Jun 05 2013
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10gen, Fun

How I survived a Tough Mudder (with my FitBit intact!)

This weekend I went to Pennsylvania with seven of my colleagues to participate in Tough Mudder, a 10-mile challenge involving 20+ muddy and wet obstacles. The idea emerged from a conversation at our all-company meeting in Miami in February. I signed up thinking, well, June is a long time from now, I’m sure I’ll have plenty of time to get ready :)

The race was a ridiculous, fun, silly and exhausting way to spend a day with my co-workers. In order to complete many of the obstacles, you need help from your teammates. At the very beginning, each participant had to jump a sizable wooden wall to enter the starting area, and I needed some assistance to get hoisted over! There are no race times or winners in Tough Mudder – the focus is on completing the challenges and working together. I loved the sense of camaraderie on the course, even among strangers.

The most challenging part of the race for me wasn’t the obstacles. It was running in the hilly terrain in the very hot sun! By the time we reached a muddy obstacle, I was eager to jump in just to cool off. So hilly, in fact, that my FitBit recorded that I climbed 300 flights of stairs on race day.

Yes, it’s true, I took my FitBit Ultra with me on the race. I very much wanted to record the race, but I was extremely concerned about getting it damaged as it is a prized possession and not waterproof. I was up the night before the race in a panic about it! Ultimately I decided to take the risk of loosing or breaking it: I wrapped it in a sealed Ziploc and stuck it in my sports bra. It survived the Arctic Enema, a 15 foot drop into 11 feet of water, and several other obstacles in which I was completely submerged. There was one scary moment during the Funky Munky (monkey bars) when I fell into the water and felt the plastic bag floating near me, but I quickly fished it out. It was a close call! I think it’s time that I order a FitBit Flex – those are waterproof.

The most memorable moments of the race included:

  • Carbo-loading at an Italian restaurant the night before the race with the team
  • Jumping 15 feet off the “Plank” into cool water, overcoming my fear of heights!
  • Carrying my colleague Jordan on my back
  • Climbing from waist deep water over mud hills
  • Jumping into the freezing cold “Arctic Enema” behind Graham, and screaming for him to “Get the f@#$% out!”
  • Watching Jerzy tough it out through the race after dislocating his shoulder – twice
  • All of the amazing costumes, including one runner in a full suit, two men in thongs, a team in tutus, and everything in between
  • Drinking a cold beer after crossing the finish line
  • Cheering on Sarah as she climbed Mount Everest
  • Getting to see Wisdom, Justin, Danny, and Sarah go through the Electric Shock Therapy before they crossed the finish line

Oracle has a sailing team. 10gen has a Tough Mudder team.

The team at the beginning of the race. Post-race photos are pretty muddy :)

The team at the beginning of the race. Post-race photos are pretty muddy :)

May 22 2013
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Community, Open Source, Startups

Open Source Community and Corporate Culture – Are they any different?

As 10gen has grown as a company, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about our corporate culture and the parallels between building great community and building great corporate culture. A healthy corporate culture will share a few of the key qualities of a vibrant open source community.

1) Transparent

Open sources communities are definitionally transparent by making source code available for review and modification. Similarly, a positive corporate culture thrives with open discussion and debate, within the limits of reasonableness. Obviously there will always be certain things, such as sensitive / confidential customer information, that cannot be shared across the company, but the overall vision and goals for the team should be as clear to everyone as the project roadmap is in an open source project.

2) Collaborative across geography and cultures

Open source contributors and users are often distributed geographically and comunicate using a variety of tools such as forums, IRC channels, bug trackers, and wikis. Similarly, a healthy corporate culture encourages the exchange of ideas and methodologies, discourages departments from working in silos, and encourages employees to create internal knowledge sharing tools.

3) Developing talent

A healthy open source project will put in place mechanisms to encourage users to become contributors and ways to acknowledge key contributors. Existing, active contributors often take a mentoring role with new users and contributors. Great companies recognize talent, nurture people, get them training, and help people develop in their careers. While a large portion of this culture has to come from management since they will approve budgets and headcount, the employees can contribute to the culture as well by recognizing the strengths of their peers, mentoring teammates, and maintaining a positive work environment.

What can you do?

Here are a few concrete ways that you can develop a transparent, collaborative culture that develops talent.

