
MongoDB shares jump more than 30% in $192M IPO - bnewton
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/19/mongodb-mdb-ipo-stock-price-on-first-trading-day.html
======
shubhamjain
MongoDB isn't usually seen favorably but everyone must admit that it's an
unlikely success story that deserves admiration. Think about it. Bringing a
database to the market with a completely different paradigm, growing it to the
enterprise-production-ready level, and creating a billion-dollar business
around is no small deal. Yes, they did ride the NoSQL zeitgeist but they
survived when others had no major success.

Undeniably, they did have their fuck-ups in the start, but I think they have
done a good job fixing them.

~~~
munk-a
If they had done so by presenting a product that was picked up due to it's
merit and continued to gain traction based on that then I'd be rather
impressed. Instead the story of MongoDB seems to be how extremely well
targeted marketing and sales can build a so-so product into a huge IPO, there
have been performance comparisons showing it isn't even the best at what it
does so this IPO is riding on the network effect of those early stages of
marketing alone.

In our economy this is sadly an entirely valid route to making money but their
mindshare is going to continue to collapse as the warts on their product show
more and more.

So the admiration you have should probably be directed at the wool the
marketers behind MongoDB managed to pull over your eyes.

~~~
rburhum
Most people forget that with startups, what you are trying to create is a
business... the technology behind is only one element to it.

It is extremely difficult to do good marketing and sales and they did it.

Solve a customer problem while building a healthy business... a success story
in my book.

~~~
gxs
Agree - I think there is a perception that if you build an awesome product it
sells itself.

There is so much work to running a successful business, especially at that
scale. Marketing, Sales, Implementation, Support, on top of G&A, and that's
not even touching on HR and retaining employees in a competitive market.

There is a reason some people are known as the "business" guys, I think
expertise in that area is underrated, especially among people who've only
worked at smaller companies or startups.

Edit: Genuinely curious to know why I'm being downvoted. Care to elaborate on
why you're downvoting?

~~~
mrbrowning
Mongo as a business has largely catapulted itself to where it is by making
money off of information assymetry more than actual technical superiority.
They may have since corrected a lot of the fundamental technical isssues with
their product, but that doesn’t change the fact that (contrary to SV dogma)
their success doesn’t rest on the creation of wealth, only its extraction from
magpie-type customers. Downvoters likely chafe at the notion that such a
strategy is laudable or valid.

~~~
rtpg
Even assuming that the product is so-so, saying that they did not create
wealth is a bit disingenuous. They basically created "NoSQL" discussions at a
time where most settled on some SQL variant despite their difficulties.

It's not like they were just a vendor of some other product. They actually
spent money on the product, on evangelism (kind of marketing, but also kind of
development), on so much.

Stripe's technical achievements at first were basically "a nice button" and a
slightly friendlier risk model. Yet they are lauded (as they should be!). We
can cut Mongo some slack given how we act about other companies.

~~~
philwelch
I would say that NoSQL was more popularized by Amazon’s whitepaper on Dynamo,
which they published in 2007.

------
gremlinsinc
Is it me..or does Mongo not seem as relevent and 'hip' as it once was... I
mean I feel postgres is much more solid, and you can combine some of the
aspects of document store via the json data types they added... of course I'm
not really a DBA and don't have a lot of Mongo experience ... but personally I
feel rdbms make more sense for growth/scaling..

~~~
da_chicken
RDBMS makes sense for _most_ applications. Most applications store data that
can be fit to the relational model. Most applications aren't big data or data
mining OLAP.

Most RDBMSs can do key-value stores very well now. Most applications also care
more about consistency over availability, which is what RDBMSs do (CAP
theorem). Many NoSQL data stores choose availability and partitioning and
sacrifice consistency (i.e., "eventual consistency"). There's a lot of
applications that you can't sacrifice consistency for. Electronic health
records, financial records, student records, employee records, etc. You care
that the data are accurate and up to date, and you want the system to error if
it can't provide that. Wrong answers and "close enough" answers aren't good
enough.

Now, if you're running Reddit or Wikipedia or Facebook or HN... do you really
care if a user doesn't get the absolute latest version of a document or
comment? No, not really. If the content is hours old it's a problem, but it's
not a big deal if it's a few minutes out of date. You care more that your
users get _a_ version of the document more than you care that they get the
_latest_ version of the document.

