 Hello everyone, welcome back to the live coverage of theCUBE here in New York City from Mongo Local, the beginning of a 20 plus city tour. Mongo.local is originating here in New York City, Packed House, a Mongo local. I'm here with the CEO, David Sierra, who's going to break down with me his vision and kind of what's happening in this next gen data platform they've built. Dave, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me, John. Love your keynote here at the beginning of the show before we get into the specifics. Mongo is, you know, born in the crowd, developers, bottoms up, consensus is, that's where the developers are. You have the platform, document winning strategy, document database, variety of other tools. The format's changed for your show this year. You're going to do originate here in New York and then do a multi city tour. Take them to the streets. Yes, yes. So what, Candly, our business is so global and we realized that while it's great to have one big flagship event and then have a bunch of satellite events that we really need to take the show on the road. So we're going to be in 26 cities between now and the end of the year, places like Sydney and Sao Paulo and Milan and Frankfurt and Tel Aviv and London. And so we're going to go to where our customers are and I think also, you know, people are a little tired of the Zoom world. So, you know, having in-person interactions, connections, rebuilding old networks is going to be great. Well, you hear the Java Center in New York City and certainly it's packed house here. As many people as was last year were here, so you certainly got the local crowd in New York and people flew in for kind of the flagship inaugural beginning, yes. Yeah, no, I mean, but we purposely, in some ways, we're actually scaling down New York because we're moving dollars from New York to some of the other cities because there's so many markets that we're in that we feel like we need to make a bigger presence on. I mean, obviously we're pretty well known in New York and New York is always going to be a very important place for us. But there's some, you know, big markets we're going after and we have a big opportunity in front of us. Digging the streets, that's what the developers are. This conference, your keynote, specifically touched on some of the things that I had on my exclusive preview with you and that was this developer-led data platform. It's a platform, it's not a point solution or an analytic tool or an analytical platform. So you have a world, the platform's emerging very quickly. You guys are really the first to lean in on this developer, changing software industry, not something else. Explain the strategy behind the developer data platform. Really focus on the coder. Yeah, so if you step back and think about, you know, it's that old cliche, you know, software's eating every business, right? And who builds that software as developers? So everything we do starts and stops with developers, right, in terms of making their lives easy. And what I try to communicate in the keynote is that when you look at where developers spend their most time, it's working with data. In fact, you know, depending on the appellation that they're building, they could spend between 30 to 70% of the time just working with data. So if you want to make them incredibly productive and make a big impact, it's all about making it easy to work with data. So our whole raison d'etre is to be able to enable, to simplify working with data, which is to start with a document database and now it's with the developer data platform. And I think the other thing too, I want to get your thoughts on it around the market share and some of the data market is, you know, you look at all the successful companies like AWS as one example, it's an easy one to jump out. I remember talking to Andy Jassy in the early days, they were very misunderstood. And he said to me one time, you know, you got to be misunderstood for a long time, sometimes to kind of hang in there. You guys have been on a trajectory with Atlas and a platform that's different than some of the other players in the quote database market. You guys have a 2% share in that database market that seems to be changing very quickly. I even predicted there going to be winners and losers and new brands emerging. But yet no one really has got a dominant share. Amazon's number one by the quote, Gartner stat, but like that's just databases. So like, how do you see the market? Because clearly you see something here that's a little bit different than chipping away at that 2%, by the way, not a bad time either. It's still a huge market on the database side. But do you see something else going on here? Well, what we're, one, this market is so large to your point that you can have less than 2% share and be close to a $1.5 billion revenue company, right? So it tells you how big this market is. But it also tells you that we have a long, you know, path for growth, right? We have a big road to go up. So we started with the database and what our customers told us was like, we love your technology. It's so easy to use. It simplifies my life. I would love to use MongoDB for other use cases. So we slowly added more and more capabilities. So as people think about building really sophisticated applications and now even AI-based applications, they will think about MongoDB first as a place to build those applications. And that's what we want developers to think about. And so when you look at our customer base, we have some of the largest companies in the world running their business in MongoDB to cutting edge startups who you may have never heard of who are just building their business to either create, transform, or disrupt different industries. I talked with Chris Grooser, who runs the marketplace for AWS earlier. And I said, hey, you know, the classic cloud model is land adopt, expand. Your business model from dorm room to board room is almost the same motion. Get coding, grow. And then you grow into this base. It seems like you have so many customers on the self-service side growing up into full-blown enterprise-like capabilities. Is that a feature or a bug? I mean, I mean, it's obviously a feature because you have a lot of headroom there. Talk about that dynamic. You're seeing more growth than is Atlas picking up that share. That growth's there. So talk about the power dynamic of landing, adopt, and where's the expansion come from? Yeah, again, it starts with developers. I mean, the workloads in general tend to start, new workloads tend to start small because the app