(Photo: AlleyCorp)

A little more than a year ago, Betabeat reported that despite his lofty role as chairman and chief executive officer of 10gen, the company behind the MongoDB database language, Dwight Merriman was still mixing it up with his developers, drinking beer and writing code with the company's engineers. 

So when news broke this morning that Mr. Merriman was giving up the CEO job at 10gen to focus his time on the chairman's role, we wondered if it meant he was giving up the technical side of his function to concentrate on the business side of things. Au contraire.

"I was the CEO that codes," Mr. Merriman told us over the telephone this afternoon. "Now that the company is order of magnitudes bigger, the coding part of the job has been getting squeezed."

To free Mr. Merriman up to keep his hands on the product, 10gen elevated Max Schireson from the role of president to CEO, allowing Mr. Merriman to spend more time working on the company's core database kernel. That could mean coding, or architecture or product definition, Mr. Merriman said, stressing that he'll still be engaged in functions more typically associated with a company's chairman.

"It was sort of interesting question what the right title would be," he said. "The best analogy is probably that I'm operating like a founder of company would do, where I touch lots of things. If we changed my title to something more tech, that’s not accurate either. I'll still be doing a lot of work on the business side, whether it's thinking about strategy or talking to customers."

At that, a founder's role is appropriate for Mr. Merriman, the DoubleClick veteran who cofounded 10gen in 2007 as part of the AlleyCorp network. Of course, it was less than two months ago that another AlleyCorp company saw its top executive move on to a chairman's position. Did Kevin Ryan's decision to cede the CEO job at Gilt Groupe influence Mr. Merriman's thinking about his own role at 10gen?

"I think the timing similarity is completely random and coincidental, and the reason for those changes is different," Mr. Merriman said. "For one thing Kevin is spending a little more time on 10gen, a day a week up from something more like a director's level of engagement. ... For me, it's no change in the distribution of my time."

(We told Mr. Merriman that if Henry Blodget—CEO of Business Insider, another AlleyCorp company—announces he's giving up his CEO title, we'd be mad at Mr. Merriman for not giving us a hint.)

Meanwhile, Mr. Merriman said he decided to make the change ahead of 10gen's annual meeting next week, when the company's 200 employees will gather in Florida. The changes, the new chairman said, from Mr. Schireson's ascension, Mr. Ryan's added involvement and his own more varied role, would help to build on the company's promising 2012.

"There's huge potential there," Mr. Merriman said. "It's growing so fast, it’s going to be a very large company."

(Photo: Hackertour2012.com)

Talk to a startup recruiter about hiring young developers, and he'll eventually admit it's hard to compete in the campus cattle call, with Goldman and Google sucking up all the air.

But rather than rely on incendiary exit letters or Aaron Sorkin scripts to convince engineering talent to come over to to the startup side, a number of smaller companies are banding together to flex their collective recruiting power.

This fall, startups like Square, Box, 10Gen and Codecademy are sponsoring a nationwide effort called Hacker Tour 2012 that kicks off September 12th. The tour targets computer science and engineering students at 25 top campuses, including Cornell, Princeton, Penn State, MIT and Harvard on the East Coast—which they claim will reach 20,000 students. The bulk of the positions the tour hopes to fill are in software engineering, with user-experience designers coming in second.

The tour is being organized by Readyforce, a San Francisco job search company that matches college students with the right employers. (Sponsorship for the tour costs $5,000, and Readyforce gets no commission for job placement.) Hacker Tour will be using customized tech talks, career fairs and yes, an Airstream bus. The company was lucky to score mobile payment company Square, founded by Twitter luminary Jack Dorsey, as its first sponsor.

"Square got it immediately," Anna Binder, Readyforce's VP of client relations, told Betabeat by phone. "The demand for engineering talent is by far the biggest story in Silicon Valley right now. Many people say the challenge you face is not raising money, it's finding engineers to hop on the bandwagon with you to help realize your dream."

One of the goals of the tour, said Ms. Binder, is to "tell the students the story about their options outside of Goldman and McKinsey and the Ford Motor Company. Just because those companies are the ones that are prevalent and super-organized on campus doesn't mean," that they're the only choice.

