Abstract
The story of MongoDB started with a frustration instead of a business plan. Databases were rigid and slow to evolve while the rest of the tech stack was moving faster. This frustration showed up at meetups, in passionate arguments on forums - and we used it to listen, learn, and build in the open. The community became co-conspirators rather than users.
Sure, we made mistakes, shipped features fast, and were often humbled. But what looked like mistakes resulted in continuous improvements in the code, new features, and a growth in the community around it.
In this talk, we trace that journey, and share our architectural bets, and the hard lessons we learned in building trust and resilience at scale. The product tenets that turned early skepticism into widespread adoption. We will share the way open source & community turned into the engine of a sustainable and formidable business. And why we chose to monetize developer convenience instead of control. How we earned enterprise trust without compromising our values, and how a developer-first philosophy became a competitive moat.
This is the story of an underdog that didn’t come from Silicon Valley. Hopefully, we will inspire you to build in the MongoDB way, by making long-term bets, and by building formidable businesses through open source & community.
Speaker
Akshat Vig
Distinguished Engineer @MongoDB, Previously Senior Principal Engineer NoSQL@AWS
Akshat Vig is a Distinguished Engineer at MongoDB, where he works on some of the most difficult distributed systems problems that come with building & operating a global cloud database at scale. Previously, he spent 15 years at Amazon Web Services, where he was part of DynamoDB from its inception and launched multiple AWS database services. He has co-authored several database papers and filed nearly 100 patents. Outside of work, he’s usually running, cycling, skiing, or walking—doing his best to keep up with his family’s pace.
Find Akshat Vig at:
Speaker
Andrew Davidson
SVP Products @MongoDB - Foundational in the Evolution of MongoDB from a Database to Cloud Service Company, Previously Scaled Global Mapping Operations @Google
Andrew Davidson is the SVP of Products at MongoDB. In his decade plus with the company, he has been foundational in the creation of the product management function and the evolution of MongoDB from a database to a cloud service company. While at MongoDB, he was also named one of the 10 people defining the new database landscape by Protocol. Andrew previously scaled global mapping operations at Google, worked in energy economics, and lived extensively in South Asia. Andrew holds a Bachelor’s in Physics from the University of California, Berkeley.
