Entrepreneur, Investor, Operator. Interim CEO @MongoDB, Partner/Senior Advisor @Sequoia. Views my own.
NYC
- Tweets 1,838
- Following 1,093
- Followers 13,751
- Likes 2,286
Pinned Tweet
Someone asked me today what's the most motivating thing I've ever read. It's this quote: "The definition of hell--on your last day on earth, the person you became met the person you could have become."
The most profound regret is not about things you did but about the things you didn’t do—the missed opportunities, the untapped talents, the unlived dreams. It serves as a powerful reminder to live fully and intentionally and to be the version you could have been if you had not been held back by fear, doubt, shame or complacency.
10
52
356
84,229
👀
🚨Breaking. There's been a pneumonic plague outbreak at a BSL-3 lab in Siberia, Russia.🚨
"Nearly 200 People Under Observation After Irkutsk Lab Worker Dies From Plague" - Moscow Times
This is fact, and also the inciting incident in my book BIOLOGICAL WAR: A SCENARIO, which is unnerving.
Will post more as I learn more, including from Russian speaking sources🧵
shorturl.at/De4kW
11
7,100
Pure gold.
My fav — People become what the room expects of them. If the room lets a standard slide, it slides.
If the room corrects the small thing every single day, people stop believing small things are small.
My goal is to build an environment where success is inevitable.
I've coached over 30 Olympic gold medals.
I've worked with some of the greatest athletes in history.
Here are the lessons I wish more people understood:🧵
4
20
294
75,461
So good.
I’ve always believed the best founders (& leaders) can balance two ways of thinking simultaneously. One part of their mind sees what’s possible and believes they can build it, even when the odds are against them. Without that belief they would never start a company.
The other part sees things as they are. It recognizes what’s working and what isn’t and addresses problems head on. Without that intellectual honesty they would never get through the hard times.
As a founder, you want both superpowers in your company: the fiery spirit of entrepreneurship and the icy discipline of management.
3
85
13,669
What a hero!!
My salute to the Indian pilot Captain Smit Machchhar for his extraordinary bravery.
Despite being stabbed and seriously injured, he fought back, resisted, opened the cockpit door, and enabled passengers and crew to overpower the attacker — preventing a catastrophic mid-air disaster.
He saved the lives of 174 people, including Israeli citizens and other nationals.
I wish Captain Machchhar a speedy and full recovery.
He is a true hero.
12
37
669
59,867
AI is moving from generating answers to taking action. That changes what we need from the data layer.
An agent can reason perfectly and still make the wrong decision if it’s working with stale data. And as agents become more autonomous, those mistakes can happen at machine speed.
That’s why operational data becomes even more important in the AI era. As software increasingly takes action on its own, the data layer becomes part of the control plane for the business.
Today we announced the biggest expansion of @MongoDB's platform yet, with MongoDB 9.0, Atlas Infinite and Atlas Agent Engine, built for this new world.
More on why we believe the data layer has to change for the agentic era:
mongodb.com/company/blog/pro…
See you tomorrow at #MongoDBLocal NYC.
2
9
60
4,586
Back at @Nasdaq! MongoDB's @dittycheria rang the opening bell in celebration of our latest announcements and tomorrow's MongoDB.local NYC. 🎉
6
14
156
36,862
No company has meant more to me professionally than MongoDB. I spent more than 11 years as CEO, and even after stepping down last year, I never really left. Serving on the board kept me close to our people, our customers and the business, and only strengthened my conviction in MongoDB’s future.
Today, I’m returning as interim CEO. I’m grateful for the trust of our board and our team, and I’m ready to get to work.
I also return with a different perspective. As a Partner and Senior Advisor at Sequoia Capital, I have a front-row seat to the founders, technologies and companies shaping the AI era. I see firsthand how AI is not only changing how software is built and businesses operate, but expanding technology’s role from helping people manage work to increasingly helping perform the work itself. I look forward to bringing those insights back to MongoDB as we help our customers capitalize on what may be the most consequential platform shift of our generation.
And we’re getting started immediately. Tomorrow at 11 AM ET, we’ll host Investor Day and share our long-term strategy, market opportunity and the product innovation driving MongoDB forward.
On Wednesday, our sold-out .local NYC event will bring together developers and business leaders focused on putting AI into production and moving from generating answers to taking action at scale. We’ll have exciting announcements at both events.
What has always made MongoDB special is the ambition of our people, the importance of what our customers build with our technology, and the size of the opportunity ahead.
I’m proud to lead this team again. There is a lot to do, and I couldn’t be more excited to get back to work.
mongodb.com/company/newsroom…
55
58
1,043
360,585
The people I have seen grow the fastest continually ask for feedback, both good and bad. They assess it based on the credibility of the source and the persuasiveness of the logic, then act on it when appropriate. The goal isn’t to accept every piece of feedback. It’s to have the humility to change when the feedback has merit.