  • Organize tech talks, lunch and learn series, or hackathons that bring different departments together to learn what others in the organization are working on, or to work together and collaborate on projects.
  • Host “cultural exchanges” where certain employees work from different offices for an extended period of time. For example, at 10gen, we have support engineers from our Dublin and Australia office do month-long stints in NYC so they can sit with the core server team.
  • Build collaborative knowledge-sharing tools, such as wikis, where staff are encouraged to share information.
  • Set up forums for discussion on important company topics, such as town halls, mailing lists, or all company meetings.
  • Embrace video conferencing! We have a virtual “water cooler” at 10gen that points a camera at each of our international offices.

What other ways can you make your company more like an open source community? Feel free to add suggestions in the comments.

May 13 2013
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Events

How to run a tech conference part 7: The Day Of!

This is the seventh post in my series on running a tech conference. In today’s post, I’ll outline what you need to do on the day of your event.

  1. Getting Started: Goals and Vision
  2. Choosing a Venue
  3. Budget and Sponsors
  4. Finding Speakers
  5. Event Logistics & Timeline
  6. Promotion of your Event
  7. The Day Of!
  8. Post Event

Being Prepared

Before the event starts, you should expect that things may go awry. Every event brings a new adventure and sometimes you can’t anticipate what the issues will be. From experience, I will tell you a few things that you should be prepared for but sometimes it’s impossible to know what the universe will bring. At MongoDB London this year, we had a terrible problem with door wedges. Yes, door wedges — the venue didn’t have enough, and there were several spots where we were desperately improvising door jams or stationing staff at the doors so they wouldn’t slam during talks. Maybe next time I’ll pack a door wedge in my conference kit, but even if I do that I know that next time there could be some other unanticipated issue so I’ll just have to be ready for it.

The Walk Through

The day before your event, assemble your staff of volunteers and walk through the space and your staff assignments. Make sure that everyone knows who is responsible for staffing registration, who is responsible for each speaking room, the expo hall, and any other areas. It also helps to have a “floater” who can jump in in case there are gaps or if someone doesn’t show on the day of the event. We also have staff designated to greet press and high-profile speakers.

At Open Tech NYC, the night before the event my co-organizer suggested an exercise that was very useful. We walked through the event, but then we also discussed all the different ways that things could go wrong and how we could possibly mitigate those issues. It was really helpful for identifying different logistical problems.

Final Rehearsals

The first several events that I organized were fairly small and we had no process for formally preparing speakers. As 10gen has grown, we’ve taken presenting more seriously as a skill set that needs development. We try to organize several prep meetings for each presentation before the event, and we’re experimenting with office hours for our external presenters as well. On the days leading up to the event, a final run through, particularly in the space where the talk will be delivered, is a great way to ensure a good experience at the event. These can be difficult to schedule, especially with set up happening in parallel, but they can make a huge difference in the quality of your presentations.

Set Up

If at all possible when booking your venue, I recommend getting the space booked the night before so that you have the prior day to set up. Sometimes this isn’t possible from a cost standpoint, but logistically it’s extremely challenging to do set up at 5am and then be on your feet all day for an event.

The key things that you need to do include:

  • Posting directional signage, banners, and any other conference branding
  • Printing, inserting, organizing and setting up name tags in your registration areas
  • Stuffing your give-away bags (here is my article on how to efficiently stuff swag bags)
  • Getting your vendor hall labeled and set up
  • Testing your A/V equipment and wireless connection
  • Doing any final presentation rehearsals or run throughs

A few small details that you should always remember:

  • Mac adaptors and slide advancers for each room
  • Random supplies such as paper, tape, scissors, Sharpies, etc. in case you need to make signs
  • Bottled water for your presenters so they aren’t parched
  • Extra blank name tags in case someone’s badge didn’t get printed

The more that you can pre-stage and set up in the days leading up to the event, the happier you will be.

Registration

There are several options for printing nametags, which I enumerated in detail in the blog post on budget and sponsors. For the day of the event, I recommend purchasing trays to organize your name tags and easily find each person. For every 100-150 people expected to register per day, you probably want 1 person on registration at peak hours. (So at MongoSF this year, which was a 1-day event with roughly 1,000 attendees, we had roughly 10 people on registration during the 8-9:30am peak hours.)

Make sure that you set up you clearly label registration with signage, and consider positioning a greeter at the entrance if the direction isn’t obvious. Be wary of creating bottlenecks at any point in the registration process!