The time seems right to test out the world-changing waters. Last winter, Occupy Wall Street turned investment bank recruiting events at schools like Yale into a "crucible of controversy." Meanwhile, student newspapers at Harvard, Cornell and Dartmouth urged students to consider a career outside finance. And that was before the "Why I Left," Goldman Sachs resignation bomb exploded across the New York Times op-ed section.

Working at a startup gives students a chance to work in an environment, Ms. Binder said, where you can have access to the CEO and, "Raise your hand and say, 'You know what? I don't think that's a good idea.'"

Partly to reflect the startup work experience, and partly, we imagine, because it's cheaper, Ms. Binder said, "I want to take an approach that's a little bit different than Goldman Sachs's wine-and-dine."

But how does that pitch play amid rising unemployment rates to an audience that will soon have to start paying off their student loans? "Part of the startup dream is this opportunity to really make it big," Ms. Binder acknowledged. "This is your opportunity—if you choose well and you focus and commit yourself, you do have the opportunity to build a billion dollar business. It's more about free time and dogs and beer and Ping-Pong and, you know, collaboration, versus suits and wine."

Maybe leave out the part about what happens to that billion dollar valuation when the public markets get their hands on your stock.

Mr. Merriman (ny.tie.org)

Look out, Oracle: a swiftly-growing open source startup could be coming for you. 10gen, the New York-headquartered database company that boasts clients like Foursquare, MTV and Disney, announced today that it had raised a $42 million round led by New Enterprise Associates.

CEO Dwight Merriman said in a statement:

We want to change the database market, to make MongoDB the best way for companies to build new applications. Our goal is to give tech teams not only a database that scales to any big data level required but also helps developers be productive and more nimble.

10gen has worked feverishly to establish itself as an innovative open source database company with strong ties to the New York tech scene. When we spoke with 10gen CTO Eliot Horowitz last month following a recent partnership with Red Hat, he told us that 10gen's need for systems engineers--and not just app builders-- is "bringing an entirely different type of engineer to New York, and it's good for the overall ecosystem. Long-term it makes the engineering talent pool much wider and deeper.”

We're sure that this new hefty chunk of change will serve New York's budding systems geeks quite well.

(internetweekny.com)

Unless you've gone off the grid, you probably already know that Internet Week 2012 launches on Monday. But with a dizzying number of events to attend, it's hard to figure out which ones are worth the time, effort and subway fare. Betabeat guest blogger Gary Sharma, something of an events truffle hound, already penned his personal list of recommendations. But consider this Betabeat's official to-do list: blogger tested, Betabeat approved.

The Art of Apps Gallery Opening
Monday, May 14th, 10am-6pm
138 Sullivan St.

Expect a lot of rounded edges and pixel talk at this gallery opening, featuring the designs of tech types like Path's Dave Morin, Jon Slimak of Piictu and Matias Corea of Behance. The exhibit will feature some of the best UI designs for apps on iPhone and iPad.

NYU ITP Spring 2012 Show
Monday, May 14th, 5pm-8pm
721 Broadway, 4th Floor

We write about ITP a lot (see the Listserve, the Descriptive Camera, and Kickstriker for some recent examples), mostly because the majority of projects produced by the students at NYU's interactive telecommunications program are actually really, really cool. ITP will unveil its best projects to the public in a two-day spring show on Monday 5/14 and Tuesday 5/15, and we think it's worth attending if only for the chance to see most of the most nimble young minds in the city at work.

Choosey Netizens Choose GIF: Analyzing an Animated Cultural Lexicon
Tuesday, May 15, 12pm-12:45pm
82 Mercer St.

We are huge fans of animated GIFs. In fact, we would probably devolve into communicating entirely through tiny moving pictures, if we could. Motherboard deputy editor Sean Yeaton will discuss how the GIF became its own cultural phenomenon.

Why Being a Good CEO has Nothing to Do With Being a Woman
Tuesday, May 15, 1pm-1:45pm
82 Mercer St.

If you haven't noticed, all of the full-time staff writers here at Betabeat possess two X chromosomes, so we're never ones to turn down a good panel about our fellow XX in tech. Featuring Birchbox cofounder Hayley Barna and Nestio CEO Caren Maio, in addition to some other talented lady founders, the discussion should offer some helpful advice on leading as a woman in the tech community.

