Sramana: What was it about MongoDBs database platform that was unique? You said that you believed for seven years that the world needed a new database. What did you see in MongoDB that made you believe it was the answer? Max Schireson: Fundamentally, I believed the world needed a new database that would do two
Sramana Mitra: You have two kinds of mentors – student and course mentors. Then, the curriculum material is coming from third party? Ray Martinez: Typically, that is the case for most of our degree programs. Sramana Mitra: What about completion rates? When we talk about MOOCs – self-managed online learning – there’s a distinct problem
Sramana: When you were looking to join MarkLogic, what did you feel was the killer app opportunity for the company? Max Schireson: At the time that I joined, they had one customer who was a really good customer Elsevier, who was the world’s largest scientific, technical, and medical publisher. The idea was that the initial
Ray Martinez: The second part of our faculty is what we call the course mentor. The course mentor is typically your subject matter expert. If I’m signed up in the College of Business for WGU Texas and I’m taking an Accounting 101 course, and if I stumble along the way in trying to learn the
Sramana: Tell me a bit more about the founding of MarkLogic. What was going on and how did you get hooked up with those people? Max Schireson: The founders were Paul Pederson and Chris Lindblad. They had been search engine engineers and they realized that they could apply some of the technologies of search engines
Sramana Mitra: You have the national number and you have all these WGU state chapters? Ray Martinez: Exactly, we have our state-branded universities but they’re all a part of the national university, which again is Western Governors University. Here in Texas, our student population is close to 5,000. Majority of our students are enrolled in
Sramana: Oracle must have been a difficult place for you with that psychology. Max Schireson: I liked it because I got to work with a lot of smart people and I got to learn a lot. I also got to work on a lot of different things. I think that Oracle was a much better
Sramana Mitra: Tell me a little more about WGU. Ray Martinez: WGU was founded 16 years ago by a group of governors who were representing western states. This is back in 1996 – a little more than 16 years ago. In 1996 at a meeting of the Western Governors’ Association, the idea of using technology