Once people have their name tag, you may also want to check them in using an app such as Eventbrite check-in or Marketo check-in, or an old-fashioned printed list. We use iPads at our events to quickly sign people in. Usually one person finds the badge and the other checks them in, and the process takes about 30 seconds. Once they’ve checked in, an automated email is sent to the attendee with information about the event, the venue, and further activities during the conference.

Breakdown

Usually we’re so excited about the event wrapping up, that we forget about the hard work at the end of the conference. It helps to have a detailed inventory of the items that you brought with you to the event and the places that you’ve stored them. If you had boxes that you packed things in, keep them handy for the end of the event with shipping labels at the ready so that you can quickly get everything boxed up. Ideally you’ll have a small breakdown crew that can get everything organized and then the rest of the team can go to the bar or social event with the conference guests.

Have Fun

In my experience, the most stressful part of conference organizing is the hours leading up to the start of the event. Once we’re through registration and the first talks have started, that’s when it starts to get really enjoyable for me. I can interact with the guests, attend a few talks myself, get feedback on the conference, and learn from our partners. Events are a lot of work and effort, but also very rewarding.

May 06 2013
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10gen

The Evolution of the 10gen Office

This week, 10gen moved into our new office in at 229 W 43rd Street. In three and a half years at 10gen, this is the fourth office that I’ve worked in, and in many ways, it felt like the culmination of our transition from startup to enterprise software company. The first three offices that I worked from were in areas populated by startups (first in Union Square, then in SoHo). The new office is in midtown with many of our large, established enterprise customers in financial services and entertainment. As an early employee I thought I’d share a few memories from each of the offices.

17 W 18th St

When I joined 10gen at the end of 2009, we were renting desks from our AlleyCorp cousins at ShopWiki in a joint residential/commercial building. We had one and a half rows of desks in their open layout. While there was a lot of energy in the office since we were paired with another startup, it was crowded and there was little privacy for customer meetings or interviews as we started to grow over the course of 2010. I managed to find this slightly blurry iPhone photo of the office, which includes co-founders Dwight and Eliot, the authors of MongoDB: The Definitive Guide Kristina Chodorow and Mike Dirolf, and Lead Kernel Engineer Alberto Lerner in the background looking pensive.

18 W 18th

134 5th Ave

At the end of 2010, it was clear that we needed our own space. We started looking to sign a short term lease when Eliot noticed that there was a “for-lease” sign on 134 5th, ShopWiki’s previous home around the corner. He knew the landlord and space well, so we jumped at the chance to move in on a short-term lease. The space needed a paint job, a new kitchen, and some carpeting, but little construction since it had been built out a few years prior for ShopWiki. We were directly above a nail salon but at least it was our own office!
Main room
When we moved in, we all thought it was huge. We had a large open area where everyone sat. As hiring accelerated, we moved my team into one of the conference rooms. Our reception area became desk space. The coat closet became our recruiter’s desk. Pretty soon, we were down to a single conference room and Elyse, our office manager at the time, would only allow it to be reserved for more interviewing! The sales team was taking phone calls on the stairwell (the fumes from the nail salon must have been lucky), the execs would have private conversations on the fire escape, and I would plan any meeting possible at City Bakery around the corner.

578 Broadway

Moving to SoHo felt like a huge upgrade. We had graduated into a new neighborhood, in the Prince Building, which housed three other extremely hot startups: foursquare (a major client of ours), Thrillist, and ZocDoc. We again had an open layout with lots of conference rooms for meetings. We started to add fun innovations like the virtual “water cooler,” a web cam pointed at all of our offices so that you can visit with your colleagues around the world.
Panorama1
Mayor Bloomberg’s visit to the 10gen office at 578 Broadway

Like 134 5th, 578 Broadway soon started to feel crowded. The marketing team moved across the hall into a temporary space to make more desk space, and pretty soon finding conference room space became a challenge. It never got as bad as 134 5th, though I did take a few phone calls in the storage closet :)

229 W 43rd

While every office prior has been unique and interesting, this is the first office that has truly felt like a long-term home. We’ve signed a multi-year lease with the option to expand into the building and have invested significantly in the build-out of the office. The facilities team did a fantastic job making the space fun, functional and professional. We have a kitchen/cafe with a ping pong table that can double as seating for lunch, for example, and lots of social areas that people are using for meetings instead of taking up valuable conference room space. The office is equipped with white boards everywhere, enormous brightly colored beanbags and adjustable-height standing desks.