TIME Inc.’s 10 Startups to Watch
Wednesday, May 16, 6:30pm-8:30pm
Top Secret

The list of TIME's 10 startups to watch reads like a week in Betabeat posts: NYC tech scene favs Code Academy, Art.sy, Fab.com and Side Tour are among the honorees. But the event is invite-only so be sure to get on the guest list if you want to attend.

WeWorkLabs Happy Hour
Wednesday, May 16, 5pm-8pm
175 Varick St., 4th Floor

First off: there will be free beer at this event. Plus, you'll get to check out the coworking space of WeWorkLabs, a NYC tech staple that seeks to foster collaboration between up-and-coming entrepreneurs. Check out some of the pitches from WeWorkLabs members and network with other like-minded techies.

hackNY Fundraiser
Wednesday, May 16, 7pm-9pm
foursquare HQ: 568 Broadway, 10th Floor

10gen will be providing drinks for a celebration of the hackNY community, an event to help raise funds "for the future tech innovators of New York City," and keep kids off Wall Street as the slogan goes. We had a pretty great time at the last hackNY fundraiser. But if nothing else, it's a chance to peep Foursquare's sweet office digs.

The Webutante Ball
Wednesday, May 16th, 8pm-11:55pm
Marquee

Don't pretend like you don't want to see the digerati all dolled up. The Webutante Ball is in its 4th year, and it's not really getting any cooler, but there will be lots of drinks. The "prom committee" is packed with NYC tech allstars, like Ben Lerer, Dave Tisch, plus old school fameball Julia Allison.

Walkabout NYC
Friday, May 18th, 1pm-6pm
187 Lafayette St. 6th Floor

If you're a fan of the Roger Mag, or just an interior design nut, you'll probably want to take some time to hit up Walkabout NYC, an open house of startup offices around the city. The lineup includes Betaworks, Gilt Groupe, Tumblr and Facebook, among many others.

Future of Media Panel
Friday, May 18th, 1pm-2pm
20 Cooper Sq. at 5th st. (NYU's journalism HQ)

Oh look, another panel to discuss the future of an industry about which no one has the slightest clue. Yay. But! The lineup is packed with A-list names in both media and tech, including Buzzfeed's Jonah Peretti, Thrillist's Ben Lerer and Jezebel's Jessica Coen. As long as everyone's candid about the real state of things, we think it should prove pretty entertaining.

Stacy London of What Not to Wear has a new startup called Style For Hire. (Source: Phil Plait via Wikipedia)

SHUTTER. Luminance is not your average photography conference. Instead of focusing on the latest gear, this two-day program will bring together experts at the forefront of the technology we use to create, manipulate and share our images. Among the speakers are Behance founder Scott Belsky, Hipstamatic cofounder Lucas Allen Buick, Google's Chris Chabot, Pulitzer prize winning photographer Barbara Davidson, Tumblr CEO president John Maloney, Facebook Photos engineer Srinivas Narayanan and the School of Visual Art's David Ross. All speakers will present a 20-minute TED-style lecture.

TOE, HEEL, TOE, HEEL. What Not to Wear's Stacy London is the cofounder of a just-launched site that aims to connect personal stylists with the stylistically clueless. Style For Hire stylists will perform a "closet audit," provide personal shopping services or create new outfits out of clothes a customer already has—that's called closet shopping. Now women who aren't lucky enough to be on the show can still have their closets—and lack of fashion sense—torn apart, but without the benefit of a judgmental, national audience.

FREE LUNCH. Rickshaw Dumplings, Mexicue and Wafels & Dinges are giving away food tomorrow to all Fondu users. Download the the micro-reviewing platform for restaurants, create an account and head to West 4th and Greene Street from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. to get your grub on. Sorry to all you Android or yet-to-adopt-a-smartphone users out there—Fondu is only available on iOS.

INCUBATE. The Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator, a program that provides startup with access to seed capital, mentors and coworking space, is taking applications until April 29th. Brooklyn Beta's summer camp for designer-developer teams is also taking applications through May 31. The 12-week program fosters connections between talented  people, invests $25,000 in participating companies and has advisors from top companies like Kickstarter, Airbnb, Union Square Ventures, Etsy and many others.

