paid.īecause Eliot and Dwight anticipated that the business model would change along the way, they knew they needed a partner willing and able to combine their first-principles thinking with operational experience to chart a course with them through unknown territory. We built the playbook as we built the company, making decisions about what the initial cloud offerings would look like and which features would be free vs. No standard playbook for product-led growth, or for the cloud-based delivery and monetization of open-source software, existed. Decisions didn’t neatly divide into categories of product for them and operational for me. We wouldn’t have been able to do that without a strong partnership between the founders and me, particularly with Eliot (founder and CTO) and Dwight (founder and initial CEO, who eventually became chairman and handed me the reins of CEO). And perhaps more importantly, we laid some of the foundations for what later became a hugely successful cloud business that transformed how enterprises delivered and consumed infrastructure software. The company grew explosively and changed the market for databases and how developers built web applications. The four years I spent at MongoDB–first as president, then as CEO-were a great experience. In the latter case, they need a partner to lead the company’s operations. In some cases, a founder is interested in and has shown initial aptitude for leading all these areas. A company needs funding, it needs a team, and, ultimately, it needs to execute on engineering, sales, customer success, and marketing. Without that, there is no company.īut that initial product-market fit isn’t nearly enough. When that idea resonates with a broad audience, you have the kernel of product and market fit. They started the company because they had an insight that something could be done better, and an idea of how to do it better. In almost every case, the initial product and market vision come from founders. The company has to execute successfully–sometimes the domain of a hired CEO. Lots can go wrong with a startup, and to succeed, two things have to go right: The product must fit the market well– almost always the domain of the founder(s). And how a founder and a CEO work through them could help determine the ultimate success of a company.
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