Champagne toast the morning we moved into the new office

Champagne toast the morning we moved into the new office

It’s been a long journey but I’m happy to settle into midtown for awhile. Hopefully we won’t outgrow this space too quickly, though I’m concerned when recruiting immediately used white board space on one of the pillars to post the note below! Did I mention we are hiring?

Top jobs, posted in the office

Top jobs, as posted in the office

Mar 31 2013
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Community, Events, Open Source

Open Tech NYC Recap

After several months of preparation, yesterday we held Open Tech NYC, a conference dedicated to exploring how open source and open technologies are powering the New York City innovation community. I organized the event with my colleague, Justin Dunham, and partnered with the Coalition for Queens, a local non-profit that is fostering the tech ecosystem in Queens.

The Sessions

When we were planning the conference, Justin and I spent a lot of time talking with Jukay, Ben, and David from Coalition for Queens on what audience we wanted to attract and how technical we wanted to go. While we wanted to draw a fairly technical audience, we also wanted to keep the sessions high-level enough that those that were new to open technologies could be introduced to this world.

For a single-track event, I was thrilled with the diversity of people, experiences, and topics that were covered. It’s tough to please everyone in a single track event but overall I was happy with the balance that we struck. Here is an overview of what was discussed at Open Tech NYC.

Sumana Harihareswara introduces you to your Open Tech neighbors

The conference kicked off with Sumana Harihareswara of the Wikimedia Foundation providing a broad overview of all of the interesting open source, open hardware, open data, and open culture happenings around the city. Despite a lingering cold, Sumana’s charisma, humor and energy shone through and was the perfect way to begin the day. This morning Sumana summarized in a blog post 50 links to institutions and events in the city, which is a great collection of resources for those of any background interested in getting involved in the open tech community. Below are some of my favorite moments from Sumana’s talk.

Joel Natividad on Open Data and Open Source: The Wonder Twins of Civic Hacking

Joel Natividad, the founder and CEO of Ontodia, presented on open data in the context of New York City’s Open Data Law, which mandates that the city’s various agencies provide access to their data. As citizens, we produce all sorts of fascinating information through our actions: metrocard swipes, 311 service requests, parking tickets, graffiti, and on and on and on.

With this data open and available, Joel explained that we can challenge our traditional view of government as a “vending machine” in which we put in money and receive services. We can start to participate in the conversation by building applications that take advantage of the information that is produced. There are, however, challenges to working with this open data. As Joel explains, each city agency has been collecting data over time in a silo, and there is no standardization across agencies. His company, Ontodia, aims to address this challenge by helping to do the data wrangling and normalization so that anyone can manipulate this powerful data.

Alan Hudson on 3D printing and open source at Shapeways

Alan Hudson, the Director of 3D Tools at Shapeways, talked about the 3D printing process, Shapeways’ factory in Long Island City, and the open source software that they use. Alan explained how open source enabled startup velocity, not only for Shapeways but for the designers that upload designs on their site to print. For example, he showed how the Steampunk iPhone case went through 9 different designs and $6,000 of sales over the course of a year. In parallel, Shapeways itself maintains over 2 million lines of code and relies heavily on open source to enable iterative development of their product.

Jon Gottfried on the History of the Hackathon

Jon Gottfried is a Developer Evangelist at Twilio, where he goes to hundreds of events and hackathons to talk about the Twilio API. His talk gave an overview of the different types of hackathons, from community-focused open source hackathons to brand-focused hacakthons with prizes. He cited my favorite hackathon, hackNY, which brings students from around the northeast to New York City to work with local startups and receive mentorship from the local tech community. Jon’s call to arms at the end was to focus on why we come together for these types of events, emphasize the community aspects of hackathons and celebrate the art of building.

Vanessa Hurst on Developers for Good

Vanessa Hurst explained how, while working as a programmer for a financial institution she was looking for a way to apply her technical skills in a more fulfilling way. She started an organization called Developers for Good to connect non-profits with people who have technical expertise. She explained that many non-profits benefit from open source since most don’t realize that most of their needs are solved by open source tools such as WordPress. She further explained that for her, helping a non-profit was often the motivation that she needed to learn a new technology. After the event, I felt inspired to join the Developers for Good meetup group.