HACK 'ROUND THE CLOCK. ZocDoc HQ  will be the launching point for April 24th's 10gen 24-hour hackathon. The event, which begins at 568 Broadway at 6 p.m., will focus on working with MongoDB. Hack away until breakfast the next day at 9 a.m. and then hack your way to the post-awards afterparty at Von Bar.

DEVBOOTCAMP. DevBootcamp is a 10-week program that brings non-programmers up to basic programming level via an intensive curriculum. It's in San Francisco, but the organizers invite national and international students to apply. Participants include an aerospace engineer, a kid "straight out of highschool," a math teacher and finance grads, making for a veritable DevBreakfastClub. "The spring cohort finished two weeks ago, 7 out of the 16 looking for jobs have so far had job offers," DevBootcamp's Lachy Groom wrote in an email. "Almost everyone has had an exceptional amount of interviews (I think the average might be 8 each). We're expecting a very high job rate within the next few weeks."

NETWORK. Entrepreneur Week, an event that brings established entrepreneurs, industry leaders and investors together to foster opportunities and relationships, began on Monday and will continue through tomorrow. Tickets are still available for some of the week-ending talks and events. Check 'em out here.

BLOG WAVE. Tidal, a company that provides tools to bloggers and publishers to help them share and be shared on similar blogs, just announced its 250,000 post milestone and three new partnerships. Tidal is loading up the Sony Music Popmarket Backstage site with reviews, photos, users and content creators eager to promote and share. Neighborhoodies, a T-shirt and hoodie company, is moving from textiles to terabytes as Tidal breathes life into their site with style posts, restaurant write ups and travel tips all focused on NYC. Finally, Seatgeek, a third party tickets site, is getting the Tidal treatment as well, as members talk about tour dates and their favorite and most anticipated shows.

NET-WORKS. Things just got a little bit faster on Staten Island. AT&T recently announced the expansion of their 4G LTE network which means mobile internet could be up to 10 times faster on those devices.

LUNCH MONEY. Education startup 2tor has obtained a $10 million line of credit from Comerica Bank.

COLLIDE. Kaleidoscope, a new way to shop for street fashion by browsing a mix of submitted and professional photos, is now on iOS.

MOMMA. Shapeways, a platform for creating and sharing 3D designs, is holding a Mother's Day make-a-thon. Participants can turn any flat two-dimensional design into a three-dimensional plastic or metal work of art. For Mother's Day, it certainly beats a stale store-bought card. Order by April 22 for metal and April 29 for plastic to get those gifts in time for dia de los madres.

JOBS. Bitly needs a new sales research associate. Acclivity is looking for a UI/UX designer and Python back end developer. Send a snazzy email. What's Watched has an opening for a sales director with three years of experience. Email Burr. News.me would like new senior iOS  and Python engineers. Torsh needs a technical cofounder and chief architect to develop web and mobile apps.

Mr. Horowitz

Earlier this week, 10gen, the promising AlleyCorp startup launched by DoubleClick cofounder Dwight Merriman, announced a new partnership with an eye toward helping developers who work with big data and cloud technologies. The boost in market share probably doesn't hurt either.

10gen both develops and sponsors the open source NoSQL database MongoDB, which is used by companies as diverse as Foursquare, SecondMarket, and Bit.ly on up to MTV, Intuit, and Disney.

On Monday, 10gen revealed that Mongo will be partnering with Red Hat, a software provider focused on larger enterprise clients that crossed the billion dollar revenue mark—the first for an open source company—in March. As Seeking Alpha notes today, the Mongo connection puts Red Hat "on a collision course with the toughest guys in tech, Oracle."

Betabeat recently talked to 10gen CTO and cofounder Eliot Horowitz, who's been known to freestyle on tech topics for eager 10gen staffers, about the Red Hat partnership, how Mongo started attracting big name clients, and 10gen's plans to hire 100 people this year, announced shortly after the company picked up $20 million from Sequoia and Union Square Ventures.

If you're not familiar with MongoDB, Mr. Horowitz offered the following analogy: traditional relational databases like MySQL or Oracle (ahem!) function sort of like an Excel spreadsheet. "Let's say you're trying to store information about people," said Horowitz. In an Excel file, you might have one sheet with the person's first and last name, one sheet with their home address, one sheet with their work phone. If you want to access all the information about a person, you might end up having to pull 20 to 30 sheets.