~~~
zzzcpan
You don't seem to know this, but no traditional RDBMSs actually provide CAP
consistency, for that they would have to use at least two-phase commit or
something, but they don't. So, they all are noCAP databases. Electronic health
or financial records are way safer in a proper eventually consistent database,
like orders of magnitude safer, but everyone just takes the risk with some
insurance at best to cover the losses.

EDIT: If you downvote, please explain why. You can't disagree with the truth.

~~~
artimaeis
> "no traditional RDBMS actually provide CAP consistency, for that they would
> have to use at least two-phase commit

[https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/language-
elements...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/language-
elements/commit-transaction-transact-sql)

> If the transaction committed was a Transact-SQL distributed transaction,
> COMMIT TRANSACTION triggers MS DTC to use a two-phase commit protocol to
> commit all of the servers involved in the transaction. If a local
> transaction spans two or more databases on the same instance of the Database
> Engine, the instance uses an internal two-phase commit to commit all of the
> databases involved in the transaction.

I'm only versed in SQL-Server but I'm pretty sure other RDBMS vendors provide
similar functionality.

~~~
zzzcpan
Thanks for pointing out. Oracle has distributed transactions too.

------
heliodor
I don't understand why everyone is so happy when IPOs go up and make it sound
like a good event.

I see it as the founders needlessly missing out on 30% of money (in this
case), which ends up going in the pockets of the Wall Street middle men that
get first access to the stock offering.

~~~
cujic9
Pricing is hard, but yes, I think they did price this one a little too low.

That said, the goal is for shares to have a nice upward pop when they hit the
open market.

This helps encourage a broader based of shareholders, protecting against the
case where a big shareholder decides to dump all of their shares.

This also helps in the case where the company comes out with bad news in the
near future. Shareholders who make money are less likely to sue.

~~~
heisenbit
The ones who made money are the ones who sold and who are ex-shareholders.

~~~
cujic9
And the underwriters, and the early shareholders who grabbed a little chunk of
that 30% on the way up.

------
KB
Having gone through a few acquisitions where MongoDB was used, I would never
recommend using it from a legal/compliance perspective. You either have to pay
for a very expensive commercial license OR adhere to their AGPL license (which
is very difficult).

[https://opensource.google.com/docs/using/agpl-
policy/](https://opensource.google.com/docs/using/agpl-policy/)
[https://github.com/mongodb/mongo/blob/master/GNU-
AGPL-3.0.tx...](https://github.com/mongodb/mongo/blob/master/GNU-AGPL-3.0.txt)

~~~
gaadd33
Why do you need a commercial license or have to do anything special for AGPL
compliance if you aren't modifying the codebase and using the binaries from
Mongo's website/repo?

It looks like all of the drivers you would use to connect to it are Apache 2.0
licensed so that wouldn't be a reason.

------
jamaicahest
>Twenty-one percent of respondents told industry site StackOverflow that
MongoDB was the most popular database, second only to versions from the
dominant technology, SQL, which traces its roots back to legacy technology
companies such as Microsoft, IBM and Oracle.

Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle are legacy technology companies? What kind of
hipster journalist wrote this article?

------
jc_811
->"MongoDB was the database that most software developers said they wanted to work with, according to StackOverflow's survey of 64,000 developers."

Does this just seem like it can't be true? Does anyone know where or why this
would be the case?

~~~
cloverich
A lot of the bootcamp schools use mongo from what I remember. An interesting
comparison would be what devs with 5+ years of experience prefer to use.

