The serial entrepreneur with substance
Many people claim to be serial entrepreneurs, but Dwight Merriman has achieved it.
He’s also the brains behind ShopWiki, Business Insider and Gilt group.
In 2007, he founded co-founded MongoDB, an opensource NoSQL document-oriented database system, with funding from the CIA which ranked 9th on the Wall Street Journal’s ‘The Next Big Thing’ list in 2012.
Finding answers
As he explains in his on-camera interview at the Dublin Web Summit (embedded above), DoubleClick was created answer to a problem that needed solving.
In 1995, the internet was still relatively new-fangled.
With thousands of advertisers scrambling for ad space, DoubleClick connected websites directly to advertisers and essentially founded the “economic model of the internet.”
Reaching new heights
His latest brainchild, MongoDB is no less ambitious. With over $150m of funding, Dwight says that the “product has already taken off”.
To date, MongoDB has had 5 million downloads, and is being used by both startups and Global 2000 companies.
With next-generation technology and horizontal scalability, Mongo DB will continue to scale up and focus on engineering and R&D.
Growing company
MongoDB already has 350 people working for them, including a serious presence in London and says that recruiting the right people can be a game changer for a growing company.
Though he spends most of his time coordinating strategy and implementation, in his perfect world, he’d get to spend a third of his time coding.
Spreading himself across various departments in his company, Dwight says he feels ‘a mile wide and an inch deep.”
Stick to what you don’t know
Dwight says developers should take on the challenge of working in areas outside their personal interest.
When you base a company on a hobby or special interest, he says it can be “harder to be objective.”
“Focus on one thing,” he says. “Find what works and sticks to the wall”