Michael Li visualizes NYC using foursquare’s check-in data

Michael Li‘s talk generated a ton of conversation and excitement. He presented several fascinating data visualizations based on the foursquare check-in data set. For example, he showed us a moving map of color-coded New York City check-ins by time of day, showing how the city wakes up and moves from the outer boros and burbs into midtown for work, then shifting to lunch and shopping destinations and eventually to night life spots. He presented a graph that demonstrated that for every degree increase in weather, people are 2.1% more likely to buy ice cream. He also showed us the graph of check-ins to popular places like Grey’s Papaya, which had a clear 3am post-clubbing surge in check-ins :)

After all of this “data porn” Michael showed the underlying technologies that foursquare leverages as well as the machine learning principles that he applies to determine venue recommendations.

Andy Parsons on the New York City Startup Stack

Our final talk of the day came from Andy Parsons, the CTO and Co-Founder of Happify and serial New York City entrepreneur. Andy began his talk with an anecdote about a startup that he was part of during the late 90′s that had a major outage. While the majority of the stack was .NET, a forward thinking engineer had suggested that they use Postgres, an open source database. During that outage, the only part of the infrastructure that didn’t go down was the database — because he was able to see the underlying source code. That experience gave Andy the insight that using open technologies was a more pragmatic approach.

Andy also talked about the importance of community. He referenced a dinner for entrepreneurs that he and I frequent where the organizers says “If you leave without helping someone, you’ve failed.” Andy encouraged everyone to give back to the community, whether it’s through contributing code, open sourcing a project, or sharing knowledge in a blog post or talk.

The Event Overall

Overall, I enjoyed all of the presentations and learned something from each of the talks. When we started planning the event, we decided to start with a smaller, single track event to see what the response was to make sure that we didn’t take on more than we could handle. I’m glad we went with this approach, because with 180 registered, the event was intimate enough that we could do Q&A during each session and have good conversations during the breaks and at lunch.

The venue was also amazing, with rooftop space and an amazing view of the city that everyone enjoyed. We lucked out with incredible weather on one of the first beautiful days of spring. Everyone could sit in the sunshine between talks.

The Next Event?

Now that the first Open Tech NYC is complete, I’m already thinking about what to do next with the event. Justin wants to organize a second event this year, which is both exciting and daunting. For those of you who were at the event, I’d love to hear in the comments your thoughts and feedback on the conference and what we can do better next time.

Thanks

Thank you to all of the amazing speakers: Sumana, Joel, Alan, Jon, Vanessa, Michael, and Andy

Thank you to Jukay Hsu, Ben Wei, and David Yang at the Coalition for Queens for partnering with Justin and me on the event.

Thank you to Joyride for the coffee, StackOverflow for lunch, Send Tech for the wireless, Team Bubbly for the video production.

Thank you to everyone who came to the first event, and special thanks to volunteers Andrew Morrow, Ian Whalen, Dan Crosta, Andy Dirnberger for helping with set up and registration.

Thank you Justin for motivating me to do this!

Mar 25 2013
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10gen, Recruiting, Startups

Doers and Strategizers

In a recent BetaBeat article, Kevin Ryan talked about the challenges of hiring a new CEO at Gilt Groupe:

Another factor in Ms. Peluso’s appointment was her experience with different sized companies. “Here’s a hard thing when you look for someone in this spot. You want someone who has entrepreneurial energy and focus and moves quickly. At the same time, we’re not a 20-person company, we’re a 1,000-person company and with global operations. So you need to have that big company structure and thought process, but not slow you down–and that’s a weird hybrid,” he said. “I’ve interviewed people from big companies and I’m like: Oh my god, they’re going to be a disaster here. They’re gonna wanna take too long on everything. And yet people can be too sloppy if they just come from startups.”

While I’ve never had to hire a CEO, I can relate to the challenge that Kevin faces in hiring at a fast-growing startup. Finding the right mix of strategy and execution is a major challenge when you are recruiting.

For example, right now I’m actively trying to find someone to head our demand generation efforts. Ideally we will find someone who has the creativity to come up with ideas for campaigns to drive new leads and the analytical mindset to figure out which programs are the most successful. That requires a strategic person, who probably has many years of experience and can see the big picture.

At the same time, we’re still a small team. This person will also need to know how to roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty, setting up programs in our marketing automation tool (Marketo), running reports to see which campaigns were successful, and all of the other details that go along with bootstrapping our enterprise marketing programs.