~~~
tytytytytytytyt
That's not "software developers", though. And how many people would that
actually be, not most I'd think...

~~~
eric-hu
A friend of mine works in a commercial real estate consulting company. One of
his former co-workers was non technical, but kept insisting they use Mongo for
their projects. He believed it would automatically boost the performance of a
system. I guess he thought of it like installing a turbocharger in a car.

I have no idea what his sources were for this, but it signals Mongo's
marketing power to me if a non developer would become so avid about it.

------
xchaotic
Hmm, I work for a competing nosql company and the good news about the IPO is:
It should raise the visibility of all database products, not just Mongo. The
second part is that IPO for a database company is viable in this climate. Some
of the early workers have been waiting for a long time for the IPO. I bet this
spawns a new group of seed investors.

~~~
swyx
yes MDB's success is fantastic news for innovation in the space as a whole. I
hope your company does well too.

------
danbmil99
ach, the interminable hatred of mongodb is an anthropological artifact worthy
of study.

It's the only truly working example of a horizontally scalable arbitrary
document storage and retrieval system with indexing on any element. It is a
much more general tool then an RDBS, and should never be used when an RDBS
would do the job.

However, it's really good at collecting searchable, arbitrary schemaless data
in real time. The newest versions do what they're supposed to do rather well,
it's a tool like any other tool.

That said, the company is guilty of overhyping for sure, and I wouldn't invest
in the stock on a rational basis.

~~~
jmakeig
Only? Many of the early MongoDB employees came from MarkLogic. Several have
returned too.

(Full disclosure: PM at MarkLogic)

~~~
danbmil99
Well you guys must have a pretty lame marketing department because I've been
using noSql for the better part of a decade and I've never heard of you.

A quick look at your web page tells me why. You have no open source or free
version that I can download and kick the tires of.

------
bfrog
Mongo is a marketing company for a mediocre product, but no doubt they're damn
good at marketing it.

~~~
takeda
They're also f*ing annoying. One of their sales people was bugging me for 2-3
weeks sending e-mail nearly every day. He even subscribed me to their mailing
lists without my permission.

------
jartelt
Per crunchbase they raised their last funding round on a pre-money valuation
of $1.6 billion. Since the market cap now is less than that valuation, why is
the coverage saying this is a big success? It seems to me like this is a down
round of some sort. Does anyone know if I am missing something here? Or does
this type of down round not really affect the employees common stock?

~~~
tschellenbach
That really depends on the terms of their last investment round. As far as I
know those haven't been disclosed. I would suspect that the investor in the
last round is compensated with more shares, probably something similar to if
he had invested at a 1.1 billion instead of 1.6 billion valuation. Maybe not
though. Depends on the terms.

------
bastijn
After being introduced to the MongoDB stale read issue in 2015 [1] we
abandoned MongoDB and never looked back. Anyone knows if this is resolved in
the latest versions?

[1] [https://aphyr.com/posts/322-jepsen-mongodb-stale-
reads](https://aphyr.com/posts/322-jepsen-mongodb-stale-reads)

~~~
travisp
It got significantly better in 3.4 -- this analysis claims that the issues
were finally resolved in 3.4 (although they were in the RC)
[https://jepsen.io/analyses/mongodb-3-4-0-rc3](https://jepsen.io/analyses/mongodb-3-4-0-rc3)

~~~
bastijn
Thanks. Seems they did some good work indeed. Though it takes time before they
get back the trust they lost over this.

~~~
takeda
Still, the settings that let them pass these tests are not defaults.

And the reason for them being non-defaults is that it will drastically reduce
performance.

Edit: Also looks like Kyle saved for the next time testing of server crashes
and restarts which is another difficult problem to handle when performance is
important.

------
ssutch3
In real-live-production workloads I've had nothing but pain with MongoDB. They
see more like a marketing and sales team piggybacking on a strange and
immature database technology.

------
RHSman2
Lets just hope the db that is used to store the data on said shares isn't
MongoDB ;)

------
mathattack
Interesting valuation. 8x revenue is a success for SaaS companies. They were
initially priced at $20/share, which would imply ~9.5x revenue. At $32/share
they're at ~16x revenue. Very steep.

They also fail the VC "rule of 40" where SaaS companies should have growth
plus margins equal to 40%. (50% growth and negative 10% margins, or 10% growth
and 30% margins) They seem to be at 50% growth, but minus 40% margins.

Somehow they pulled it off. Great for them!

