Chetan Puttagunta – Go Slow to Go Fast: Software Building and Investing

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:24)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:49)
My guest this week is a good friend and business mentor of mine. Chetan Puttagunta is a general partner at Benchmark Capital and has a remarkable track record of investing in early stage software businesses, including several like Mulesoft, MongoDB, and Elastic that went on to be public companies. Chetan has been my key guide for understanding the world of enterprise software, as we at O'Shaughnessy Asset Management have built an investment platform called Canvas. His advice has been critical to our early success in software. In this episode, we explore the history of software and software investing, and go into the details on how to build and grow new software businesses.
We discuss product, sales and marketing, recruiting, scaling, and everything in between. Please enjoy this great conversation with one of my favorite business and investing thinkers.
Chetan, let's start with a very specific story. One of Benchmark's founders, Andrew Radcliffe, is famous for this non-consensus and write idea to make any money, and everyone nods their head at that. I think it's hard to realize what non-consensus feels like in the moment, so I'd love to start with the story of how you found the company MongoDB, which, if you look it up today, is probably like an $8 billion market cap stock. Let's start with that story. We're going to talk, using that as a springboard, about the history of compute and databases, some wonky stuff. So, start with the story of MongoDB and how you found it.

**Chetan Puttagunta** (2:04)
Yeah. Look, I invested in MongoDB in 2012, and when I first met Elliot, who's the founder of MongoDB, I was, funny enough, 25 years old, and I had had a lot of experience building consumer apps. The App Store launched in 08, the iPhone, of course, famously came out in 07, and it was really hard to build applications at that time because the technologies that were freely available or openly available to developers were frankly limited. And if you take a step back and looked at what the leading technology companies had at that time, they had built all these incredible proprietary libraries and proprietary technologies. And if you asked your friends that were developers at Google, they had access to all these fancy databases, all these fancy tools and new libraries. You talked to your friends at name your big tech company at the time. It felt like there was a distinct advantage between those that were trying to do something startup-y and trying to do something on their own versus working in a large company.
And at the same time, there was a vast and rapid growth rate in the number of developers coming online.
Those were things that were always in my mind, always felt like, hey, agility and productivity was really, really important to developers.
And so when I met Elliot, he had this huge vision because he himself came out of DoubleClick and experiences himself of not being able to move fast enough to address customer needs. And the customer in his mind was his internal company. And so he had this vision of building a database that was a general purpose database that was super easy to get started. And that was the primary wedge into the market, which was that if you wanted to prototype something, if you wanted to get started really fast, if you wanted to see the initial version of something really quickly, let's get it out there. And once it gets traction, we're going to figure out how to do replication and scalability and all that stuff. We're not going to start with these call it traction problems. We're going to start with let's get you to iterate faster. And this was really well before Agile became something that was pretty instrumented across tech teams. So that resonated with me immensely. But if you had asked, and I did ask, the best developers that you knew at the time, ask them to play with Mongo, they would tell you, this isn't something I need.
Have you tried MySQL? Have you tried the established databases that are out there? Here are all the features that it has. Why would you ever have MongoDB? I'm a database expert. I know how to make MySQL work for everything. There's no reason why you need this.
But you missed the entire need of the entire class of developers that wanted something where they didn't have to think about schema, where they didn't want to have to plan how the database would look at scale, because they had no idea whether the application they were working on was going to work or not. So I'll give you this example where I went down this rabbit hole of trying to create a consumer app and spent so much time on the schema itself for a relational database, put the app out there and it was an absolute failure. No one cared. But I had to waste all this time on schema planning.