Mongo, on the other hand, stores everything together. "So you say, 'Give me everything you know about Nitasha,' and it gives you one document," he said. "It’s better for user profiles and other things because it’s a much more natural data model for the types of data you’re storing. It pulls up faster because instead of loading up lots of things, you’re loading up one thing." On the performance side, he added, it helps with development time, scalability, and ease of use.

The new partnership with Red Hat will help optimize the process of running a MongoDB database on Red Hat's operating systems and middleware, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), by sharing blueprint and best practices. The announcement stressed the growing need for developers to be able to quickly and flexibly deploy apps that deal with large amounts of data in the cloud.

But the Red Hat deal also seems in line with a trend Mr. Horowitz noted of larger, enterprise clients adopting MongoDB, which started last year. (As an open source software, not all MongoDB users are 10gen clients.) From 2009 to 2010, he said, Mongo was getting traction from a lot of startups and small companies. "Shutterfly started using it very early. But it was really last year when a large companies started moving a lot of things over. Disney moved a massive amount of data on Mongo in December. MTV has moved a large portion of their website over, so Comedy Central and Spike are running on Mongo."

"The interesting thing about Mongo," he noted, "Is that the data model fits most types of applications pretty well so the use cases are actually very broad."

Those enterprise clients are likely to be better served with the Red Hat partnership. For example, although the core Mongo database has the same functionality, Mr. Horowitz noted that the addition of Redhat Enterprise Linux provides features like security, backup/restore, disk optimization, and monitoring.

In 2011, 10gen hired about 75 to 80 people. This year, as they've boldly stated, 10gen is trying to top that. Indeed, the bulk of the $20 million in financing is being used to build out the tech team and grow the product. In terms of recruiting, the fact that 10gen is one of New York's few pure tech companies in a sea of consumer-facing apps gives it an advantage. The company hit an inflection point around the end of 2010, he said. "Something changed where everyone really seemed to know about Mongo and it became easier to hire people," said Mr. Horowitz. "When you go to startup fair at MIT and 19 out of 20 startups are based in Mongo, that’s a pretty big deal."

10gen tends to hire from two groups of candidates: recent college graduates who know they want to work in a startup or those deciding between the financial sector and Startupland. Mr. Horowitz said he's seeing more and more of the first category coming to New York. It also helps that MongoDB is written in C++, a popular language at banks, high frequency trading companies and outfits like Bloomberg. "You have a large community of that in New York, so it’s stronger than it is in Silicon Valley," he said.

Because 10gen looks for systems engineers and not just application engineers, Mr. Horowitz added, "I think its bringing an entirely different type of engineer to New York, and its good for the overall ecosystem. Long-term it makes the engineering talent pool much wider and deeper."

That said, the competition is still fierce. "Most people that we hire end up having offers from a number of other startups in New York," he said. "It’s either Foursquare or Etsy or Tumblr or Google."

In fact, Foursquare isn't just a 10gen client and competitor, it's also their neighbor. 10gen's Soho offices are located at 568 Broadway, the same building inhabited by Foursquare and Zocdoc. (Tumblr was trying to move into the same spot as well.) Proximity allows for a communal atmosphere. MongoDB holds meetups in ZocDoc's public space, for example. "And I just ran into a Foursquare engineer in the kitchen," Mr. Horowitz said. "He popped over to ask a question."

Does that mean we'll see more of a startup exodus from Union Square to Soho? "It’s hard to imagine there could be any more," he said. "We have a ton of clients within a five-block radius of here. Actually getting some real density is good because you can go out to lunch and see a lot of startups you know, which is definitely a change from other neighborhoods in New York ten years ago."

Mr. Horowitz said he had seen a bunch of familiar faces during lunch hour at Lombardi's recently. Then, of course, there's the Tom & Jerry's crowd after work. But you're not likely to run into Mr. Horowitz there. "I have two small children," he said with a laugh.

MongoNYC is hosting an all day conference on May 23rd focusing on MongoDB. According to the site, "The conference will feature over 40 sessions from MongoDB developers at 10gen, MongoDB users from the community, and technology partners, with presentations for both the novice and expert."

image from David_Saracino

Don't play with matches in a dry wooded area. Don't put a detailed rant on Hacker News unless you're prepared to start a fire.