has just been built. There's very little data. There's very few users. And over time that workload grows. But as you win more and more workloads is that snowball effect happens. And all of a sudden the business in that account. And so now we have, you know, so many seven-figure and six-figure customers who are really running the business among them to be. But it didn't start as seven, six-figure customers. It started as four and five-figure customers. To your point, sometimes some from self-serve. And over time, they've grown into that because they've slowly given us more and more business. And that's the way we operate. We want to build a long-term relation with our customers. This is not a quick bang. Do a big deal and then walk away. We're building a long-term relation with our customers that we think is incredibly valuable to them. And as they grow and as they see value we're the beneficiary of their growth. You know, one of the things I want to get your thoughts on is your positioning, your position vis-a-vis LLMs, foundational models, AI developers. They're all trying to figure out what to develop on and then how to stand it up and run it. Right. You guys are a big leader in developers. You got the LLM and AI. What's that story here? So for us, what we are doing is, when you think about AI, for us that's all about building more intelligent and smarter applications, right? And a key part of that is thinking about semantic search. How do I really understand and intuit the intent behind that query? Which needs vectors, right? So vectors basically are a mathematical representation of all forms of data. So you can do things like nearest neighbor searches. And so by enabling vectors or vector searches you enable developers to build these very interesting AI applications based on either LLMs or the public domain and being able to marry that with your own proprietary data. So the fact that we can offer a vector search on our platform means that on one platform you have your source data, your metadata, your search indexes and your vectors which creates a very unified and compelling experience for developers and it makes their life essentially so much more easy. What's the reaction from the investment community around your keynote, the platform play? What are they saying? They seem to be impressed. I think a lot of the investors are quite impressed with our platform story. Obviously as you know we announced some strong earnings in Q1 but we don't get obsessed with where the stock is today or tomorrow. We're thinking about long term where we're taking the business. And given that, we're just focused to keep our heads down. We know what we need to do. We listen to our customers carefully, build those capabilities, try and execute well in terms of going out and winning more business and just do that over and over again. I mean you've got the platform now for multiple years. You've got a trajectory. What are some of the learnings that you're seeing come out of the business from this multi-year platform journey and what's your view right now as you talk to customers? We had an inflection point, more growth. What do you see happening right now with the platform? So I think there's definitely been an inflection point when I joined MongoDB which is almost nine years ago. There's still some questions about what's the winning technology? Is it MongoDB, is someone else? Well nine years later it's clear that we've won the modern database or data platform space. Now customers are much more comfortable trusting us to be able to do more. In fact they're coming to us and saying, enable full tech search. They come to us, give us a time series solution. They're coming to us and they enable us to do in-app analytics. And now, stream processing and vector search. So this is all driven by customer feedback to us because we have 43,000 customers and so that gives us a lot of confidence and conviction about what we're doing because over time the challenge for customers is that when they use a bunch of point tools they get a ton of data sprawl. They get a very fragmented developer experience and so their architecture is both very costly and very complex and hard to manage. And so given that they're grabbing to a place where they say I need to have much more elegant architecture that enables me to move fast but it's much more cost effective and easy for me to use. Talk about the dynamic now when you have customers building in native. A lot of choices you've got streaming now announced today. There's streaming solutions out there. I'm seeing this platform pattern emerging on the big players. You guys are out there at the top of the heap. Native services platform and integrations with other services. A lot more, I won't say rubbing up against other vendors and other platforms but the integration stories are coming out. We heard about AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and 19 other clouds out there, like other clouds. So integration is a huge part of it. What's native, what's not? How do you see that playing out for the customer? Well again, we start from the point of view of the customer that worked backwards, right? So customers told us they want to expand in these areas but we also recognize we need to be a good participant. You know, where Amazon and Google are sponsoring the show and also sponsoring the world tour that we're going to do for the rest of this year. So they're great partners. Azure is also a good partner and we're working with them. We're winning customers collectively but we know that we need to be a good partner. So different technologies integrate with MongoDB. We work with VI tools. We work with OLAP tools, et cetera. So on the streaming side, while we've introduced stream processing, we do work with the transport companies like Confluence, RedPand and many, many others who offer the transport capability to basically enable these event-driven applications. And so we have to be able to work with these people. We try and build our services in a very composable way and extensible way so we can add more integrations when we find that customers are really demanding that. And so we take a very open approach of how we build our product. You look around here, it's packed house in New York City. You got an ecosystem. Yes. That's a platform, check. Growth, platform. Right now I think you're what, going to do close to two billion maybe this year? Estimates are about 1.5. Little bit. Upside, over 1.5. You got an ecosystem checking in. Mark Porter was telling me your CTO earlier that the failover response