Dwight Merriman
Co-founder 2007Background
DoubleClick co-founder and technologist who co-founded 10gen, later MongoDB.
Role at MongoDB, Inc.
MongoDB possesses a technical, frustrated founding story, rooted entirely in the crushing limitations of traditional 1970s database architecture and driven by the intense, scale requirements of the modern web. The company was founded in 2007 in New York City by brilliant software engineers Dwight Merriman, Eliot Horowitz, and Kevin Ryan. They were an experienced, successful team; they had previously founded and scaled DoubleClick (an internet advertising pioneer that they eventually sold to Google for a staggering $3.1 billion). While building DoubleClick, Merriman and Horowitz experienced foundational frustration. They were heavily trying to serve amounts of dynamic ads (billions of impressions a day), but the rigid, entrenched relational databases (like MySQL and Oracle) were choking. Every single time they wanted to add a new specific feature, they had to undergo complex 'schema migrations' that severely slowed down development. They possessed a 'eureka' moment: the relational database was obsolete for the modern internet. They decided to build a new, flexible database from scratch. They originally called the company '10gen' (because their ambitious original plan was to build an entire cloud platform). However, the database component was so brilliant and heavily demanded by developers that they abandoned the cloud platform and focused entirely on the database, renaming it MongoDB (derived from the word 'humongous'). By ignoring forty years of established database dogma, they built the foundational data architecture for the unstructured, scaled modern web.