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Scaling a Fat Startup: MongoDB CEO Max Schireson (Part 5)

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 things differently than a relational database. One, it should work very naturally in a scale-out architecture. You should be able to string together commodity hardware to handle increased workload. That was very hard for a relational database and there was not a generally packaged solution. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Ray Martinez, Chancellor of WGU Texas (Part 5)

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 with people abandoning the course after a while. >>>

Building a New Online Fashion Brand: Combatant Gentlemen CEO Vishaal Melwani (Part 1)

I am a big believer in new, highly focused online fashion brands that can be built with a purely digital strategy. Combatant Gentlemen is a case in point. The company bootstrapped to $700K in revenue, followed it up with a $2.2 million financing round, and is on track to deliver $15 million in revenue this year. The market is large, and hence the opportunity to scale exists.

Sramana Mitra: Vishaal, let’s start at the beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where did you grow up and in what kind of background?

Vishaal Melwani: I am a third-generation tailor. I grew up in Las Vegas, Nevada, believe it or not. My dad was a second-generation tailor. My parents came to America in 1976 from Hong Kong. The goal was to basically have the American dream and focus in on what they knew. >>>

Scaling a Fat Startup: MongoDB CEO Max Schireson (Part 4)

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 market would be in publishing where companies made their living on content and that we would give them new ways to exploit their content. One of the early applications that they had analyzed was the citations in scientific papers. They were able to query into the structures of documents in a systematic way which made that process much easier. The thought was that publishers would be the initial market and that the company could expand from there. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Ray Martinez, Chancellor of WGU Texas (Part 4)

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 material to complete one of my courses, what I would do is not call on my student mentor because my student mentor may not know how to explain about doing a particular spreadsheet that I need to learn. I would call my course mentor who would actually be able to help me with that. The course mentor would give one-on-one instruction via email or Skype.

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Scaling a Fat Startup: MongoDB CEO Max Schireson (Part 3)

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 to databases to help manage semi-structured and unstructured information. That is what they were doing and I have been working on applications in that space. I got introduced to them through a friend of a friend. Not long before that conversation, my long-time boss at Oracle had left and I was starting to think that it was time to do something new. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Ray Martinez, Chancellor of WGU Texas (Part 3)

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 our undergraduate degree programs. However, slightly more than a third of our students are enrolled in various master’s degree programs that we offer in one of those four colleges that I talked about earlier.

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Scaling a Fat Startup: MongoDB CEO Max Schireson (Part 2)

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 environment for me than school. When people hear that I worked at Oracle for 9 years, the common reaction that I get is that I am too nice to have worked at Oracle for 9 years. >>>