Ep 142 MongoDB Origin Story with Dwight Merriman and Lena Smart

**Michael Lynn** (0:04)
Welcome to the show. My name is Michael Lynn and this is The MongoDB Podcast. Thanks for joining us. Today on the show, Lena Smart, Chief Security Officer of MongoDB, and I team up to interview Dwight Merriman, co-founder and key contributor to MongoDB. Dwight Merriman is a true tech legend. In addition to co-founding and co-creating the MongoDB database, and 10gen, now called MongoDB The Company, he also co-founded and led several other well-known successful companies, including Business Insider, DoubleClick, and Gilt Groupe. In today's interview, Dwight shares openly and honestly about the motivations behind creating the database, which now actually claims nearly half of the entire NoSQL market. He talks about the decision to build the database rather than use something that existed at the time. Dwight's friendly, easy to talk to, knowledgeable, and probably one of the smartest individuals that I've had the pleasure of chatting with. Without further ado, let's get to the interview. If you enjoy the content, please consider visiting Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Leave a rating and a comment if you're able. Let us know what you think. Stay tuned.
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**Lena Smart** (1:51)
So it is my absolute pleasure, and I'm so glad that you could make it in person today, to introduce Dwight Merriman. He is the first CEO of MongoDB, and you are still coding, I understand. You're also co-founder and director of MongoDB as of today. Are you still coding?

**Dwight Merriman** (2:11)
I'm still coding or tinkering a bit myself, but not on the database anymore. I think to really dive in and work on it, there's a certain minimum number of hours a week you have to work on it, just to keep up with the code base and the state of everything, because it's not short, it's not a small program.

**Lena Smart** (2:34)
Yeah.
Amazing. And also in the room, we have Mike Lynn, who is our developer advocate. And I know that you'll likely have some questions. Yeah, for sure. Just fire ahead, because probably this will be the most interesting person I'll speak to in a while too.

**Michael Lynn** (2:48)
Well, I'm fascinated already, and I've got so many questions for Dwight, but I'm going to let you go ahead and ask away.

**Lena Smart** (2:54)
Cool. So the first question I have, and this has been a burning question of mine since I joined three and a half years ago, is how did you start the company? How did you start MongoDB?

**Dwight Merriman** (3:05)
Right. So when we started, actually the name of the company was 10gen, and this was around 2008 or I forget the date, maybe two months before that, I can't remember. The original, what we were really looking at the time is myself and our other co-founders like Elliot and Kevin. We've been working on various entrepreneurial projects, and just we were seeing this repeated pattern where over and over, new product idea. You start building the system.
At this point, I've been doing that for quite a long time. So, kind of knew what the best practices were at the time, but it was always around that timeframe, January 2008, whenever it was. It just seemed like it was always a bit awkward. There was awkward and un-aesthetic, and it just seemed like there was a lot of duct tape and rubber bands, and even though those were best practices, right? You know, you would talk to CTOs at the time, you know, and they would say things like, you know, putting Memcached in front of databases is okay, and roll your own sharding in front of MySQL or Postgres is okay, but it sort of isn't. It was because it wasn't in a better way at the time, and you know, everything was, that was really when cloud computing, EC2 was really taking off, so it was very clear to us that cloud computing was the future, and a lot of the traditional products weren't very cloud-friendly. So if you have a database that skills vertically, right, so I can make it bigger, but, you know, then it's a main frame, or a Sun 6500 or something like that, it's like that's kind of the opposite of some A cloud principle, which is kind of like horizontal scalability and elasticity, right? And then if you tried to do it the other way horizontally, it was usually kind of rolling your own when it came to operational databases. And a lot of other things, but also just agile development was the way to go then, you know, iterative development, but a lot of the old tools, and this isn't just databases, but languages, everything, weren't really designed for that because they were invented earlier, so it's not their fault. So we were just saying like, there's got to be a better way to develop applications. And this is both on how to develop them, how to code them, and also on how to scale them, and how to run them in the cloud, painlessly. So our first concept was just we were going to do platform as a service. So we were going to try to make a, take a fresh take on the developer stack, versus LAMP and whatever else was common then, and see what we could come up with. So we started building a platform as a service system. It was open source, and this was very early. So it was, I think, when we went to beta, it was almost exactly the same time that Google's, was it Google App Engine?