Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

cnbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 425 posts

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

#101

Post by gxs »

rburhum wrote: post #98
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…

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.

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?

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

#102

Post by SamReidHughes »

snarf21 wrote: post #95
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.

The company "missed out" on the money, not the founders right? The IPO wasn't with the all of the founders shares. They may also be restricted on when and how much they can sell. Part of the value is creating buzz. If you IPO at 24 and it jumps to 32, hopefully it is still 30 when you can sell. If you IPO at 32 and it drops to 26 cause there is no buzz, you make a lot less when you sell.

The company would be more valuable (having more cash) or less diluted (having sold fewer shares) if it had IPO'd at a higher price.

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

#103

Post by pessimizer »

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…

> It really was the first NoSQL database that many programmers used

That was because it was heavily marketed, not because of timing.

> Mongo was the easiest to experiment with and to get working.

It really wasn't, it was the one they had heard about.

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

#104

Post by derefr »

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…

> their mindshare is going to continue to collapse as the warts on their product show more and more

I'm not clear on why you think this—software products with huge mindshare and an open contribution model, get their warts fixed, usually by programmers sponsored by corporations repackaging the software (Redhat and Canonical with Linux) or running the software in a SaaS model (Cloudant with CouchDB.)

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

#105

Post by pessimizer »

jjnoakes wrote: post #75
jsjohnst wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[or maybe the fact I watched a hundred million $ startup go down the drain in part due to bad engineering choices, of which Mongo was one, doesn’t entitle me to a negative opinion of Mongo]

You can say you'd choose to be homeless all you want, but saying "many" would do the same I think is being a little too dramatic. And quitting your job (as you now point out, but didn't originally) is much different from "choosing to be homeless".

hyperbole

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

#106

Post by kelnos »

notyourday wrote: post #100

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

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.

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

#107

Post by adamnemecek »

sametmax wrote: post #92
adamnemecek wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's easy to reason about. ...until it's not. Then it's really not.

But how many people reach this stage ?

It's a gradual process and you start feeling the pain fairly early on.

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

#108

Post by derefr »

enjo wrote: post #27
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 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 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.

I think most of HN would feel this way about, say, Redis. And Redis isn't "highest scale" or "most durable" or "most available" either. (Though it is pretty reliable.)

It's interesting, then, to compare the general impression people here have to MongoDB to the one they have of Redis. To me, Mongo is a "why use it when Postgres is just as easy to install", while Redis is exactly what I'd think of "to bootstrap a project, but three years later it's still running."

Is it just the slightly-different pitched use-cases of "working store" (Redis) vs "persistent store" (Mongo)? Is it that Redis still has its uses even when you've got Postgres there beside it, whereas Mongo doesn't so much (at least since Postgres got JSON columns)?

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

#109

Post by richardwhiuk »

zzzcpan wrote: post #99
toomuchtodo wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In certain environments, it is better to fail then to have data that isn't immediately consistent. Finance and healthcare are two such systems. Availability is not always paramount. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_transaction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomicity_(database_systems)

They only guarantee consistency as long as you don't use them over a network, i.e. communications with the database are always reliable. But once you do use them over a network - CAP theorem comes in and forces you to either use something like two-phase commit or no promises of consistency. Which is the opposite of what his post implied, like there is CAP consistency with those databases. But there never was! Althoug…

Proper RDMS databases have two phase commit with transactions.....

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

#110

Post by capkutay »

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…

How did MongoDB go to market differently than the other enterprise NoSQL DBs (MarkLogic, DataStax)?
Post reply on HN