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MongoDB has filed confidentially for IPO
- nodesocket 9y agoWow interesting. Anybody have their S-1 filing? Interested to see how their hosted/managed offering Atlas[1] is doing vs support contracts. [1] https://www.mongodb.com/cloud/atlas https://www.mongodb.com/cloud/atlas
- notyourwork 9y agoI have never heard of a confidential IPO, how does this differ from any other IPO that is in the news?
- cm2012 9y agoIt's just an earlier announcement. The banks involved leak it almost every time.
- adamson 9y agoWhy is it in their interest to leak the announcement? Wouldn't that discourage other companies from filing through them in the future?
- abhi3 9y agoThe leak builds up hype and investor curiosity about the IPO. It's like how visits by politicians to an area are 'leaked' so that the press is there to cover them.
- jakevn 9y agoYou may be assuming that every employee of a company cares about the company's best interests. I find it unlikely that a janitor, intern, disgruntled employee, etc. would be unwilling to spill juicy details for a small fee or feeling of importance.
- brogrammernot 9y agoIt's an intentional leak. Part of the "game". If you send a press release, everyone thinks you're lying and boring. If it's "leaked" it's sexy and ends up on TechCrunch as a "Report: Anonymous Source shows interesting financials"
- berberous 9y agoStarting with the JOBS Act (in 2012), certain smaller companies under a revenue threshold were allowed to file their initial draft registration statements with the SEC confidentially. It was meant to encourage startups to go public and avoid the public eye while they negotiated their registration statements with the SEC. It all goes public before the IPO.
- notyourwork 9y agoThanks for this information.
- leothekim 9y agoThey've made their share of mistakes, but they've stuck it out and have definitely improved their product over the years. I wish them all the best for their IPO. What would be really good to see As a measure of their business health is an indication of how their cloud business is doing with respect to their enterprise sales business. A healthy cloud business would signal less volatility in the face of high revenue garnered from fickle enterprise sales relationships that have been their bread and butter until the past couple years.
- ZedDogX 9y agoI haven't used MongoDB but I've listened to those who are pushing for it. Yes, that's unfortunate that mistakes have been made (especially when it comes to databases). But, better to find that mistake early on rather than later. And it speaks to the founders dedication to the project that they navigated the rough waters and saw it through.
- meowface 9y agoReliability and implementation ideas aside, MongoDB popularized document stores and document stores can sometimes be a good thing (even if there's usually little to no reason to prefer them to plain SQL databases for most applications). So they deserve credit there.
- GenericsMotors 9y agoAgreed; though the way they did their marketing early on the message they conveyed was that document databases were here to replace RDBMSs. It was extremely dishonest.
- mattmanser 9y agoTo be fair to them, it wasn't just them, it was everyone.
- keithwhor 9y ago
- olegkikin 9y agoA side note: MongoDB now dominates the famous framework benchmark in the read benchmarks. https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/ https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/
- kuschku 9y agoWith 1.4% more performance than PostgreSQL, and far less guarantees w.r.t. schema. Yeah, that's not hard. It's surprising it took them this long. EDIT: The performance comparison that was linked, and that I was referring to: http://i.imgur.com/Thk5DlU.png http://i.imgur.com/Thk5DlU.png
- elvinyung 9y agoEdit: I'm dumb (and bad at reading words). I don't believe this assessment is entirely fair -- MongoDB essentially commits every write to a majority quorum of nodes. Remind me again how many machines a standard Postgres INSERT/UPDATE commits to? (Disclaimer: I still like Postgres better.)
- kuschku 9y agoThe benchmark measures almost exclusively read performance, so that's not really a question. Now the real question is why mongodb isn't faster than postgresql in this test. MongoDB gives so many guarantees up just to get more performance, and then looses to PostgreSQL? This is the worst trade deal in the history of trade deals.
- elvinyung 9y agoOh oops, totally misread "read" as "write" :P
- mrgordon 9y agoYep exactly. People fall for these benchmarks too easily (especially the ones released by 10gen themselves)
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- a13n 9y agoWow I had no idea they were a for profit corp, rather than an open source project. And my startup uses mongo. Mind blown! Good for them.
- rpeden 9y agoThere's no reason a for profit company can't ship an open source project. :) MongoDB is an open source project, and the MongoDB company is a for profit corporation that ships the database and sells support and services related to it.