An anonymous pastebin post from this weekend slammed the MongoDB database architecture and in particular the support from 10Gen, the AlleyCorp company with deep ties to MongoDB. It quickly raced to the top of Hacker News and from there around the developer community.

The screed got a ton of attention, to the point where 10Gen CTO Eliot Horowitz jumped into the comments on Hacker News and addressed the complaints point by point. Mr. Horowitz conceded that a lot of the issues where known complaints about MongoDB, but also highlighted the fact that many details from the post didn't match up to any of what 10Gen offered or any of their customer records.

In fact, deep in the comments on the Hacker News post, the "originator" of the pastebin post appeared to claim he was just a troll testing the masses to see who were sheep. "My intention was to troll as many hipsters as possible and make them a little more aware of how easy to manipulate they are, without even providing the slightest bit of evidence. It cracks me up that there are startups out there right now, making foolish architecture decisions based on the FUD i'm spreading. Start thinking for yourself!"

This begat a new cycle of finger pointing and skepticism, as the comment board rushed to determine if the troll taking responsibility truly was the original offender or simply an anon seeking attention. Meanwhile folks like Harry Heymann from foursquare and Wedge Martin from badgeville posted about their personal experiences with 10Gen.

"I run engineering for foursquare," wrote Mr. Heymann. "About a year and a half ago my colleagues and I and made the decision to migrate to MongoDB for our primary data store. Currently we have dozens of MongoDB instances across several different data clusters storing over a TB of data and handling 10s of thousands of requests per second (mostly reads but the write load is reasonably high as well). Have we run into problems with MongoDB along the way? Yes, of course we have. It is a new technology and problems happen. Have they been problematic enough to seriously threaten our data? No they have not. MongoDB is a complicated beast (as are most datastores). It makes tradeoffs that you need to understand when thinking about using it. It's not necessarily for everyone. But it most certainly can be used by serious companies building serious products. Foursquare is proof of that."

Eventually a post appeared on Read Write Web wondering what the damage to 10Gen and MongoDB's reputation might be. This seems a bit much, given the poster was only pointing to known issues and had several inconsistencies in their story. The powerful reaction does point to a very real debate about MongoDB and where the future of database architecture is headed. But the community knows a troll when they see one, and rallied to push 10Gen CTO's Eliot Horowitz's response to the top the Hacker News thread.

Image via Business Insider

It's easy to stop sweating the small stuff once you get to the top. As a recent New York magazine article pointed out, Mark Zuckerberg used to be a coding machine. These days, not so much:

But, as the Groups team was adding the finishing touches to its product, Zuckerberg said he wanted to write a few lines. "Everybody was like, Ohhhh, Zuck's gonna write code," says Feross. Someone set up an easy bug for him to fix—adding a link to a picture, or something—and he went to work. Five minutes passed. Twenty minutes. An hour. "It took him like two hours to do something that would take one of us who's an engineer like five minutes."

Dwight Merriman, one of the original founders of DoubleClick, was that company's CTO for a decade, helping to create the DART ad serving technology which currently powers Google's profits. Now he is founder and CEO of 10Gen, one of the leading developers and service providers for the MongoDB database language.

Betabeat was chatting recently with a 10Gen engineer who was impressed by how closely Mr. Merriman worked with the staff. "Dwight is drinking beer with us and writing great code."

In fact, last week's 10Gen's Brandon Diamond told us, Mr. Merriman "Sits in the same place where all the other engineers sits," comes into work everyday, and  "actually writes more code than most of us."

On a technical level, 10Gen is one of the few New York companies that impresses Silicon Valley sophisticates. Kirill Sheynkman, an Oracle veteran who just started running a massive Russian venture fund out of Manhattan, says that 10Gen brings a smile to his face.

As more big companies start deploying apps from the cloud, both consumer facing and within the enterprise, the demand for 10Gen's services will continue to grow. The company just raised $20 million which is plans to put towards international expansion and increased R&D. With his army swelling, it remains to be seen how much longer Mr. Merriman can keep coding in the trenches.

He certainly still finds the job exciting. "We've hit a real inflection point for the database world," Mr. Merriman told Betabeat by phone. "Your traditional relational approach will still be there, but an increasing number of problems will need to be solved our way."

Working at Google, Mr. Merriman saw the challenges of scaling to serve billions of ads per day. "As we looked into that future, it always seemed to us that the data layer was the weak link. So that is the problem Mongo was designed to address."

