 Welcome to MongoDB.localNYC, where data dreams become a reality. Join John Prager as he speaks with industry experts and thought leaders who will share their insights and best practices in data management, security, and deployment, all from the Big Apple on theCUBE, the leader in live and emerging high tech coverage. Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE's live coverage here in New York City from MongoDB. It used to be called world.local is what it's called now. MongoDB doing not the annual tournament, annual kind of like conference. It is like a tournament of champions, of developers all around the world and they're doing a multi-city tour. They're kicking it off in New York City where the biggest event is. We've seen this in New York City with AWS Summit. A lot of local talent comes in. This is the kickoff of a multi-city tour from MongoDB. It's theCUBE's live coverage. This is later flagship event. We're kicking it off with Trevor Marshalls, the CTO at a company called Current. Trevor, great to have you on theCUBE. Kicking off MongoDB. Absolutely, no, I appreciate it. So talk about the company before we get into the conversation about developers and the whole focus around where we are today. Talk about your company and how long it's been around. Where are you guys at in the progress and what you do? Yeah, absolutely. We're going on eight years literally this week as it marks eight years of incorporation of the company. But we're a fintech based here in New York. We build banking services for millions of Americans. We're not a bank ourselves. We work with banks to offer checking accounts, savings accounts, all sorts of things. Really to improve financial outcomes for our members. How many employees you guys have? We've got 160 based here in New York, and yeah, we're all in the office. Well-funded, mobile rounds of funding, private, not yet public, no markets closed, but still doing great. Yes, yeah, no, it's okay. I do the CTO, so what do you do there? You're like, oh, we see the roadmap, make sure you get the right tech. What's your role? Yeah, I mean, I spend a lot of time thinking through how we're using technology to really deliver the value to our members. One of the differentiations about how we came into the space was we really approached consumer banking from a technology perspective. We decided to take on a lot of the financial stack and do that ourselves and really make that our core competency, so as a result, we've really created a technology mode around the products that we offer, and a lot of my role as CTO at current is ensuring that we're playing into that advantage and pushing what we can build a lot further to bring that to customers. Yeah, I mean, we do a lot of coverage on theCUBE about the modernization of the digital transformation, all that kind of cliche stuff, but it's kind of happening on the business side. You're seeing Next Gen Cloud coming, you're seeing a lot more agility in terms of developer-led activity. MongoDB database is now a data platform, and you start to see that organic evolution of some of the developers, but by the way, you can just get into Mongo, we're a customer, even theCUBE, we have our own Mongo instances all over the AWS, and then it grows, and so they're having this huge moment where developers are now driving the standards because the apps themselves are, is the company. Yeah, absolutely, I mean, especially in financial services where there is a lot of this transformation, there's a huge advantage of just being cloud-native. So since the beginning, we've been building our product and our technology in a way that can scale, and for Mongo in particular, we've been working with Atlas for many, many years, fairly early Atlas customers, and for us, what that gives us is the flexibility to not think too much about how big we need to get based on the transaction volume, the number of customers, and so that sort of push-button scale, once we did quite a lot of work to get ourselves set up to be able to do that has given us a tremendous advantage from a cost and efficiency advantage just in performance advantage and really being able to deliver with high reliability our customers. Talk about the speed aspect of being competitive. I mean, financial services, highly competitive market, getting that right feature, getting those developers focused and productive, and satisfied, I frankly, building the apps and not constrained. It's a huge thing. Share your thoughts on that paradigm because I know you're living it, the rest of the mainstream, I call it mainstream enterprise, is now coming to realize that developers are the competitive advantage when the application is your business. 100%. I think, I mean, you can address that question in so many different ways. I think from Mongo's perspective in particular, they've always been really focused on developer flexibility. And for startups in particular, you're never going to get it right the first time. And when it comes to your data model, like all the way down to the data model, you need the flexibility there to change how you're indexing data, how you're aggregating data, how you're constructing this view that ultimately delivers a product that's never existed before. So having that flexibility built in natively, it's critical if you want to move quickly. You know, Trevor, I was geeking out with a buddy the other day, we were talking about large language, LLMs, large language models. And then someone who wasn't as technical, was like, I don't get it. I'm like, okay, language, that keyword is language, SQL, structured query language, no SQL, no language, document database stores documents, which has text, which is language. So like, we started getting into this riff of like, databases have different use cases and like, a lot of this AI is set up perfectly for new kinds of data structures, whether it's no SQL or object store. So you're starting to see a lot of people have all this data enrichment sitting around. But it's not like, there's no insights coming out of it. From a new AI perspective, yeah, they do insights. I got dashboards, I got some analytic tools. But a whole nother level of insights is emerging in this whole AI wave. That is foundational models, LLMs. What's your take on that? As you look at that landscape, what are some of these new insights? Well, I think one of the first things is you have to, the precursor to doing any of that type of insight is making sure that you have a data strategy that can actually work with those machines, those concepts. And what's really important for us is that, and what we've been focused on is how do we make sure that we're creating this sort of homogenous data layer across all of the interactions that our customers have with us. And then you can start leaning into some of the amazing technology. You know, we're also here speaking with Google Cloud. And they've done a lot of work in starting to productize and make available a lot of these advancements to companies like us, where we