How to Grow from Idea to IPO with Eliot Horowitz of MongoDB & Viam

**Alexa von Tobel** (0:08)
Welcome to Inks For Starters with Alexa von Tobel. I'm Alexa, a serial entrepreneur myself, and founder and managing partner of Inspired Capital, a venture firm that backs fearless founders who are solving some of the biggest challenges facing humanity. Now in our sixth season, we sit down each week with one of the best founders on the planet to hear their story of guts, inspiration and drive. Let's dive right in. We had a little trouble with Eliot's mic, so we changed the tech partway through the episode. Apologies for the inconvenience, and we hope you enjoy. Hi everybody, I'm your host, Alexa von Tobel, and this week, I'm excited for you to meet serial entrepreneur, Eliot Horowitz, founder and CEO of Viam, an engineering platform, unlocking AI, automation and data for the physical world. Eliot founded Viam in 2020 to help companies build solutions across robotics, food and beverage, climate, marine, industrial manufacturing and more. A career software developer and technology leader, Eliot previously 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 went public in 2017 and 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. Eliot is passionate about using technology to address societal issues, including working with waves to protect marine life in the North Atlantic and supporting billion oyster projects to help restore New York's harbors ecosystem. With that, let's welcome Eliot. First of all, Eliot, I'm so happy to have you here. I watched so much of your career as you co-founded built MongoDB and now with your latest venture, Viam. Let's start there actually. What is this latest venture? Tell us all about it in your own words.

**Eliot Horowitz** (1:56)
First, thanks for having me and I'm really happy to be here. So Viam is a software platform that brings the power of AI to physical devices all around you. Everyone has the experience of things in their house that are supposed to be smart. There are light switches or things that are not supposed to be smart, like air conditioning systems that you wish were smart, and wish they knew when they were going to break or that something's going to break or when they do break, it's much easier to get them fixed. So we're all about taking physical devices, making them smart, making it easy for software and hardware engineers to work together to make the devices that people will work with every day, whether it's in their house, their office, in a factory, on the streets, in boats, to just be better.

**Alexa von Tobel** (2:35)
I love that, by the way, my air conditioner just broke, and so I'm like that one really hit home there. We're going to touch on MongoDB in a bit, but let's just start with after taking a company public, why build a business again? What was the aha moment and when did you dive back into the arena?

**Eliot Horowitz** (2:52)
Yeah. So after I left MongoDB and it was during COVID, and so it was just sitting around and hanging out with my kids. What I always tend to do in those situations is start tinkering with things that drive me crazy. And at the time, I just had things around my house that were driving me crazy, and the sprinkler system wasn't quite working well, and the sprinkler system didn't talk to the security system. And I started looking at all these problems and just started trying to fix them myself, and it was frustrating. I started doing some more research into sort of the broader ecosystem of hardware and software. And I also really like playing chess, so I did what most people do in that situation, was I bought a really high-end robotic arm and tried to make it play chess with me. Again, this is COVID, so I was bored of playing on an iPhone. I was like, oh, let's play chess against the computer, like on a real chess board. And it was a pretty frustrating experience. I got it to work, but it was not a great experience. And then taking a step back, it became very clear that the problems I faced building a robot to play chess with me were the same as making your HVAC smart, which is the same as making boats know when things are going to go wrong ahead of time and doing predictive maintenance in any arena, whether it's in a warehouse, an air conditioning unit or a boat. And that the world really needed a platform that bridges devices in the physical world, modern software and AI. And putting it all to one package could be really valuable. And so that's what we started to build.