Personally, I love both aspects of my job and it’s one of the things that makes working at a startup so rewarding. Hopefully I can find someone that is up to the challenge!

Mar 22 2013
1 Comment
Fun, Productivity

Features That I Wish Google Calendar Had

Like most startups and growing companies, 10gen uses Google Apps for email and calendaring. I love the service but there are some features and functionality in Google Calendar that I would love to see.

Tagging

Gmail loves tagged threads over folders, and it was a key innovations of the service. Why doesn’t Google Calendar follow suit? I have a shared calendar for all of the MongoDB events, and it was getting very cumbersome. The US team wanted to see US events, the Python team wanted to see Python events, the training team wanted to see training events, and on and on and on. We ended up making separate calendars for US and Europe events, but I would have preferred to have had a single events calendar with tags so we could look at events according to any dimension that we want (i.e. all Python events in the US or all online events).

Recognizing Multiple Accounts

Google hasn’t don’t a great job of unifying multiple Gmail accounts. I have a personal Google calendar and a 10gen calendar, and while I can overlay them it isn’t evident to anyone at work that I have a dentist appointment or a tennis game on my personal calendar unless they also add my personal calendar to their view. Instead I end up putting my entire personal life on my work calendar, which is not ideal.

Canceling/Declining Meetings

This is very basic functionality, but I should be able to easily send a note with an explanation when I cancel or decline a meeting. Instead, I have to send a separate follow up explaining my I am declining.

Hopefully the Google Calendar product team reads this post and adds my feature requests!

Mar 03 2013
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Community, NYC, Open Source

Agenda for Open Tech NYC

I am excited to announce the agenda for Open Tech NYC on March 30. Thanks everyone who submitted talks or made suggestions for the event. Here is the lineup of talks:

  • Sumana Harihareswara (of the Wikimedia Foundation) introduces you to your Open Tech neighbors
  • Open Data and Open Source: The Wonder Twins of Civic Hacking (Joel Natividad, Ontodia)
  • New York, 3D Printing, and Open Source (Alan Hudson, Shapeways)
  • History of the Hackathon (Jon Gottfried, Twilio)
  • Developers for Good: Coding for Social Impact in NYC (Vanessa Hurst, Developers for Good)
  • Open-source Data Science and Visualizing NYC (Michael Li, foursquare)
  • The NYC Innovation Stack (Andy Parsons, Happify)

This is going to be a really fascinating day and I can’t wait to hear from this set of speakers.

Since it’s a single-track conference, we tried to keep all of the speakers focused on the theme (open source and innovation in New York City). In the future, if the event goes well, I hope that we can grow into a larger space and broaden the topics that the event covers.

I hope to see you on the 30th!

Feb 11 2013
2 Comments
Community, Events, NYC, Open Source

Open Source Conference in NYC

I’m really excited to announce a side project that I’ve been working on with my colleague, Justin Dunham. We are organizing an open source conference in New York City!

Open Tech NYC on March 30 in Queens, NY

Since it’s the first time we are organizing the event, we are running it on a shoestring with support from the Coalition for Queens, who is providing the space for free. It’s a single track conference with all the speakers focused on one theme: celebrating and exploring open source in New York City and how it are contributing to the startup and innovation community in the city. So far we’ve lined up some really interesting speakers that I am personally very excited to see, including Sumana Harihareswara from the Wikimedia Foundation, Andy Parsons from Happify, Alan Hudson from Shapeways, Jon Gottfried from Twilio, and more.

We’re keeping the conference inexpensive, fun, and interesting, and I hope that you can join us for the event. More information can be found at www.opentech2013.org.

Feb 09 2013
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10gen

The Third 10gen All Company Meeting

This week I participated in the third 10gen all hands meeting. Having been at 10gen for over three years now, I want to start recording some of the history of the company as it grows.

The First All Hands: NYC, June 2011

The first all hands meeting was in New York City in June 2011, the day after the second MongoNYC conference. The company was roughly 45 employees at the time, mostly based in New York with a new office in California. Our sole employee in Europe, Gerry Treacy, met many members of the team in person for the first time at the all hands.

The first meeting was very low key in comparison to the next two events. We had a day of sessions, but there were no slides and it was very interactive. The presentations took place in our office on 5th Avenue in the open layout. Yet, it included a few key traditions that we’ve retained.

