 Okay, we're back here live at Oracle OpenWorld. This is siliconangle.com's theCUBE, our flagship program where we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. We go where the action is and the action is Oracle OpenWorld and we go talk to all the experts we can find. CEOs, developers, marketing people, anyone who's got some signal, want to share that with you. I'm John Furrier, the founder of siliconangle.com. I'm here with Mac Shearsen, the president of TenGen. TenGen is the company that is powering MongoDB the fastest growing database out there powering big data analytics, all kinds of new back end web scale companies and beyond. Max, welcome to theCUBE. Great, thanks, it's great to be here. This is our place where we have a chat about what's going on, right? So, we call it the ESPN of tech where we can talk about tech like a sports show because we love tech. So, you guys are growing like crazy. So first, tell the folks out there about TenGen and about your company and just what's orbiting around you guys right now and the massive growth that you have. Sure, so TenGen is the company that's behind MongoDB. So, we started the MongoDB project. We've been building the product and commercializing it and we're just really excited with the momentum MongoDB has. We're really excited about the work that we're doing with our customers and the growth of the company. So, we're now about 175 people. We have a follow the sun support model with offices in Dublin, New York and Sydney for support and corporate offices as well in London and San Francisco and it's been wonderful. It's been explosive. It has. So, go back a year, how many employees did you have last year? We started last year with about 25 employees. Okay, I wanted to get that out there. Just, I mean, just if you look at the numbers, just sheer growth, you guys are growing, busting out the seams. One, what kind of year has it been for you? So, tell us in your mind's eye, just take us through last year. What happened and what's going on right now for the company? Sure, so we made a lot of progress with the product. So, in the last year and a half as we've grown from 25 employees to 175, we've added a lot of the capabilities that enterprises need in the product, whether it's things like journaling to improve the robustness, better capabilities for managing broadly geographically disbursed deployments in multiple data centers. We've improved the concurrency in the products of products, made a lot of progress. The company has matured a lot. So, we've gone from three sales people and engineers doing everything to help customers to having that 24-7 follow the sun support infrastructure and a team of people to service our companies around the world. Then revenue growth has been fantastic and better than we expected. We've raised a ton of money as well. And probably, but I think the most significant thing is really the way that MongoDB is becoming accepted as a mainstream tool for building applications and is being used a year and a half ago, MongoDB was in use at places like Craigslist and Four Square and Shutterfly, a bunch of web companies. And now we're in use at some of the world's leading banks and telcos and big government organizations as well as cool web companies. Yeah, I mean, people I talked to, you know, the web scale companies, I don't like to use the web 2.0 name because it's kind of dead, but you know, web scale, people who would pop out of the woodwork or code in a way love it because it's, you know, it's a good product, easy to work with, right? But then you get the LAMP developers, the LAMP stack developers who just gravitate to Mongo. That seems to be kind of the general reaction some folks I talked to. But then it scales. So you have a scaling headroom to the point where it can go well beyond the expectations of what a prototype or a product could go. And that's a good thing. You know, it's not hard to work with. That's been some, that's been some positive. Some criticisms have been, it does break at some point, like everything needs some real engineering. So take us through the reality of that, those things. And these are my opinions, based on some conversations I've had, but take us through that. One, is that true about these abuse of the product? Has that been some consistent, if not add to the color to that? And then two, the criticism of the breaking point is everything does break when someone has to re-engineer things and whatnot. Sure, so first of all, when we built MongoDB, the goal wasn't just to build something scalable, but it was to build something that would be really efficient and productive for developers to use. We didn't want developers to have to make a trade-off that says, boy, I think this application is going to get really big. So I'm going to use the really complex, painful, heavyweight thing. And this thing is just going to stay small so I can use something which is simple and appealing. The reality is when you start building an application, you don't know how big it's going to get. And you never want to foreclose that possibility of explosive growth by the technology that you choose. But the other reality is there's two ways that you can foreclose that possibility. One is a technology that doesn't scale to the level that you need. And one is a technology that doesn't give you the agility to build the functionality that you need. So we looked at what was going on in NoSQL and said, yeah, by removing some of the features that can be impediments to scaling, we can