- discordance 9y agoYes this is true, although what happens when the profit motivated corporation doesn't make profits or loses revenue? Isn't it more likely that a profit motivated OSS project will lose resources in this case, potentially affecting the product?
- rpeden 9y agoThat's a really good question. I think the reality is that many large OSS projects are corporate sponsored, either directly or via companies paying developers to work in the project. In a case like MongoDB, if the company faced difficultly or even went out of business, the product would undoubtedly be affected. But since it's a popular open source product that many companies depend on, it seems unlikely it would die. For some of the successful companies using MongoDB at scale, paying developers to work on the project could very well be cheaper than migrating to something else. I think this is true for large open source projects generally. It's nice to at least have the option of taking the code into your own hands if the company or people developing it decide to stop for any reason.
- ezrast 9y agoCheck out RethinkDB, a competing product which had exactly this happen earlier this year. I don't follow the project closely, but the Linux Foundation picked up stewardship and development appears to be continuing, if at a reduced pace. MongoDB is pretty popular, so while it would certainly be disruptive in the short term for the sponsoring company to go out of business, continued community development is all but assured.
- arrty88 9y agoGet ready for another SNAP!
- BinaryIdiot 9y agoI don't see why. SNAP hasn't really figured out how to make money and their features were easy to copy (and copy better) in Facebook's properties. MongoDB is far longer established, has a large enterprise business and likely has a sizable cloud business. These are not "features" you slap onto another product and then simply have users come flooding to you. No, databases are pretty critical pieces of infrastructure. As long as the business is solid this IPO should work out well, IMO.
- api 9y agoThis is huge -- we haven't actually had that many open source based IPOs!
- perseusprime11 9y agoWill meet similar fate like Twitter, Snapchat...
- bdcravens 9y agoPerhaps, but wouldn't it make sense to compare them to another software infrastructure company, rather than social networks?
- perseusprime11 9y agoI am not comparing them but simply predicting the fate based on overblown expectations that were similar to Twitter and SnapChat.
- bdcravens 9y agoI think it's easy to equate, because in our bubble we hear so much Mongo hype, but to the much larger world, they know as much about Mongo as they do Firebase or New Relic. Also, Mongo the technology has a different set of expectations than Mongo the publicly traded company.
- hendzen 9y agoBoth Hortonworks & Cloudera are the most similar recent IPOs. Hortonworks is below the offering price, Cloudera has been basically flat. And this is in the context of an insane bull market for tech stocks and the market in general. So we will see how this turns out. It's been a couple years since they last raised funding so its possible they didn't really have another choice. Chances are if the numbers on the S-1 were truly great they wouldn't have done it confidentially.
- vqc 9y agoDo you have any info that companies that don't have great numbers tend to file S-1's confidentially compared to companies with great numbers? In my experience, companies that can file confidentially will, regardless of their numbers (and I think all companies now have the option to do so).
- hendzen 9y agoNutanix, Twilio are two recent ones (IPO'd in 2016). They both were great performers last year. I don't have the time to dig up all the data and do a comparison of the correlation between returns on companies that used the confidentiality exception vs. companies that didn't, but it would certainly be an interesting analysis.
- vqc 9y agoAre you sure Twilio or Nutanix didn't file confidentially before its S-1 was flipped public? I'm actually not sure if there's a way to tell, other than a leak.
- zjaffee 9y agoIt's worse than that, cloudera went public at a valuation below the price set during their last round of fundraising. Also, people are bullish on tech companies that are consumer tech related or are in the enterprise space serving industries not relating to tech directly. P/E ratios for companies like oracle, ibm and cisco aren't that high.
- myth_drannon 9y agoIt looks like the NoSQL movement was just a fad and plenty of startups got burned by it and some still stuck with this tech , writing inefficient workarounds for something that comes OTB with the regular SQL databases.
- webscalist 9y agolol trello: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3485186 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3485186
- myth_drannon 9y agowell, there are so many... using mongodb for CRUD apps and realizing they can't do joins.
- paulie_a 9y agoSadly some do not come to that realization and manage to implement a join "solution" anyways.
- redwood 9y agothat comment is over 2000 days old. wow
- stuffedBelly 9y agoStartups got burnt by NoSQL because they wanted to use it for everything instead of thinking over use cases that fit. It's a good thing that this fad went away and now people would be more likely to educate themselves about relational vs. non-relational db before jumping into the fire pit.