The first tradition that we started was the team building activity. In 2011, the team building activity was a scavenger hunt around the Highline. Of course, there was a heat wave during the event. At least one team decided that they preferred to drink a cocktail to running around the city solving puzzles. In contrast, I was on the team with our VP of Sales, arguably the most competitive person in the company, so my team hustled through the clues. At one point, we entered a bar in the meatpacking district to ask a bartender to help us with the answer to a clue. Little did we know that our President (now CEO), Max Schireson, had been there earlier and bribed the bartender to give all the subsequent teams misinformation! My team lost by a single point. When I accused Max of cheating, he responded, “I didn’t cheat, I merely used all the resources available to me to win!”

Mini MeghanAfter the scavenger hunt, we enjoyed a nice dinner together. The following morning we had a series of sessions where everyone learned about the different activities happening across engineering, sales, marketing, and more. Another tradition emerged: recognizing employees with company awards. Our first round of awards recognized the team in a lighthearted way: Alvin got a passport case for all the travel that he did visiting customers and his relocation to London to support Gerry. Kyle and Kristina received fancy pens for their work on MongoDB books. And finally, Max presented the final award. He explained that our detractors often complained about 10gen’s evil marketing machine, and that every evil genius needs a Mini-Me. He then bestowed upon me Mini Meghan, a little doll in my likeness with a MongoDB t-shirt. It’s one of my proudest moments at 10gen.

The Second All Hands: Sonoma, January 2012

The second all hands meeting was more elaborate than the first, with the meeting taking place in Sonoma. At the beginning of 2012, the company had expanded to 100 people with a growing European contingent. Unlike at our first all hands, our staff was becoming more specialized. For example, engineering was breaking out into teams such as support, solutions architecture, driver development, documentation, core server, and more. For the first time, we included our new college hires – many of which wouldn’t be starting until the summer – in the event.

Like the previous year, we hosted a team building activity. In 2012, we broke into groups to build rockets. The rocket that flew the highest, without breaking the egg inside of it, would win the contest. You could enter in either the “stock” competition, where you used the parts provided at the event on a team assigned on the day of the event, or you could enter the “top fuel” competition, and buy parts prior to the event with a team formed prior to the meeting.

As usual, Max got competitive and invested an obscene amount of money into his rocket for the top fuel competition. He had his team working into the wee hours of the night. This year I preferred to be on a team that chose to do the bare minimum (read: drink) on the stock fuel competition. After all of their hard work, Max’s team was the only rocket that didn’t manage to launch! It was the subject of many jokes in the following days and weeks.

In addition to the rocket competition, we had dinner at a winery at an epic-ly long table, enjoyed a morning activity (choice of yoga, biking, or walking), had an outdoor lunch catered by food trucks, and several fascinating sessions from our investors, analysts, executives, and staff.

The Third All Hands: Miami, February 2013

The most recent all hands meeting was my favorite. At 200 people, the company is large enough that we have a truly global presence, bringing together staff from all over the country (New York, Palo Alto, Atlanta, DC, Texas) and world (Sydney, Dublin, London, Barcelona) to sunny Miami. At this size, we’re facing the most interesting problems. As Dwight explained in one of the opening sessions, we’re through many of the “risk gates.” There is adoption of MongoDB across startups and enterprises, and now we’re trying to figure out how we scale the business and execute on the vision. Bringing the team together was an amazing opportunity to come up with new ideas and approaches to these challenges. And on a more practical note, at 200 people, there was critical mass for lots of fun side activities: groups met to go to the beach, play poker, meditate, swim, run, you name it.

As 10gen has grown, so has our customer base, and our customers need support even during our all hands meeting. Throughout the event, we had a 24/7 “support box” staffed by the team with snacks, drinks, and special t-shirts. Everyone on the engineering team did a rotation in the support box during the event. Even our VP of Finance answered a support ticket, earning herself a t-shirt!

This year’s team building activity was ideal for a technology company: lego robot sumo challenge. Each team had to build a robot to compete in a round robin sumo competition. This was a great activity because there was work for everyone: the engineers could program, the non-techies could assemble the robot, and in my case, I sorted legos and got the smarter people on my team drinks!

On “Latin Night” we had drinks and dancing, and our annual company awards. This year, there were open nominations from the staff. I loved that we recognized individual contributors across a variety of departments, all of which demonstrated not only strong work ethics and commitments to our customers, but inspiring, positive attitudes.

The past three years have been a lot of fun. I’m looking forward to continuing the adventure.

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