Thoughts on technology and the tech business
A little over a year ago, I decided to step down as CEO of MongoDB. I am now ramping up my work life again though not to anywhere near the intensity of being CEO and I thought this would be a good time to share an update on my last year. My professional activities have [ ]
Earlier this summer, Matt Lauer asked Mary Barra, the CEO of GM, whether she could balance the demands of being a mom and being a CEO. The Atlantic asked similar questions of PepsiCo’s female CEO Indra Nooyi. As a male CEO, I have been asked what kind of car I drive and what type of [ ]
Marketing is often tasked with communicating bad news well. Unfortunately, sometimes people try to hard to make bad news good. I remember one executive at one of my previous employers presenting a chart of his team s output that showed declining output over time as resources increased. Incredibly, he spoke excitedly about how well the team [ ]
Many companies measure their progress by some indicator of sales. In the end, product, market, and execution have to come together and how much money customers are willing to pay you is a pretty good indicator of how you are doing. But how to measure that? In SaaS/recurring revenue models there are lots of detailed [ ]
This morning MongoDB announced that we raised $150 million in growth capital. Some notable new investors include leading public market investors Fidelity and TRowe Price along with Salesforce.com. I am also excited to welcome Altimiter Capital (where partner Kevin Wang is actually a MongoDB user) and happy to see that NEA, Sequoia Capital, Intel, and Red [ ]
The old joke in Silicon Valley is that you can tell the extroverted engineer from the introverted engineer because he is looking at your shoes instead of his own shoes (and yes, it is always told about a him , which will be the topic of another post). But what happens when an introvert becomes CEO? [ ]
Recently I was asked to give a short talk on balancing delegating vs doing at a CEO forum. I thought I would share some thoughts here as I prepare. Mostly from the CEO viewpoint, but many of the ideas here could apply to managers in other roles. I think there are four types of tasks [ ]
Today 10gen is changing its name to MongoDB, Inc. I wanted to share my thoughts on the change with the MongoDB community. The short version: the company is completely dedicated to building and supporting MongoDB, so it made sense to have a name which clearly communicates that focus. The long version, for those who want [ ]
Sample bias is a simple concept. If you do a poll about the economy standing outside the unemployment office people will probably say its bad. If you do it inside the Gucci store you might get a different answer. Reality might be somewhere in between. In many businesses, we don t get to talk to all [ ]
Shortly I will be participating in the March for Innovation, in support of liberalizing our immigration policies. I wanted to share some of why I favor a more open approach to immigration, in particular for highly skilled immigrants. I will start with the counter-argument. In an environment of high unemployment, fears that immigrants take jobs [ ]