Engineering Founders

Building platforms, ecosystems & open-source communities: Lessons from Viam & MongoDB w/ Eliot Horowitz @ Viam

Episode Summary

How do you build a platform that accelerates innovation by 10x-100x? Eliot Horowitz (CEO & Founder @ Viam) shares how insights from building MongoDB are shaping Viam’s approach to platform ecosystem development, user-centricity and open-source strategy. We explore the origin story behind Viam, principles for platform design for hardware/software development, modular systems, seamless APIs, and finding the right abstraction layers for your product. Plus we cover cultivating developer communities, and frameworks to anchor your business-model and pricing. This episode is packed with insights on platform building, fostering ecosystems, driving user-centric innovation.

Episode Notes

ABOUT ELIOT HOROWITZ

Eliot Horowitz is the Founder and CEO of Viam, an engineering platform unlocking AI, automation, and data for devices in the physical world. With a deep commitment to advancing technology, Eliot leads Viam in helping companies build solutions across robotics, food and beverage, climate, marine, industrial manufacturing, and more.

A career software developer and technology leader, Eliot co-founded MongoDB in 2007, writing the core code base for the pioneering database and leading the engineering and product teams for 13 years as CTO. MongoDB, which went public in 2017, has since reached a market cap of over $20 billion. Before MongoDB, he co-founded the ecommerce company ShopWiki and served as CTO, and he began his career in software development in the R&D group of adtech firm DoubleClick.

Eliot is passionate about using technology to address pressing societal issues, including working with WAVS to protect marine life in the North Atlantic and supporting Billion Oyster Project’s work to help restore New York Harbor’s ecosystem.

SHOW NOTES:

• The origin story of founding Viam (2:07)
• How Viam can be a game-changing platform, accelerating robotics software & hardware 10x to 100x (3:43)
• The ideation journey behind Viam: Building a platform that simplifies the integration of hardware and software development (5:22)
• Solving challenges with seamless APIs, a modular system, the right abstraction layers, and a comprehensive platform (9:04)
• Key questions for identifying the right abstraction layers at Viam (10:42)
• Optimizing your platform for flexibility and ease of use (12:42)
• The evolution of product building, from first-hand experience to customer-driven (15:43)
• How Eliot’s MongoDB Experience shaped Viam’s user-centric approach, open-source strategy, business model & ecosystem approach (17:58)
• Cultivating developer communities & leveraging community insights at MongoDB & Viam (22:11)
• Frameworks for deciding on your business model & pricing (24:02)
• Eliot’s approach to building developer tools & products used by engineers (25:34)
• Aligning your eng team & stakeholders on the product vision (29:01)
• What it means to deeply understand engineers and how they interact with your product (30:20)
• Strategies for eng leaders to better connect with customers (33:48)
• Viam’s real-world applications & what’s next (35:41)
• Rapid fire questions (38:31)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Viam - At Viam, we believe in the power of technology to make our world smarter, happier, and more sustainable. We're building a revolutionary engineering platform for problem-solving in the physical world, so that innovators from all disciplines can address humanity's most complex challenges with practical solutions. Together with our partners, we're committed to making a lasting positive impact on industries, communities, and the planet.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/