Hazard Lights

A month ago our portfolio company MongoDB went public. The stock priced at $24.00 per share and closed the first day of trading at $32.07 per share. While an IPO is merely a financing event in the trajectory of a successful company and, in the words of the company’s super talented CEO, Dev Ittycheria, “NOT an end but rather a new beginning for MongoDB”, it’s still an important milestone and one worth celebrating and reflecting upon.

My association with MongoDB has been an absolute pleasure, having served on the board since Flybridge led a $3.4M financing in the company at a $12M post-money valuation ($0.66 per share) in October of 2009. In that month, MongoDB had 2,563 downloads for its nascent product. Today, it has had over 30 million. When we announced the investment, I wrote about what led to our decision to support the company: a phenomenal team, a large market with trends in the company’s favor, and a great product that customers loved. What strikes me upon re-reading that post 8 years later, is how simple, but true, that analysis was.

Since the beginning, under the leadership of co-founders Eliot Horowitz and Dwight Merriman, MongoDB has had one of the most talented, creative and driven technical teams I have had the pleasure of working with. Further, throughout the company-building process, the company benefited tremendously from the advice and guidance of Kevin Ryan, the company’s third co-founder and Chairman. Our market thesis was that the database market was large, growing (at the time, $30B in annual revenue; in 2016, $44.6B) and trending towards more special purpose solutions rather than the legacy, one-size fits all relational database model. This market insight has played out broadly. In addition to MongoDB, alternative datastores like Hadoop and its derivatives in the analytics market have thrived in the market. Finally, on the product front, MongoDB has continued to be loved by developers for it’s simplicity, flexibility, scalability and the fact it can run in any environment from the company’s database as a service offering, Atlas, to the cloud, on-premise or in hybrid environments.

What we did not write about publicly, but discussed in our internal analysis, were three additional observations:

• MongoDB is a classic disruption story. When we were conducting diligence on the company, many of our friends and experts with deep expertise in the relational database market were quick to point out all the product’s shortcomings and the features it lacked. These objections failed to recognize that user’s desires to (1) develop software in a more agile, iterative manner; (2) deploy databases in horizontally scalable cloud architectures; and (3) utilize a product that was easy to access and allowed for immediate productivity gains all created benefits that more than compensated for the product’s supposed shortcomings at the time. Today, this “nice toy” of a database, as one of these experts called it, sees 30% of it’s new paying customers come from applications migrating off of relational databases (the other 70% comes from net new applications).
• Developers are the new King of IT. When we first invested, it becoming apparent that the proliferation of software applications across all enterprises coupled with the rise of of the cloud, and more distributed architectures, was making the developer the new “King of IT”. This allowed, and continues to allow, MongoDB to go-to-market with a very developer-centric approach and then leverage this grassroots adoption into paying customers over time. I have written much about this developer adoption strategy in general, and as it applied to subsequent investments we made in companies such as Firebase, Stackdriver and Crashlytics (all successful investments and interestingly, all now owned by Google), but the approach of building a passionate user base prior to selling into a large enterprise has proven to be a successful one.
• Land and Expand is a powerful business model. The flip side of a grassroots adoption first model is that when you do land a paying customer, you often land them for relatively small dollars. But, with a recurring revenue model and a product that delivers on its promises, over time these small customers renew and expand and this can build a large and growing recurring revenue base as shown in the chart below. In the case of MongoDB, this led to annual revenues that grew from $40.8M in FY 2015 (Jan) to $101.4M in FY 2017; in almost 300 customers that now spend in excess of $100K per year, up from 110 in early 2015; net ARR expansion rate of over 120% for each of the last ten quarters; and, annual cohorts that show, in the case of 2013 for example, 4.1x expansion over 4 years (i.e $5.3 million in FY13 grew to $22.1 million in FY17).

Of course getting the investment thesis right only matters if the company is able to execute. And the team at MongoDB has executed exceptionally well. Along the way, the founders were joined by Dev Ittycheria, who to no one’s surprise given his track record of success, has proven to be a remarkable, strategic, focused and results oriented, leader. He is also an exceptional recruiter and under his guidance the company has added well over 400 employees, including Michael Gordon, an extremely adept CFO (who after the IPO process is in need of a good night’s sleep), Carlos Delatorre, CRO who has built a world-class sales team, and Megan Eisenberg, CMO who has the unique talent in a marketing executive of being to drive both high level corporate marketing and a demand generation machine. Under Eliot’s leadership as CTO the company has also built a world-class, deeply technical, enterprise software team in New York City (which many thought was not possible, but it turns out to be a distinct advantage), including Cailin Nelson, SVP Cloud Engineering, Dan Passette, SVP Core Engineering, and Richard Kreuter, SVP Field Engineering. A hat tip to all of these executives, plus the 800+ other employees at MongoDB, on what they have built together.

It has been my distinct pleasure to work with such a talented team for the last 8 years. But, again, the IPO is just a financing. The company feels like it’s just getting started in its quest to disrupt this massive database market. I look forward to remaining on the company’s Board and continuing the journey for many years to come, building an important, anchor public technology company in New York City.