build something that scales. But let's think about really which features we have to take out and which features we can leave in that'll make a developer's life productive. So I think the ease of use is absolutely accurate. I think that people do sometimes run into trouble. And I think that running into trouble is... That's natural though. People do at some point hit a ceiling based on how well they architect, right? I mean, it comes down to that too. Absolutely. We try to make things as easy as we can for users. But you still have to plan for capacity. You still have to test. And people don't have a lot of experience with architecting distributed database systems. So one way that I think about it is running a single server of MongoDB is much, much easier than running a single server of Oracle. However, we also let you run 100 servers of MongoDB or 1,000 servers of MongoDB. And we've made that as easy as we've been able to, but it's still harder to run a 500 server MongoDB cluster than it is to run one Oracle database. So we're going to keep working on it. And hopefully someday it's easier to run a 500 server MongoDB. Let's just be fair. What's the price points? The price point is much less. And I think the adoption curve. Technology tax of Oracle is heavy. We were just talking before you came on about the Oracle with Dejure from Nutanix. And Oracle is serving clients that are like wealth, like rich people. They need like a wealth manager. They're not scrappy startups and or hyperscale companies. Well, Oracle I think has really done a good job of separating the underlying economics of how much customers pay them from the decision cycles of people actually choosing technology for a project. I can't tell you how many people that I talked to who think of Oracle as being free. And yet they managed to drive some very impressive margins that are the envy of a lot of people in technology. So I think they've done that very effectively. Give an example. What do you mean by that? Sure, so a big organization whether it's a government department or a Fortune 500 company might do an enterprise license with Oracle where they pay them $50 million for all the Oracle that they can use over the next three years. So they're paying a lot of money, but each project team is freely able to use the technology without perceiving that cost. Okay, so they've already been paid the tax. It seems like open source to them. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's what we're up against, which means we can't win deals just by being cheaper. We have to be better. But I do think you talk about the economics of Oracle and I think the economics are fundamentally a little bit outdated. If you go back 20, 25 years, when I was getting started in this industry, people would buy an Oracle license for a couple hundred thousand dollars and they'd run it on a vax that they spent maybe $350,000 to buy. And so the $200,000 for the database made sense. You fast forward a decade or so and you're running that $200,000 database license on a $70,000 Sunbox and it was a little bit irritatingly expensive. Now, when it costs $200,000 for an Oracle license to run on a $6,000 commodity server from Dell, people think that's crazy. So we think the price point for the database should be similar to the price point for the rest of the costs in operating the system. The database shouldn't be 10 times as expensive as everything else. So you're balancing product development with hyper growth, which means you got to deal with, as a president, you got to deal with personnel issues. HR, someone, you got to get rid of the good employees, keep hiring great employees, get rid of the bad employees, shuffle things around. Some people are young in their job, get some leadership. You get a lot of things going on the operation side, same time on the product side, and the market's exploding. So in all three theaters, you're pretty busy, right? So, one, you're a tech athlete by our standards. That's a compliment, by the way. So what's your outlook for the year? What's on your plate right now? Take us through your plans for the next six to 12 months for TenGen and MongoDB. Sure. So on the product side, we're doing a lot of work around things like security and auditing that are important to some of our largest users. We have people who've implemented secure systems, whether that's for intelligence or just security around financial data for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, but we haven't made it as easy for them as we should. So we're going to do some work around that, as well as around making operations and management of MongoDB easier. And then from an organizational development perspective, we've gone from 25 people to 175 people in a little less than two years. We're not going to continue at that rate of growth. If we did for a decade, we'd probably have hired half the population of the United States. So that's got to normalize to maybe something in the 50 to 100% per year employee growth. And as we do that, the ratio of people who are newer will come down. The productivity that we'll have per head will come up. The processes will have time to sink in before they're broken again by the next round of growth. So I'm typing a little note here on Twitter for people who want to go see the SiliconANGLE's Trend Connect report, go to slideshare.com slash SiliconANGLE. And you'll find a report that we put out on big data in September on a proprietary survey tool we built that shows out of 170,000 sampling, MongoDB