Mr. Diamond

At a town hall for NY Hackers this week, its founder Brandon Diamond announced the creation of the Hackers Union, a unifying non-profit resource for all engineers in New York City.

"We’re still sort of in the early stages of a self-sustaining engineering culture like you might find in San Francisco," said Mr. Diamond, who also serves as associate director of NY Tech Meetup and a database kernel engineer at 10Gen (the company behind MongoDB). "Our goal is not to become the next big meetup. We want to consolidate all the activities into a central hub."

The effort has already attracted a potential sponsor--a hedge fund, no less.

With all the anxiety and initiative swirling around building up New York's tech talent pool, we're a little surprised no one's attempted a for-the-hackers, by-the-hackers centrifuge on this scale before. Betabeat talked to Mr. Diamond about what the Union will offer, rebooting the engineering interview process, bringing Wall Street engineers into the fold, and why 10Gen's like an early Google.

Why does the city need something like the Hackers Union?

When I first started working in New York City, it’s just a vast difference in terms of the number of engineers here. We’re getting better, we’ve got great meetups, great programs. But our goal is to build a place where new engineers can go to meet experienced engineers, where we can publicize the message that New York City is not just a great place to be in a startup, but a great place to do awesome engineering. And we don’t think there’s a single unifying resource focused exclusively on techies.

What was your first job here?

I was at a company called Clickable, which had a very small NYC engineering team. It was mostly a sales culture. The bulk of their engineering was elsewhere, so I was one of three guys. It could get a little lonely.

How is the Union related to NY Hackers?

Well it’s not really. It’s a terrible word, but we’ve sort of "pivoted" over the past year we’ve been around. Mostly I was concerned because there were great tech events, but there was nowhere I could go where I could kind of hang out with a bunch of nerdy people without being in the shadow of a sponsored startups. So that’s where [NY Hackers] came from. We started by giving Unix accounts to any hackers who were interested in New York City, which was good, but we found that face time was really important. Then we started doing town halls as kind of strategic play. We get a lot of people coming to these things, I think we had 300 RSVPs two nights ago, but we really wanted to have kind of a centralized entity where we could furnish the information these folks are looking for.

Like what?

We can do things like have a guidance counselor program, if you’re looking for a job we’ll meet with you and connect you with the right organization, bigger picture things.

Why did NY Hackers give them Unix accounts?

Well the theory was there’s all these diverse initiatives—like Adopt-a-Hacker was one of them and the NYTM was doing a program to encourage technical folks to come to the event. But I sort of felt like that was not what techies really wanted, because it’s not the sort of thing I thought I would respond to. The idea was let’s not ask them to come to our domain, we’ll go into their domain. That was by providing these Unix accounts where you would be in an open ecosystem, you could write your own scripts, you could share them with other people, you could talk in IRC, you could even play Minecraft. It worked reasonably well, but we wanted to go bigger.

So this is like an evolution of NY Hackers?

Here’s the problem, we stupidly chose the name NY Hacker, even though we’re good friends of HackNY, so we’ve been kind of invisible as a result. That’s part of the reason we’re renaming. We’ve been going at it for awhile. We hosted a bunch of hackers from Mexico, I think it was Mexico, it might have been Brazil, it was called Hackspedition. We showed them around, they did a hackathon. We’re doing our best, but we really need to improve our website, do a publicity push, and part of the money will go to our first hire, which will be a managing director, interestingly not me. Turns out having a full time job and these sort of aspirations does not—I sleep like, definitely not enough. If someone has the time and passion to carry things forward faster, then I want to empower that person.

Are you going to offer the same types of things as say the Freelancer’s Union, like healthcare?

I don’t think that would be our first goal. One of the things we want to do is, there’s kind of a problem with the way interviews happen with technical people. It’s nobody’s fault, it’s just that a lot of hiring managers aren’t aware of how to properly screen technical folks. So you wind up in an uncomfortable situation where you’re trying to solve brainteasers on the phone and its not really fun.

How would you fix that?

One thing we were thinking about doing was certifying or vetting providers and counseling them on how to do a successful tech interview. It’s more about asking background questions, asking about projects, and looking for passion and seeing if they can speak conversationally about difficult topics. Then when it gets to a final round interview where you really want to vet their abilities, start with a code sample and then ask them one or two very CS-y, very computer-y thought questions. But definitely don’t ask the color of people’s eyeballs on a desert island somewhere.

