Crucible Moments

This episode takes us back to the earliest days of YouTube, as the founders explain why it was a longshot that succeeded against all odds. When cofounders Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim left PayPal to start YouTube, it wasn’t even clear that the nascent broadband infrastructure could support playing video in a browser. In a brief period until its acquisition by Google—from its first incarnation as a video dating site to confronting daunting technical and legal challenges—the early story of YouTube is an underdog tale of scrappy upstarts who ended up changing the world.

Host: Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital

Featuring: Steve Chen, Jawed Karim, Zahavah Levine, Colin Corbett, Yu Pan

DoorDash faced skeptics from the start. Grubhub, Delivery.com, and others were already addressing the restaurant delivery market when CEO Tony Xu and his co-founders started in 2013. But after talking to hundreds of local small businesses, they realized there was still an unmet need: None of the competitors solved the problem of delivery with an on-demand workforce, the way Uber had done with drivers. After struggling to raise initial funding, DoorDash found traction. But the next few years would prove tumultuous, with cash scarcity and investor skepticism putting the company perilously close to the brink. The founders’ contrarian decisions, clarity on their commitment to serve small local businesses, and ability to out-operate competitors has turned DoorDash into one the decade’s startup success stories. In this episode, Tony brings us inside their decision-making, and what DoorDash saw that others missed.

Host: Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital

Featuring: Tony Xu, Keith Yandell, Miki Kuusi, Alfred Lin

MongoDB, founded in 2007, originally aimed to create a platform-as-a-service system with a new database layer. Facing competition from Google, the founders pivoted to focus solely on their database product, MongoDB—a new kind of database built for the scale of the internet era. Founder Dwight Merriman built a product that developers loved, but scaling the company proved challenging until Dev Ittycheria took the reins as CEO in 2014. As cloud computing grew, MongoDB transitioned from on-premise software to Atlas, a fully-managed cloud service. Despite initial skepticism, Atlas now represents 70% of MongoDB's revenue. As Atlas scaled, MongoDB faced another controversial decision: whether to change its open source license model to maintain its commercial moat. These pivotal decisions transformed MongoDB from a niche database to nearly $2 billion in annual revenue.

Host: Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital

Featuring: Dwight Merriman, Dev Ittycheria and Tom Killalea

Transcript: https://www.sequoiacap.com/podcast/crucible-moments-mongodb/

00:00 - Cold Open

00:19 - Introduction

05:30 - The NoSQL movement

09:52 - Scrapping the platform for the database

14:57 - Launching as MongoDB

19:52 - Moving to the cloud with Atlas

24:52 - Assigning a directly responsible individual

30:15 - How Atlas changed MongoDB

35:03 - Updating the licensing model to avoid “strip mining”

39:50 - Evolving back into a platform

41:26 - Executing on points of leverage

Founders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah reveal how they took a blog started as a hobby and turned the ideas behind it into a $20+ billion success. In 2006, HubSpot upended traditional approaches to marketing by taking advantage of the the nascent internet in a new way: By capitalizing on seach engines and social media, they offered a way to pull customers in rather than pushing ads and mailers out. They coined the new category “inbound marketing.” They continued to defy conventional wisdom, deciding to serve small businesses over big enterprises, and taking on a Goliath in a new category. As the founders explain, zigging where others zag is the key to their success.

Host: Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital

Featuring: Brian Halligan, Dharmesh Shah, Pat Grady, Dannie Herzberg

Transcript: https://www.sequoiacap.com/podcast/crucible-moments-hubspot/

What happens to an events company when every event is canceled? “Even if you have spent 14 years building something, it could truly be gone in 14 days.” After working tirelessly to revolutionize how live events are organized, this was the reality Eventbrite CEO Julia Hartz faced in March of 2020 as pandemic lockdowns went into effect, extinguishing the lifeblood of her business. She brought the same strategic thinking and grit that had led the company through its previous inflection points to rally her team and reinvent Eventbrite in the middle of a global shutdown.

Host: Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital

Featuring: Julia Hartz, Kevin Hartz

Transcript: https://www.sequoiacap.com/podcast/crucible-moments-eventbrite/