Hazard Lights

While I try to avoid promoting Flybridge portfolio companies on this blog, from time to time I will write about our new investments in the hope it sheds some light into how we are thinking about opportunities. 

Today it was announced that we recently invested, along with Union Square Ventures, in a New York City based company called 10gen. 10gen was founded by Dwight Merriman, Kevin Ryan and Eliot Horowitz and they are an open source software company that developed the non-relational database, MongoDB. 

We invested in 10gen for a few reasons:

1. Strong founding team: Dwight was the co-founder and CTO at DoubleClick, Kevin was the President and CEO of DoubleClick and Eliot was a lead software architect at DoubleClick.  As a result, the team knows a few things about both building large scale web infrastructure and growing and scaling businesses.  We were also fortunate, in a prior life, to have been investors in DoubleClick so we also had the benefit of knowing the team well.  
2. A belief in the "NoSQL" database market: while the name is a bit of a misnomer, we believe that databases are getting more specialized over time as users realize that the one size fits all relational database model does not often fit what they are trying to achieve with their applications.  Specifically, a schema-free, non relational document oriented database such as MongoDB is particularly well suited to web applications where scalability, performance and flexibility will be highly valued. Virtually all the web developers we spoke to in our diligence were using, either in production or in their labs, NoSQL databases with very positive results.  We expect this trend to only increase as more applications are deployed in Cloud environments as these databases are particularly well suited to that architecture.  
3. MongoDB is a leading solution in this emerging market: while MongoDB was only recently introduced into the market after a few years of development, the product has been downloaded by tens of thousand developers and is in production at companies such as SourceForge, Business Insider and Disqus.

While there are other reasons we, in short, liked the team, the market opportunity and the company's specific solution.  We look forward to working with this great team to take advantage of this exciting opportunity.  If you have an interest in downloading the product, please click here, or joining the team, please click here.