring us in to that moment.

**SPEAKER_3** (3:41)
So, Viam, tell the story of 2020 So, I announced when I was leaving MongoDB, it's sort of been almost exactly five years ago, actually, around March of 2020 And this is right when COVID happened, so nothing happened for four months, and I was kind of hanging out. And then over the summer, I started tinkering around with things at my house, playing with sprinkler systems and trying to automate them and just trying to make things happen, and was kind of frustrated by a lot of these things. I was also looking at a lot of climate change things and looking at oceans and trying to imagine how robots could clean the oceans, and was surprised at how hard it was to actually build physical products that actually worked, and was sort of dismayed by the state of a lot of physical products that I bought. Since I am a tinkerer and an engineer, I ended up buying a robot arm and building a chess robot to play with. Learned a lot about what was good in the space and what was bad in the space, and decided that, you know what, I think there needs to be a step function change in how software engineers and hardware engineers can work together to build real products. So hired a couple of people that I knew and really spent 2021 tinkering in the space and really understanding what was going on. I don't like building things if I don't really understand the problems. So really just dug in. And at the end of 2021, really sort of felt like we understood what we needed to build, and spent 2022 and 2023 building that. And that really is just a platform to bridge these worlds of software and hardware and AI and cloud for devices that exist in the real world.