~~~
dx034
For non-tech people, MongoDB often represents areas such as "big data". I work
with a lot of people that have very little tech knowledge and the name comes
up frequently to demonstrate that you're hip. It's the same that being on AWS
convinces investors because running your own servers is so yesterday.

Only Hadoop probably has an even bigger name. That's what everyone connects
with machine learning and AI, so every big company needs a Hadoop cluster.

------
manigandham
As usual, the confusion and religious comments are numerous. There is no such
thing as "nosql". There are different types of databases, with traditional
relational being useful for 95% of scenarios (especially on increasingly fast
servers with decent replication features) while the rest of the time something
more specific is needed.

SQL is just an interface, obviously common to relational databases but can be
applied to any datastore. Spark/Drill/Presto/Dremio/etc can give you SQL over
any data, even just files in a folder somewhere, so let's clear up this notion
between actual database technology and the access path.

Document stores are definitely useful. MongoDB is one of the better ones today
although it had a rocky start. RethinkDB was an interesting experiment but
never matured, RavenDB is a solid contender, Couchbase has proven itself, Riak
might stick around, and there are dozens of others.

There is a place for everything and MongoDB is being used by plenty of
companies to great extent. It might not always be the right choice but when it
is, it works incredibly well. Good luck to the team, I'm glad to see the
success in both the product and the company.

~~~
lstyls
> There is no such thing as nosql

This is not at all correct. SQL has well defined semantics that are
standardized around the relational model and ACID guarantees. A nosql
datastore is one that intentionally makes tradeoffs that force it to deviate
from that model. The name makes sense if you understand that SQL was the first
broadly adopted language that targeted the relational model.

I'm not very familiar with the systems you mention other than Presto. But if
they do not provide relational guarantees then even if they have SQL-like
syntax the semantics are sufficiently different for them to not be
implementing a true SQL. Hence, nosql.

~~~
manigandham
SQL = structured query language. That's all it is, a language to access and
manipulate data and data structures. It comes in several variations, standards
and dialects. Any system can implement (a form of) SQL as an interface, just
as any system can also implement ACID guarantees around data access, but these
are completely separate concepts. ACID isn't even mentioned on the SQL wiki
page. [1]

Relational databases have a history of offering both in a single package, but
there is no "true" SQL. There are also plenty of non-relational data stores
that offer SQL and/or ACID guarantees so this limited generalization isn't
accurate or useful.

"NoSQL" has no meaning other than originally describing systems that did not
have any SQL access at all, usually due to different storage layers,
distributed architectures, custom access protocols, and general immaturity
around usage. A decade later, all of these systems have evolved and there's
both convergence and specialization everywhere.

It would be far better to just talk about the actual type of database, and the
interfaces and guarantees it provides, rather than marketing jargon like
nosql.

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL)

------
gerbilly
Maybe machines are too fast today. Back in the 70s, even departmental
computers were slow. This might have forced better engineering choices onto
the product designers.

The difference between and O( n log n) algorithm and an O(n^2) one could have
made the difference between a decent product and a totally unusable one.

Nowadays, toy examples can seem to work fine even when the products have
really terrible implementations.

------
eltoozero
Obligatory: MongoDB is web scale.[0]

[0]: [https://youtu.be/b2F-DItXtZs](https://youtu.be/b2F-DItXtZs)

------
odammit
I think the share price will be eventually consistent.

~~~
s3nnyy
Is this a pun? For puns I go to Reddit, for substance to HN.

~~~
odammit
My sincerest apologies. I hope I didn’t ruin your entire week.

