Considering MongoDB’s meteoric rise, just about quadrupling in market value over the last year to a 7 billion cap, its CEO has not been in the limelight as much as one would expect.
Last summer, a group of MongoDB interns including myself, had the chance to converse with Dev Ittycheria. Prior to this talk, we mostly knew him as a ping pong legend and half of us probably believed prowess at that sport correlated directly with performance as CEO. We were also painfully aware of how well the company was doing, quite literally, since every afternoon, a group of us engineers had a planking session in which we planked for 3 minutes + the stock price in seconds. Anyways, here are some gems of wisdom he dropped during our conversation:
- An extremely precious commodity is trust. Though this doesn’t seem outwardly revelatory, most people don’t align their decision frameworks to gather more of this precious commodity. It’s easy to say, hard to build a habit of it.
- After accumulating a lot of experience in a domain, one should trust the gut more when operating in that domain.
- One metric to determine if being CEO might be a good career goal for you is to ask if you’re ok with not being entirely liked by many people.
- CEOs are made, not born.
- In deciding which career to pursue, consider which careers fall at the intersection of: strengths (what are you better at than many people), quality of life you want, and passion.
- A few ways that mentors are helpful: anticipate the next corner, float ideas, get honest critical feedback.
