Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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**SPEAKER_2** (1:48)
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**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:17)
My guest today is Dev Ittycheria. Dave is the CEO of MongoDB, the developer data platform with tens of thousands of customers in a hundred different countries. He joined the company as CEO in 2014, taking it public in 2017, and now approaching a decade of leading MongoDB to become a go-to choice for the most sophisticated organizations around the world. We discussed Dave's philosophy for constructing an exceptional enterprise sales organization, why he feels a leader must be incredibly judgmental to drive excellence, and how he plans to guide MongoDB through another technological transition. Please enjoy this great conversation with Dev Ittycheria.
So we were just talking about what it's like to live through technology transitions.
And often I talk about this with investors from the perspective of what opportunities does this unlock that weren't there before. And lots of investors have made fortunes around some big platform change or something. But I'd love to focus on it from the perspective of a CEO and operator who's running a business and has run other businesses through other technology changes and transitions. And just begin by having you riff on this experience. We're going through a huge one maybe right now. Everyone's trying to figure it out. So what's it like from the trenches?

**Dev Ittycheria** (3:33)
Obviously the transition we're talking about now is this transition to AI and what it means. Obviously when OpenAI released Chat GPT, it kind of made AI feel real for people because all of a sudden you can use general common English language to engage with a computer and give you answers and generate content that never happened before. So it kind of made things feel much more real where before AI was the purview of machine learning and engineers and data scientists. I've learned a couple of lessons because I've been through a number of these, I would say I've been through three transitions, the move to the internet in the mid late 90s, obviously cloud and mobile about a decade ago. And now obviously we're going through the AI transition. A couple of lessons learned is one is value always accrues first at the bottom layer of the stack. Think about telephony or the internet. In March of 2000, Cisco was the world's most valuable company. A lot of people thought they were a lynchpin of building out the broadband internet and everyone wanted high speed internet access.
But March 2000 also went into bubble burst and people looked back and said, well, Cisco really values fairly when it's valued like, I think, 300 times P multiple, which doesn't make obviously a lot of sense. So the obvious question is now people look at NVIDIA and saying, is NVIDIA really the Cisco of 2000? Or some people are asking, is NVIDIA the Google of 2003? Even though they've accrued a lot of value, they're on the cusp of being the seminal company for the next 10, 15 years. I don't know the answer to that question, but one thing, NVIDIA is not trading at 300 times that are PE multiple. There's obviously tons of demand of compute. And one thing we do know is that the more compute you have, the bigger breakthroughs you can have in these AI models. So one is the value is definitely first accruing at the bottom layer of the stack.