------
z3t4
Whats MongoDB's business model !? Open source, and separate "enterprise"
closed source version !? Are contributors OK with this or are most
contributors in-house ? It seems Nginx et.al are also using this business
model ... I'm thinking about starting my own open source business.

~~~
gaius
Bait and switch

They promise that it's so easy to use you don't need a DBA, you don't need any
ops staff to run it, etc, just develop and go! Then once you're in too deep,
they get you...

------
bad_user
The irony of the situation is that MongoDB is now pretty good at horizontal
scalability, probably because of all the big companies that were fooled into
using it, which then had to fix it :-)

Seeing the comments in this thread, it's interesting how it gets compared with
PostgreSQL. People are missing the point — NoSQL only happened because of
horizontal scalability requirements, being the number one reason for why
people want NoSQL.

Just because PostgreSQL can now store and interrogate JSON, that doesn't mean
that PostgreSQL can scale horizontally. In fact PostgreSQL sucks at horizontal
scaling, historically its replication story has been worse than MySQL
actually.

And might not have big data, but you might want redundancy and scenarios with
pretty tight SLAs are not uncommon at all.

------
mi100hael
_> "Most applications today run on a database technology that was introduced
in the 1970s," Ittycheria said. "In the '70s, I was using a rotary phone to
have a phone conversation. So people are looking for a modern, scalable and
flexible platform."_

It's like a weird version of the Turing test where you have to decide whether
someone's speaking seriously or in jest when they talk about NoSQL.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs)

~~~
blauditore
I know there's quite some aversion to NoSQL around here, and generally I don't
care much as I'm seldomly dealing directly with databases.

But recently, I've been exposed to a fairly big and complex SQL one with
several references between entities and lots, lots of X_has_Y tables. This
makes me think that with growing complexity (which seems to be a general
trend), NoSQL databases seem more practical at some point, or at least
something less rigid than classic relational ones. I'm not saying SQL is
obsolete, but it seems like its domain of usefulness is shrinking.

~~~
autokad
i got downvoted in another thread for saying nosql has a lot of advantages in
reducing work like not having to worry about carefully creating indexes when
joining billion row tables. someone replied you dont need indexes. i replied I
dont know how you plan on running joins on billion row tables in postgress
without indexes. got downvoted again.

I bet they are still waiting for that join....

~~~
parasubvert
Whether you need indexes really depends on what you’re trying to do. Full
table scans are more efficient if you are doing analytics on most of those
rows in a time series. If you need 1 row in a billion, yes, you need an index.

~~~
autokad
if your doing a join on two size N tables, your O(n) cost for each record is
N, thus you are doing N^2 lookups. basically reading the entire DB into memory
each record.

~~~
parasubvert
No. Worst case a nested join of two tables M and N would be O(MN). But most
real databases would have a merge or hash join which could bring this down to
O(M+N) if the tables are already stored in a sorted indexed order. It is also
rare the cardinality of these databases will be similar in an analytical query
- usually you have one time series “fact table” and a bunch of dimensions to
enrich that data.

If I’m doing analytics on a time series this gets even better with partition
pruning and hash joins or bitmap indexes. And if I have a columnar database,
that blows up this whole complexity argument.

My point is that, layout and indexes should never be assumed to be one size
fits all. Keep in mind if I’m doing analytics I _want_ to bring my time series
data into memory at least as a stream, as I need to calculate / filter /
transform the records. Not everything is about rendering a page on a website.

------
felipellrocha
Does anyone use Mongo anymore?

Edit: Honest to god question. I was surprised when I saw the headline, because
I've never seen anyone use mongo in production, and never ran into any
articles talking about using mongo.

~~~
52804375092485
I can't think of a compelling reason to use Mongo over Cassandra except "we
already use it and don't want to change".

~~~
enjo
It's a fair bit easier to setup than Cassandra and a document store is simply
easier for most people to reason about than column-families.

