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MongoDB shares jump more than 30% in $192M IPO

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Re: MongoDB shares jump more than 30% in $192M IPO

#81

Post by megaman22 »

flavio81 wrote: post #72
shubhamjain wrote: post #22

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. U…

> it's an unlikely success story that deserves admiration Well, it's a success story due to marketing, smart marketing, clever marketing, and more marketing, not due to lots of technical merits. And it was not the first document store to appear, just the most successful. For starters, CouchDB was previous to MongoDB.

Notes was a document store before JSON, or even XML was even a thing. The wheel turns.

Re: MongoDB shares jump more than 30% in $192M IPO

#82

Post by jameskilton »

munk-a wrote: post #65
shubhamjain wrote: post #22

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. U…

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 o…

Ah, right, like RethinkDB?

As much as I'd love this to be true, the #1 measure of success is if people even know you exist and #2 is if you solve enough of a customer's problems that it's worth using your product. MongoDB hit these two points hard right out of the gate and are now very successful because of it.

Re: MongoDB shares jump more than 30% in $192M IPO

#83

Post by heisenbit »

cujic9 wrote: post #56
heliodor wrote: post #17

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.

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 mak…

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

Re: MongoDB shares jump more than 30% in $192M IPO

#84

Post by wvenable »

dandermotj wrote: post #74
hungerstrike wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is an example of non-relational data? A tree is relational. Each child has a relation to its parent. I can't imagine data that has no relation (no connection) to anything else. Maybe what you meant was heterogeneous (e.g. data elements that do not all have the same attributes) - but even then I can't readily come up with an example.

Sparse heterogeneous data is often the type of data stored in NoSQL dbs. Modelled in a relational way, this produces many tables with many NULL fields, while keeping it in a key value format is neat and tidy. I'd recommend the paper What Goes Around Comes Around[1], the first paper in Readings in Database Systems[2] [1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=73661829057771494... [2]redbook.io

> Sparse heterogeneous data is often the type of data stored in NoSQL dbs.

I still can't imagine what sparse heterogeneous data exists in the world that makes sense to store. Any type of querying or processing requires some kind of structure (even if implicit in the code) which you can just put in different table structures.

You have to make sense of data to process it and that kind of implies a structure, doesn't it? Am I missing some obvious example of heterogeneous data?

Re: MongoDB shares jump more than 30% in $192M IPO

#85

Post by hinkley »

flavio81 wrote: post #72
shubhamjain wrote: post #22

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. U…

> it's an unlikely success story that deserves admiration Well, it's a success story due to marketing, smart marketing, clever marketing, and more marketing, not due to lots of technical merits. And it was not the first document store to appear, just the most successful. For starters, CouchDB was previous to MongoDB.

Reminds me of JBoss, right down to the astroturfing.

Re: MongoDB shares jump more than 30% in $192M IPO

#86

Post by heisenbit »

huac wrote: post #36

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

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.

Re: MongoDB shares jump more than 30% in $192M IPO

#87

Post by munk-a »

wnevets wrote: post #70
munk-a wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

>how extremely well targeted marketing and sales can build a so-so product into a huge IPO Thats how most products succeed if you ask me.

I don't disagree, but we haven't seen them close the distance in terms of performance.

Let me clarify a bit, I'm not saying that this tactic is invalid or inefficient within our current system, in fact this is a great way to land a good payday if you can pull it off. My point was more that MongoDB is going to implode when their performance shortfalls become visible to the wider populace, if that happens, of course. It's still possible they take the earnings from this IPO and dump heavy into R&D investment to make up the lost ground, but it's also very possible they take this payday and ride out the tech until it breaks down.

Re: MongoDB shares jump more than 30% in $192M IPO

#88

Post by devdad »

stanfordkid wrote: post #39
enjo wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really is an interesting story. They aren't best in class in any of the metrics we think of as mattering. It's not the highest scale system out there. It's not the most durable. Or the most available. Hell it's not even particularly reliable (at least throughout its history). It is however..simple. Very simple. It's easy to reason about. It's easy to setup. For 90% of use cases it's very easy to administer. It tur…

It really was the first NoSQL database that many programmers used -- and it came out right around the same time that JSON was really taking off. The timing was perfect, the product was simple. Fact is most people don't really need insane scale and there are thousands of use cases where you just need to read and write JSON and fetch things by a few different fields. I think they nailed it. Every other NoSQL DB out the…

This is me - I had taken SQL at uni and found MongoDB to be much easier to reason about since I knew my frontend parts already. One of the apps I've built has a terrible database structure (my first real life server setup!), and is probably the worst codebase I've ever written. I will never show it publicly. It currently serves 100k+ users and the users have no idea how messed up the server code is. It won't scale to a million users, but that's okay and the technology served me well as a junior.

I since turned to RethinkDB and sometimes just a classic SQL will do, but Mongo is really easy to get started with.

Re: MongoDB shares jump more than 30% in $192M IPO

#89

Post by bpicolo »

jsjohnst wrote: post #76
bpicolo wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it? Because there are a ton of companies out there running postgres, mysql and scaling workloads just fine.

I upvoted you because you’re technically right for many cases, but if you’d ever dealt with a database you couldn’t scale further (we were using multiple of the largest instances EC2 had at the time) and new data was flowing in faster than you could delete it and downtime wasn’t an option, you too would hate any predecessors who said “you can always scale higher” before things got so bad it was almost impossible to r…

Yeah. There are definitely cases where the scaling options make sense along different axis for sure. My point is mostly that relational DBs tend to strike a good default ground if you aren't sure what axis you'll care about.

Re: MongoDB shares jump more than 30% in $192M IPO

#90

Post by munk-a »

hinkley wrote: post #85
flavio81 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's an unlikely success story that deserves admiration Well, it's a success story due to marketing, smart marketing, clever marketing, and more marketing, not due to lots of technical merits. And it was not the first document store to appear, just the most successful. For starters, CouchDB was previous to MongoDB.

Reminds me of JBoss, right down to the astroturfing.

Honestly, this story being on the front page of hackernews might be another example of that astroturfing. It's not impossible that they're trying to drive that price up as much as possible before dumping their shares.
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