(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."

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.

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 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."

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.