How does the non-profit aspect work?

We’re still doing a little debating about 501(c)(3) versus (c)(6).  (c)(3) is more for the common good type thing. Kind of the way you would encourage kids to exercise and eat fruits, [we encourage] engineers to come to New York City. (c)(6) is the same except it’s for industry organizations so you’re allowed to do political lobbying, but they tend to run using a dues system. We don’t want to do dues. The other big difference is that donations aren’t tax deductible, but we want to run using sponsorship money instead of the dues.

Do you have potential sponsors?

There’s a company, but it’s kind of still up in the air. It’s a hedge fund that wants to give us a very large seed investment, which we’ll use for all the expenses we’ll need to worry about while we’re incorporating. One of the things that we really wanted to do is have our own kind of fund, where folks who want to do like a hackathon or a movie night or a class can approach us. We’ll say well here’s pizza pies, we’ll help you reach people who are interested and go do it.

If a hedge fund is interested, does that mean it’s not just for hackers in the startup world?

We have folks from banking, from all over the place.

Do Wall Street hackers get along with startup hackers?

They actually do. Most of the folks in the room are wearing t-shirts and shorts and then a few other guys come in with a full suit on. But we’re all concerned about the same thing, the only difference is where we’re working. And when you do the traditional hackathon, you kind of exclude those people—I think the majority of people are from banks and advertising firms—because that’s sponsored by the startup world. There’s not really a great level of discourse between the two. We’re kind of an unaffiliated central hub for what we hope will become a thriving hacker community, which, by the way, will benefit the startups, the banks and the whole city.

So, how are things going on 10gen, which of course, is Kevin Ryan's "most promising" investment?

It’s really exciting. I had a whole year doing startup stuff, during which I thought, if I don’t succeed, which is not likely at all, then where would I want to be. There are a lot of good startups in NYC and they’re all solving interesting problems, but 10gen is solving the sorts of problems we studied and talked about in school. I would have to compare it to what early Google might have been like. There’s free food; we have free lunch Friday. The CTO, he basically freestyles on tech topics that we all shout out. It’s a meritocracy. Having the money, yeah, it makes things more chaotic, but everyone’s excited for sure.

Early Google in terms of potential growth or the environment?

Maybe both! It’s really interesting growth-wise, it’s an engineering oriented company, which is surprisingly less common than it used to be in the early 2000s, late nineties. The CEO [Dwight Merriman] sits in the same place where all the other engineers sit, along with the CTO. [Mr. Merriman] comes to work everyday, he actually writes more code than most of us, he’s an incredible guy, he’s extremely inspiring.

Ha, he’s better at it than Zuck. What are you working on right now?

Our focus right now is on improving concurrency, a major thing people want to do right now is map reduce, which is kind of a new way to process data when there’s a lot of it. We’re focusing on parallelizing the database and handling concurrency better. We kind of distance ourselves from MongoDB because we want the community to really own it, so we say 10Gen sponsors MongoDB. We’re continually improving the product.

Dwight Merriman via Business Insider

10Gen is not a startup you hear discussed often at cocktail parties, even the kind full of engineers. But Kevin Ryan has told Betabeat on more than one occassion that he believes 10Gen --which provide commercial support for MongoDB,  the increasingly popular open source NoSQL database-- is the AlleyCorp company with the most potential in the long term.

10Gen has just raised a $20 million series D from Sequoia, FlyBridge and Union Square Ventures.

The company is run by Dwight Merriman, who along with Kevin O'Connor, founded the ad-tech company that would become DoubleClick. Mr. Merriman is widely acknowledged by both Kevins as a technical genius, the kind of person who can handle a complex, rapidly evolving database play in the enterprise space.

According to GigaOm, 10Gen now has over 400 customers and more than 100,000 downloads of its MongoDB package per month. While that doesn't sound huge by consumer standards, it's proof that MongoDB is more than just a fad. If growth continues apace, the NoSQL system could be a serious player in the massive multi-billion database industry. Clients already include big names like Disney and Viacom.

10Gen hopes to use the funding for international expansion and building out the capabilities of MongoDB.