For something like your typical rails app, Mongo has some real nice
properties. It makes it sticky. You start out with Mongo because you can just
drop data in and off you go. You keep using it because Mongo, despite all of
its drawbacks, is really plenty good enough for more than 80% of the stuff on
the web.

------
huac
$192M IPO means $192M of funds raised in the sale, at a valuation of $1.2B.

~~~
heisenbit
Which is a little more than the amount of money they lost the last two years.
Taking into account their 100M in the back this gives them roughly 3.5 years
at the same loss level.

------
semanticfact
I hope Neo4j will achieve something similar. Relational does a lot very well
but for certain use cases a graph is far superior.

------
ww520
Technology aside, how's their financial status now that they have IPO'ed? Does
it seem like a good investment?

~~~
sjg007
I would look at year over year growth. How you define growth will decide the
riskiness for you.

------
dna_polymerase
MongoDB worth > $1B?! Ladies and Gentlemen, we're back in 2000 again. Brace
yourselves for the bubble bursting!

------
pier25
This article is still relevant: [http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/2013/11/11/why-
you-should-never...](http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/2013/11/11/why-you-should-
never-use-mongodb/)

The main point is: most of your data is most likely relational and not
document based. Use the DB that fits your data model, and not the data model
that fits your DB.

~~~
olegkikin
Even for document data, Postgres is quite competitive

[https://www.percona.com/live/e17/sites/default/files/slides/...](https://www.percona.com/live/e17/sites/default/files/slides/High%20Performance%20JSON%20-%20PostgreSQL%20vs.%20MongoDB%20-%20FileId%20-%20115573.pdf)

------
jijji
ride that gravy train till there is no more gravy

------
Muuuchem
I thought they were supposed to go closer to 1 BN

~~~
partiallypro
The IPO was $192M, the worth of the company is slightly above $1B

------
goldfishcaura
Who would have though given that at some point this "Don't use MongoDB" seemed
to have taken over HN:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3202081](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3202081)

------
notyourday
This means the company absolutely positively mispriced the offering. The
company could have successfully raised nearly 30% more money.

~~~
kelnos
That's not how it works. When you're shopping around your IPO before going
public, you need to get commitments from institutional investors to buy your
stock at IPO at a particular price. Just because people will start buying at
+30% shortly after IPO does not mean you can get investors to commit to a 30%
higher IPO price beforehand.

~~~
notyourday
That's exactly how it works. What you are describing is the standard IB B.S.
speech. It has been debunked multiple times, starting from the time of DLJ.

~~~
kelnos
Huh? I'm not saying it's reasonable/good or doesn't involve cronyism and
"discounts" for "favored" investors, but what I described is actually how it
works.

------
perseusprime11
Twitter...Snapchat....MongoDB...Beware!

------
nolok
In a world where Giphy is valued by investors at 400M, I'm not sure if half
that for mongodb is good or bad.

~~~
meritt
They sold 8,000,000 shares at $24 but that is only 16% [1] of shares
outstanding. The stock is ~$30 as of now, which yields a total valuation of
$1.47B

[1]
[https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1441816/000104746917...](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1441816/000104746917006396/a2233556zs-1a.htm)

------
john_moscow
So instructions on making a successful company in 2017:

1\. Spot a non-trivial expense type applicable to most Fortune 500 companies.

2\. Make a startup offering the same thing under the cost.

3\. Use your network to get sales people that personally know exec-level
people from Fortune 500 and will pitch the product to them.

4\. Get them to sign up. Of course they'll do, you're offering it under cost
at the investors' expense.

5\. Show impressive revenue and customer base growth and forget the word
"profitability".

6\. Make an IPO and cash in before the public realizes that your might have
been selling dollars for ninety cents.

Who's left holding the bag? Average Joe, who's pension fund ended up investing
in a promising technology company showing exemplary revenue growth over an
extended time period...

~~~
ragnarok451
To be fair, Average Joe's pension fund was probably invested in one of the VCs
that who cashed out at the IPO too. So Average Joe likely still benefits at
the end of the day.

