Former BladeLogic founder explains why he considered MongoDB’s CEO role

A former BladeLogic founder, who became BMC Software’s president after BMC acquired BladeLogic, said he considered MongoDB’s CEO role after judging the database company ahead of rivals in developer mindshare and financial momentum. About six months after assessing competing database investments, he received a call from a search firm about the job. He later became a venture capitalist, led Datadog’s Series B round and remains its lead director.

He said MongoDB had strong engineering and product teams but a dysfunctional go-to-market organization and leadership culture. He believed newer-generation open-source technology was better than the earlier generation and that developers’ enthusiasm for MongoDB was an advantage. He also saw New York’s growing technology talent pool as making it easier to build a company there than when he started BladeLogic.