time is less than in the milliseconds in Atlas database on all clouds. So there's a trend where this whole distributed systems architecture is paying out dividends. Are you seeing that in the numbers? You see that in the uptake? Is that yet resonating with customers from an impact standpoint? Is it more of a revelation now? Or what are some of your thoughts on that? Because there's a lot of value in that ecosystem and that distributed global platform. Yeah, I mean John I would say that we're really excited about the future but I'm so cautious. Like the economy is not firing on all cylinders but in Q1 we added more customers than we've had in the last two years. So it's nice to see us adding a lot of customers. A lot of other companies are struggling to add more customers to their portfolio. We're showing great operating leverage so we continue to grow our business but also do it in a much more efficient and effective way. But we're, and then we're also planting seeds for growth with all the product announcements we made. So we feel like we are building a very healthy long-term business but doing it in a very disciplined manner. I've been sitting on theCUBE now and I'm on our podcast with Dave every week. AI's hot all the time but developers are setting the standards. There's no de facto standards bodies in this era. Go back to the old era when we were breaking into the business, you know IEEE, a lot of physical layer standards. Now you got the hyperscalers out there. The developers kind of playing that role defining kind of what tools and open source projects will be getting picked up. So we're seeing the developers leading how to purchase or buying decisions or adoption decisions because they're coding in line to the application. The applications are in charge. The developers are driving that. You've kind of brought this up in the keynote and love your developers as your campaign that you just released. Developers are setting the agenda. How do organizations and customers you talk to flip that script because the script has been flipped but not maybe not in the companies yet? Well our approach is to really think about how do we make developers be able to do more and be more productive. Like if you just start and look at where the developers spend their time, look at how they work, you know if you build tools that make their jobs easier they're going to use your tools. If you build platforms enable them to do a wide variety of, address a wide variety of use cases they're going to use your platform. If you enable them to easily go to different deployment models whether it's your own data center, the cloud, multi-cloud, mobile, edge and embedded devices and you can do it on one platform they're going to use your platform. So the more you can make the developers life easy the more they're going to gravitate to you. But they're smart, they're cynical, they don't like hypey marketing so you really have to prove it in terms of building real product that adds real value and that's our goal. And developers do talk very frictionlessly on the internet, they can share their commentary of course you see that. Final question for you as you look over your nine years at Mongo, take us through your mind like kind of how that journey progressed where you are now because you look at it's the same game building software at a whole nother level because the data game AI, it's software. Right. Silicon advances are still software. I would say there's really been three chapters to the MongoDB story. The first chapter when I got there was to really prove that MongoDB was not like a cool toy but that people could really trust their crown jewels, their mission critical workloads on MongoDB. And it took time, we had to build tunable consistency models, transaction guarantees, enterprise grade management security and then over time to start believing. Then the next chapter was like okay the cloud was very popular the cloud redefined how applications were built and how they were managed. So we had to prove that we could build a cloud business. When we went public, cloud was in the single digits of percent of revenue. Now it's almost two thirds of a revenue. And a lot of people were skeptical. They said how can you partner and compete with the hyperscalers? And we showed if you build a great product, have strong product market fit and execute well you can do that. And one of the other things we did that no one else did is we built a truly global distributed data platform that runs across all the major providers with one single elegant interface. So we made it very easy for developers to manage workloads and build applications no matter what cloud they were using. And now the third chapter is all about building out the platform. So we started with a database and saying customers said okay I trust you to run these mission critical workloads but I want you to do more. I've got all these cool new use cases, time series, you know more sophisticated in-app analytics, full tech search. I want to be able to do that all in one platform and based on feedback also now do stream processing and build the next generation of AI applications. So that's the third chapter that we're on today. We were riffing earlier about data scalers. Hyperscalers was the cloud, you guys are the data scalers. And so I guess my final question and the segment with you would be what's your vision for the platform next level and generative AI's role in the future of scaling data for customers and making developers the driver of value extraction and insights that we've never seen before. What's the vision of the platform and your view of how generative AI is going to impact developers? Our vision is that MongoDB is the first choice for developers everywhere to build modern applications. Those applications are now even more intelligent and more smart and AI enabled and they're going to choose MongoDB to do that. Dave thanks for coming on theCUBE and thanks for your time. I know you're super busy with customer visits and investors, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Thank you, thank you very much John. Thank you. And congratulations on your continued business success. I think you could be 10 billion revenue but I know I got to keep the expectations down. Keep those earnings coming. Congratulations. Thank you. MongoDB data scaling for customers is what's happening here in theCUBE bringing you all the data here live with theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host. We'll be right back with more coverage at MongoDB local after this short break.