 Welcome back everyone. The Keeps Live Coverage in New York City, winding down this epic day of Mongo Local. This is the kickoff of their flagship multi-city tour, 20 plus cities, they're taking it out on the road. This is the Keeps Live Coverage in New York City, where it was a packed house here for the opening keynote. The data is the center of the value proposition. You've got the developer platform. It's an amazing product. I love it, big fan of platforms. Got some questions though. How fast will scale? What's the generative AI? A lot of good stuff. Our next guest is James Micorette, founder of Payload, customer of MongoDB. Also, they did a seed investment in them. Entrepreneur, Mike, thanks James, thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me, yeah. We're built on MongoDB, so this is a very important event for me, as you can imagine. I came here to learn about where it's going, and with all the chat about AI, and the new vector database stuff that they're doing, that's super exciting to me, but it's also just honestly hunting grounds for me, because we're built on MongoDB. It's a perfect relationship. And they got a data platform, it's scaling, they have all the bells and whistles natively. They got connectors, you can do APIs, it's just clouds booming. I want to get into it before we get into it, but take a minute to explain what your company does, what you guys have built, what you're building, what market you're targeting, and what you're doing. Yeah, so Payload is a headless content management system, but the funny thing about CMSs in general is that developers hate them, and when the developers hate building with a product, the marketing people are going to hate the product as well, and nobody's just going to be interested in building on it, and so the difference, the big difference with Payload, it's a CMS, yeah, but it's developer first, and I truly believe that if you build something for engineers, they're going to like working with it more, and they're going to build better products, and Payload is a totally self-hosted open source CMS. So there's a lot of CMSs out there, like Contentful, Sanity, High Graph, Prismic, ContentStack, you name it, but they're all carbon copies of one another, and you never have control over the database with any of those CMSs at all. They're just completely abstracted away from you, so as soon as you need to do something hard, you're going to hit roadblocks, but with Payload you have complete control, and you actually get your own MongoDB, and that data is portable, it's extensible, you do what you want with it. And headless is obviously important for developers to take it over and build on top of it, so it looks like it's their own. Oh yeah. Shopify has done a great job with that on the e-commerce side, others have built these headless systems, it's quite the rage. What makes you different than other CMSs if you have to kind of nail down the key differentiators? So you think of like the landscape for a web developer, and there's one side, it's like application frameworks like Laravel, Rails, Django, whatever you got. You really have to build a lot of stuff from scratch with those, but then on the other side you have CMSs, which especially headless CMS, automatically they give you an admin panel and they give you endpoints for your data, but there's no middle ground there. Like headless CMS application framework, Payload is like literally right in the middle. We're basically half application framework, and you can build crazy things way outside of just powering blog content, or something like that. That's the low hanging fruit, but you can build full applications with this, headless CMS. So talk about the support for, I mean so I'm familiar with WordPress, we're a publishing company, that's for blogs and whatnot, we got Ghost out there, but now you got multimodal content, which is a really big deal. I could have a feed, it could be JSON endpoint, I got support say a River of Clips video, I got podcasts, I got text, I got AI bots. How does these content managers, developers build a good UX because you have conflicting challenges? I don't want a frame, I don't want a widget. They looks too canned, I want to make it look beautiful, so I want great UX enablement, and I want good UI. And so how do you respond to that? So first off, multimodal content, that's a challenge, right? But if you have the control over the backend, when someone uploads an editor uploads a podcast or something and you need to generate a script and then save it on that record in the database, with Payload because you have control over the backend, you can inject a plugin that automatically scrapes the script, puts it right on the document in the database, and then the front end developers can retrieve that seamlessly and build a really nice custom interface. The whole goal of Payload is to make it easier to build very high end products. What kind of coding is on the front end for a developer? Payload is fully TypeScript, front to back. So the backend is Node TypeScript, the front end is React in TypeScript, it's all done for you, but you can pair it with any front end that you want. You can use Next.js, you can use SvelteKit, you can use whatever, you can use native apps to fetch the content from Payload, and it's just like an omnichannel source of truth. And what kind of tools are you guys using with Mongo? How do you guys interface? You said you're built on Mongo? Yep. Explain some of those use cases and architecture. Yeah, right now MongoDB is the only database that we support, and you can run the community edition if you want on your own servers. We have Payload Cloud, which is like a one click deployment, and that gives you the CPU, that gives you an Atlas database out of the box, automatically, that you own. You get the connection string, and then it gives you S3 and all that stuff as well for files. But we're built on MongoDB Atlas. So if I wanted to redo my entire publishing franchise, Empire, Empire, because you're kidding, of course. I got blogs and news, I got video. Yep. I want to make it more dynamic and cooler, like a destination, like a portal, like a very targeted for my audience, and create great, memorable experiences. Could I use your product? How would I engage? My product would be extremely simple to implement for all of that. And then you're going to end up with one admin UI that you can cross-reference content, and you can build up highly dynamic and related entries, and just then render it into a front end that's very deliberate. It's open source, it's free. So the only reason you have to pay for it is if you want enterprise extensions, or if you want to deploy to payload cloud, but it's just on GitHub. So you can step forward. How about performance? I get a lot of traffic. Oh man, this is a good topic. You just sent me a softball. So we did a performance test. The funny thing, we get asked this a lot. MongoDB is object-oriented database, and relational databases are good for relational performance and all that. But I stacked it up against two of my competitors. I'm going to name-drop them too. Good. Strapi and Directis, those are both Postgres. Heavy relational DB test. We ran it, it was like a load test for relational databases. We were using MongoDB, and we were 700% faster than Strapi and 300% faster than Directis. In a relational test with MongoDB, it's blazingly fast. Yeah, and by the way, document databases, document, think like word doc, has text in it. Yeah. Text, so AI really lined up nicely for the generative AI capabilities. How do you look at that, as you look at that wave coming? How set up are you enabled for some of the generative AI extractions, metadata, and whatnot? We're literally actively building that right now, but just today, talking about MongoDB vector support, it's going to be amazing to just keep all that in one database. That's a game changer. Like you won't need to go out and sign up for other vendors. You'll just go with MongoDB Atlas and this should be done. You know, Linux has milled this out there. I've never seen that one. That's open source. A lot of open source action going on with these Vect, Dave, should be super exciting. Final question, rate the show. Obviously, a little bit biased because you're all on Mongo, which is not a bad thing, by the way. We're a customer too, by the way. We use MongoDB as well. What's your view of the show? How'd they do and what happened here for people watching that didn't come who might have FOMO? Your ground truth right now, tell them what's happening. It's very well produced. It feels like an oiled machine and you know what they say about New York City, it's a well oiled machine with all the wheels and knobs and everything, but that's how I felt about this event. I've been to a lot of these, as you can imagine, and it's got some production value. It's good, it's tight. My day's been booked, but I've been enjoying every second. A lot of good connections. It's not too crowded, but crowded. Yeah, totally. It's beautiful, it's low. I've been having a good time. What you're going to do is in 23 cities. Yeah, I know it. Yeah, Chicago, I'm going to be going to the Chicago one too. I'm a mid-westerner, so. That weather's good. Let's make sure it's not in the winter. Yeah, that's challenging. It's not going to be winter. Hope it's around KubeCon. It's going to be in Chicago this year. Linux Foundation will be there. Cool. All right, James, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for having me. That's a wrap here in New York from Mongo Locals to CUBE's coverage. The flagship first of many coming down the pike here, going on the road. Like they say here in New York City, fashion starts on the streets and that's what's going on in open source and developers, MongoDB's data developer platform or developer data platform, they're calling it. And the next big thing here happening, that's theCUBE's coverage. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.