- dsmithatx 9y agoI worked with one of the largest ad publishing companies. They wanted to track data about every client served an ad. This generated over 1.2 Terabyte per hour of data when the MySQL master started to max out. We had the largest possible multiple core system. It was going to cost my client $30k to upgrade to SSD drives to get more out of MySQL. Also note we had to store this data on an expensive SAN in order to feed the data at a reasonable rate to MySQL or PostgreSQL. I had just learned of MongoDB and went to school at 10gen for their sys admin class. I talked to the developer about storing the data in NoSQL using a small sharded cluster on a Friday. Monday morning he asked me to setup a MongoDB cluster. Tuesday we moved over from MySQL. They ended up using much smaller servers, got rid of the 3par and epsilon SAN's and saving tons of money. My point is there are certain situations where NoSQL is still the answer unless you can cluster your SQL write server. I've moved on from working with Ad publishing clients but, I'm sure there are other places where SQL databases are not adequate. NoSQL might be or, have been, a fad but, like any tool when used for the right job it works.
- chirau 9y agoI hope at some point they realize the value in queueing writes versus prioritizing. Maybe I did it wrong but that totally put me off
- flavio81 9y agoReally? I thought the MongoDB fad had gone away, that common sense returned, and people either used proper document stores, or proper relational databases, or graph databases.
- dajohnson89 9y agoCould you be a little more specific as to what a proper document store is? Mongodb has impressed me after using it for two years in a highly concurrent and rapidly changing big data production system. It's not without its significant headaches, but I've yet to find a database that is.
- flavio81 9y agoThere are many articles out there on the web, over the last 5 years, addressing the many problems specific to MongoDB. For example: http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/2013/11/11/why-you-should-never-use-mongodb/ http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/2013/11/11/why-you-should-never... http://cryto.net/~joepie91/blog/2015/07/19/why-you-should-never-ever-ever-use-mongodb/ http://cryto.net/~joepie91/blog/2015/07/19/why-you-should-ne... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9912842 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9912842 http://developer.olery.com/blog/goodbye-mongodb-hello-postgresql/ http://developer.olery.com/blog/goodbye-mongodb-hello-postgr... https://www.andreas-jung.com/contents/goodbye-mongodb https://www.andreas-jung.com/contents/goodbye-mongodb
- dajohnson89 9y agoSo what do you recommend instead?
- noncoml 9y agoCongrats. I wish them all the best. I know MomgoDB is not very favored in HN but if there is one thing Mongo taught us, is that a nice and simple API to access your data makes a world of difference.
- jaequery 9y agothink it is a bad fit and a bad time for an IPO, their market just isnt big enough and their losing a lot of steam as of late. most importantly in terms of numbers, there is nothing going for them. they arent exactly redhat level in terms of support, nor rackspace level for subscriptions, and nor snapchat level in terms of market reach. this looks like some last effort cash out sort of deal to me. weird to say that its somewhat of a sad outcome for an once promising opensource company.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Salgat 9y agoThey recently passed a suite of jepsen tests that finally gives them legitimacy they needed (the latest server release has very good consistency now). MongoDB is in a good place from a technical position.
- abrookewood 9y agoThat's interesting. I've always avoided Mongo because of the general perception that it loses data, but I'll take Jepsen's tests over hearsay anyday.
- digitalzombie 9y agoWell MongoDB is working with Jepsen... After several Jepsen's article on how bad MongoDB is with the Taylor Swift reference. Also the notorious wave of MongoDB hacked with terrible security defaults and several programmers blaming bootcamp coders for terrible set up. I think MongoDB had to do some damage control and wake up. They apparently are working with him now. Quick google as proof: https://aphyr.com/posts/338-jepsen-mongodb-3-4-0-rc3 https://aphyr.com/posts/338-jepsen-mongodb-3-4-0-rc3
- patrickfreed 9y ago>their market just isnt big enough the database market is one of the biggest software markets out there, if not the biggest. >their losing a lot of steam as of late at least according ot google trends, mongodb is more popular than ever. >last effort cash out sort of deal to me they're hiring like crazy and looking to grow a ton in the next year, so I don't think that's the case.
- gaius 9y agoNow we know for certain that we are in a bubble
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- pandemicsyn 9y agoWill be interesting to see if Datastax follows with an IPO of their own.
- CyberDildonics 9y agoI hope their IPO filing doesn't get lost before it gets synced to disk.