Max Schireson
Contributor
Max Schireson, the former CEO of MongoDB, is an executive-in-residence at Battery Ventures, where he helps advise the firm’s cloud and data portfolio companies on a variety of strategic and tactical business issues.
More posts by this contributor
Tracking the explosive growth of open-source software
The Money In Open-Source Software
“Are you gonna hire a bunch of useless salespeople like they have at Oracle?”
This was the first of many memorable interactions I had with Eliot Horowitz. Eliot was the founder and CTO of MongoDB, and in late 2010, I was interviewing to come aboard as president. Product-led growth was far from the common buzzword it is today, but the founding team at MongoDB had built a product that developers loved — the very developer love that would drive much of the company’s rapid growth.
My topic today isn’t product-led growth, but the relationship between a founder, such as Eliot, and a hired CEO and the key factors necessary for that relationship to succeed. That dynamic was always important, but focusing on it is critical in today’s more volatile, fast-changing technology markets.
On the surface, Eliot’s question was about business models and sales hiring. But it went much deeper: Our discussion was a live experiment on how we would work together, getting to the heart of a startup’s decisive partnership between a CEO and a founder. The territo …
