Crucible Moments

Sequoia Capital

A podcast about the inflection points that shaped some of the most significant companies of our time. Crucible moments are pivotal decisions that determine your trajectory. In Season 2, hear from founders and leaders like Steve Chen of YouTube, Drew Houston of Dropbox, Frank Slootman of ServiceNow and Tony Xu of DoorDash, Steve Huffman of Reddit and more about how they navigated the challenges and opportunities that defined their stories. Hosted by Roelof Botha of Sequoia Capital. The content of this podcast does not constitute investment advice, an offer to provide investment advisory services or an offer to sell or solicitation of an offer to buy an interest in any investment fund. read less
BusinessBusiness
EntrepreneurshipEntrepreneurship
InvestingInvesting

Episodes

MongoDB ft. Dev Ittycheria - How an Early Pivot Catalyzed an Open Source Movement
Sep 12 2024
MongoDB ft. Dev Ittycheria - How an Early Pivot Catalyzed an Open Source Movement
MongoDB, founded in 2007, originally aimed to create a platform-as-a-service system with a new database layer. Facing competition from Google, the founders pivoted to focus solely on their database product, MongoDB—a new kind of database built for the scale of the internet era. Founder Dwight Merriman built a product that developers loved, but scaling the company proved challenging until Dev Ittycheria took the reins as CEO in 2014. As cloud computing grew, MongoDB transitioned from on-premise software to Atlas, a fully-managed cloud service. Despite initial skepticism, Atlas now represents 70% of MongoDB's revenue. As Atlas scaled, MongoDB faced another controversial decision: whether to change its open source license model to maintain its commercial moat. These pivotal decisions transformed MongoDB from a niche database to nearly $2 billion in annual revenue. Host: Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital Featuring: Dwight Merriman, Dev Ittycheria and Tom Killalea Transcript: https://www.sequoiacap.com/podcast/crucible-moments-mongodb/ 00:00 - Cold Open 00:19 - Introduction 05:30 - The NoSQL movement 09:52 - Scrapping the platform for the database 14:57 - Launching as MongoDB 19:52 - Moving to the cloud with Atlas 24:52 - Assigning a directly responsible individual 30:15 - How Atlas changed MongoDB 35:03 - Updating the licensing model to avoid “strip mining” 39:50 - Evolving back into a platform 41:26 - Executing on points of leverage
Introducing "Training Data," a new podcast from Sequoia about the future of A.I.
Jul 11 2024
Introducing "Training Data," a new podcast from Sequoia about the future of A.I.
Crucible Moments will be back shortly with season 2. You’ll hear from the founders of YouTube, DoorDash, Reddit, and more. In the meantime, we’d love to introduce you to a new original podcast, Training Data, where Sequoia partners learn from builders, researchers and founders who are defining the technology wave of the future: AI. The following conversation with Harrison Chase of LangChain is all about the future of AI agents—why they’re suddenly seeing a step change in performance, and why they’re key to the promise of AI.  Follow Training Data wherever you listen to podcasts, and keep an eye out for Season 2 of Crucible Moments, coming soon. LangChain’s Harrison Chase on Building the Orchestration Layer for AI Agents Hosted by: Sonya Huang and Pat Grady, Sequoia Capital Mentioned:  ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models, the first cognitive architecture for agents SWE-agent: Agent-Computer Interfaces Enable Automated Software Engineering, small-model open-source software engineering agent from researchers at Princeton Devin, autonomous software engineering from Cognition V0: Generative UI agent from Vercel GPT Researcher, a research agent  Language Model Cascades: 2022 paper by Google Brain and now OpenAI researcher David Dohan that was influential for Harrison in developing LangChain Transcript: https://www.sequoiacap.com/podcast/training-data-harrison-chase/