don't have to have all of the very academic knowledge of how to construct these things, but still get the benefits of them. And so it really starts with having that strong data strategy of really thinking through how do you normalize data? How do you make it available? And then how do you turn that into insights and products? So we're very focused on that. It's a big- You're developers, you're developers, the current developers. What's your value prop? How does MongoDB fit in? We're here at their event. Yeah. Take us through that story. Yeah, absolutely. I think to be an engineer at current, like one of the amazing things is very quickly. On day one, you're deploying services to production and we keep really this ethos of any developer can work across any code base within our company. And so as a result, you get an amazing amount of leverage as a developer. You're joining a company. We have just under like 50 developers at current. And so every pull request you're opening, every change you're putting into production has the ability to improve the lives of millions of our members. And it's an extremely exciting sort of journey. Yeah, and Atlas, as you mentioned, you're a user of Atlas, been around for a while, took a couple of years to build that. And I always, and I remember Mongo been following us since they've been called 10Gen. Mongo will never scale. They're doing mission critical workloads. So they just keep proving all the skeptics wrong, but having a data platform, because it's turning into a data platform. I mean, it's not just database. They got search, they got time series, they have a lot of, they have global. What does that mean for your productivity? Because you have all those developers, you need to have good search, you need to have good tools. It's not a point solution. For us, I mean, like the biggest thing that we get with Atlas and Mongo generally is just reliability. When we're talking to our account managers, it's like, yeah, the features are nice, like adding all these additional things. But for us, we want uptime, we want query performance. We just want the nuts and bolts, all the block and tackling to be something that's just done and constantly improved. And so that's one of the advantages of working with a hosted solution like this, where you've got people who are focused full time on making this thing more reliable, more performant, and we get the advantage of that. And that's really what we're looking for. Talk about your session coming up with Google. You mentioned them earlier in the conversation. They had vertex, they're doing some good stuff. I'm going to interview Steve Urban coming on a little bit later. Lot of progress. I mean, I don't think Google gets a lot of credit for the AI shops that they have. They've had it a lot. I mean, they're in my backyard. I know Google really well. You've got a session with them. What's that session about? What are you going to be talking about? What's on your agenda? Yeah, we're going to keep it pretty open, but in general, we're going to be talking about how we've managed to build this, you know, consumer banking technology just with cloud native technology. And that's going to be, you know, it's something I talk about quite a lot. It's something that's pretty exciting. So yeah, no. And the highlights of that talk will be what? The methodology, the tech you use? Yeah, the way that we're leaning into our technical advantage, how we deliver products and services. Yeah, so all the good stuff. You know, I wish I was 25 again. I always say that on the queue because when you think about what you just said, the ability to get on the cloud native and take advantage of the hyper scales, assets. If you're an entrepreneur, you're a developer, the ability to get product market fit is one hackathon away for getting some traction, but then you can also go deep. Take us through that phenomenon because this is like, I mean, it sounds cliche to say it's a new phenomenon, but it's really the cloud in the 10 past decade. You're starting to see that sass, okay? You have the cloud. Now you have cloud and a lot more refactoring and opportunities to do new things. Yeah, I think the key thing is like we've done a ton of experimentation. We've done a ton of products that we've put out and then pulled back. You need to have that flexibility of trying things. And if you can't try it, you don't know what will work. And as a result, we're able to find just incremental changes and then major changes. Like we can introduce huge features and we can easily pull them back. So I think that ability to be flexible, nimble, like all of these things are what allows us to get to that product market fit. And as a manager, the mindset is key to let people know, look at try stuff. But don't get dogmatic. Don't fall in love with your idea. It doesn't work initially. You got to pull it back. I mean, that could be a challenge too, dealing with. Yeah, for sure. It's easy, yeah, sunk cost fallacy, all that good stuff. But I think we're pretty good at understanding what are the key drivers of our business, how does technology play into that and really what's the right strategy for us to pursue with our product. Really appreciate you coming on. For the final word, share the audience what you think about where we are now with MongoDB, obviously here talking about data platform. But as an industry, where are we at? Where you see it going? A lot of technical innovation coming together. You got surge of next gen cloud. You got really this AI wave, which is super hyped up, but it's got some legit legs. The agility of developers now leading the charge, setting the standards. How do you see the next five years plus playing out, what's your vision? Yeah, well you opened with us the comment around transformation. I think a lot of the industries that haven't adopted cloud technologies are going to be forced into that within the next five years because the incremental speed that you get by working in this space will just dominate product. And ultimately, you can have the biggest marketing budget in the world. You can have a great brand, but if the product is much better, that's just going to, that's the real alpha. So I think that transformation, especially in financial services where we play, is going to accelerate to its sort of inevitable conclusion. Awesome. Final one more question since you're here. What's the coolest thing you're working on right now? I'm really excited about a credit building product that we're putting out. So the ability for our members to grow, the credit scores will be talking a lot more about that over the coming weeks as we start to roll out. Trevor Marshall, CTO current here, kicking off MongoDB.local New York City. I'm John Furrier with the QB back. Live coverage all day. We got wall-to-wall interviews coming up. We got the CEO coming on, CTO of MongoDB. We got two analyst panels. Stay with us throughout the day. We'll be here at cube.net. SiliconANGLE.com for all the stories. We'll be right back.