is more popular than Hadoop for data scientists. So I want you to comment on that because that's a really relevant stat. Now on the same survey, just to the hashtags here, on the same survey, IT professionals, Hadoop is more popular. In both cases, analytics is growing month over month in terms of popularity. So here we go, Hadoop, HBase, Mongo, but ultimately no one talks about client server, they talk about the solution. So you can see the market changing. You guys are now more popular by our data with data scientists than Hadoop. So observations, commentary on that, what do you think, what's your observation on that? So we're happy to see more people discovering MongoDB. When we built it, we built it to be applicable to a broad variety of use cases. And so it's nice to see that a lot of people are finding it to be a helpful tool. Hadoop's been out there for a little bit longer. It has, I think, a little bit of a head start in terms of popularity. And I think it's really useful for some of the really complex high-end use cases. We'd like Mongo to become kind of a go-to tool that people can use, ranging from simple applications to complex. And we think that that's really important in building critical mass of usage. Well, we actually use H-Base, but we haven't really played with Mongo because we got some H-Base jockeys on our team. But my takeaway from the data clearly shows that when you talk about data scientists, you're not just talking about math geeks, which they are. You have PhD developers who love the Hadoop and you have more of a higher-end, I would call higher-end Hadoop kind of target audience in that community in Apache. You look at what Mongo's done, it makes sense, right? Big data analytics appeals to fast projects. I got to get something on the board quickly. So that makes sense to me. Absolutely. The other thing is a lot of people use MongoDB in operational use cases as well. And we have a lot of joint customers with Hadoop. So at eBay, they use a lot of MongoDB and they use a lot of Hadoop. At Foursquare, all the check-ins, all the user profiles, all the venue information is stored in MongoDB. When you check in and figures out which badges you earn by querying MongoDB to find your check-in history, the check-in history at that venue, and they use Hadoop as well to do some of the analytics and trending behind that. So I don't view the two technologies as being an either-or for a lot of leading organizations. They're going to use both, which is great. Got a lot of views on this report. I just put it up this morning. We already got 571 views. Go to slideshare.com slash silicon angle and you'll see our exclusive proprietary original content. It's called TrendConnect. TrendConnect is our new research report. We're putting out monthly in a lot of different verticals. This is a sample report on big data and staggering. We have looked at about 170,000 people looking at the marketplace and profiling their interests in the different technologies. And we are here with the president of TenGen who's shepherding MongoDB on a rapid growth rocket ship, as they say in Silicon Valley. Final question because we're up on time. What's the most exciting thing that's happening to you right now in your world around TenGen, MongoDB, and around you personally and your outlook for the next year? Sure, so I talked to the head of architecture at a top tier bank about their transition of their data management platform and that MongoDB is now one of their core data management platforms and all the organizational changes he had to go through to make that possible. And to me, the fact that it's not just the four squares and Craigslist and eBays of the world but it's the top banks, the top telcos, big government organizations is a key transition for our company and for the technology and the marketplace. Okay, Max Shearson, the president of TenGen, MongoDB, folks out there, if you're watching Oracle Open World and you're familiar with Oracle Database, watch MongoDB, rapid adoption amongst LAMP stack developers and other developers, an alternative to HBase and Hadoop. Could be complimentary, we saw Cassandra and these other communities all kind of converging in on a rapid growing market, congratulations on your success growing, they're hiring and doubling their staff. And we have some news that we will share shortly because I'm not allowed to break it because I'm under friend EA with some of your guys but great to know your company, you're in Palo Alto, California and Variety, Lightspeed, great investors. No, no, no, Lightspeed Ignition, right? Frank Artali, is he in there? NEA, Sequoia, Union Square and Flybridge. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Fly, I didn't know Flybridge was in there, I like those guys. So NEA, great firm, Sequoia, never heard of them. Flybridge, great firm out of the east coast, I've been impressed with these guys, X-Graylock, XIDC, great guys. And Union Square, Union Square, it's Fred Wilson and his team doing all the great web startups, and then Ignition. And Ignition, no, Frank, Ignition's not in, okay. All right, so maybe I got that wrong, anyway. Maybe I need to talk to Ignition, right? They don't have any money, they're raising a new fund. Okay, so this is theCUBE, we're through all the action is, 10 Gen, hot startup, growing like crazy, looking for work, go to them, they're hiring like crazy, Max, the president, here inside theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, we'll be right back after this break. Okay.