5
26
6,581
Dev Ittycheria retweeted
We have raised $200M at a $5B valuation to scale self-improving software development in the enterprise.
@FactoryAI has grown to serve hundreds of thousands of developers at companies including RBC, Adobe, Nvidia, T-Mobile, and Palo Alto Networks.
We will use this capital to accelerate our investments in research, product, and global go-to-market.
163
68
822
413,592
Dev Ittycheria retweeted
Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead.
You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement.
I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible.
But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier.
Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want.
Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well.
So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it.
If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.
3,423
12,340
72,116
9,608,551
Dev Ittycheria retweeted
If you are a startup founder wanting to be a scaleup CEO, I think Sequoia is a particularly good partner. In addition to myself, we have @dittycheria & @carl_eschenbach to help on the journey.
32
2
223
15,170
Being a founder is one of the loneliest roles there is. Everyone's livelihood rides on your decisions, but no one else carries the same weight of responsibility. The hardest calls are made in isolation, and you own the outcome either way. The job is only getting harder. AI is changing what companies build, what small teams can do, how they reach customers, and the capital required to scale. The rate of change is accelerating, so the advantage goes to whoever learns and adapts fastest.
Yet the decisions that determine whether a company lives or dies haven't changed. Nailing product-market fit. Constructing an effective go-to-market engine. Building a cohesive leadership team that can scale. Knowing when to raise, and how to allocate capital you may never get a second chance to deploy. Get these wrong, and no technology saves you.
Few firms have helped founders answer those questions longer, or better, than Sequoia. For over fifty years, it has backed founders early and stayed with them as they built enduring companies. What's struck me most, though, isn't the track record. It's the institution. Sequoia has treated the firm as something to be perpetuated, not a vehicle for individual partners. It approached succession with unusual care and reinvented itself as markets shifted. That mindset is why it endured while firms that once stood beside it disappeared.
I've seen how they operate up close. My relationship with Sequoia goes back 16 years. I met Doug Leone in 2010, and for over 11 years I worked closely with Roelof Botha at MongoDB, where Sequoia was our largest investor. I saw firsthand how they behaved when we were winning and when we faced our hardest calls. The advice was thoughtful, the feedback direct, the support consistent. They understood that being a good partner doesn't mean always agreeing with you. It means being honest, staying engaged, and prioritizing the company's long-term interests.
After nearly three decades of building, leading, and investing in technology companies, I'm joining Sequoia as a Senior Advisor. As both an operator and an investor, I've lived through the questions founders face. Helping the next generation answer them is exactly where I want to spend my next chapter.
sequoiacap.com/people/dev-it…
54
10
381
110,584
Dev Ittycheria retweeted
JUST IN: Microsoft’s new Wisconsin data center will reportedly use less water this year than a typical car wash.
323
861
10,388
680,347
Forward this to anyone you know who claims data centers are bad for communities.
Regret the tone of my post on data centers yesterday.
What I should have said:
There were reasonable concerns about data centers 18ish months ago: water, taxes, jobs, electricity prices, the environment and what they would do to small towns. Well-structured data center projects have largely addressed these concerns today and we should be celebrating this.
On balance, data centers are awesome for America in every way.
On water: U.S. data centers use a fraction of what golf courses use. A lot of the numbers from 18 months ago were off by over 1000x. Newer data centers use closed-loop systems or recycled water. Should be required by every town approving a data center project.
On taxes: looking only at sales-tax exemptions, as Ronan Farrow did, is the wrong way to evaluate this. Data centers pay significant property taxes. Loudoun County, which is the wealthiest county in America, now collects on the order of $1 billion a year from data centers. In Quincy, WA, data centers are more than half the property-tax roll. Over time, property taxes can go to zero while government spending increases in these towns.
On jobs: this has been unambiguously awesome for blue collar Americans. Demand for electricians, plumbers, welders, HVAC techs, and contractors has gone vertical, and it is not a one-time construction job. These buildings get upgraded and expanded over time. That is why the building trades are fighting for them, and why some unions are now treating opposition to data centers as a reason not to endorse politicians.
On power: the original fear was that households would pay for the incremental electricity demand in the form of higher prices. That is why the ratepayer-protection deals and the new large-load tariffs exist. The right structure is: the data center brings or pays for new generation and signs a contract long enough that existing customers are protected. Where that is happening, utilities are cutting or freezing residential rates and saying so on the record. Where it is not, people are right to object. Electricity prices are going down *today* in a number of large states because of data centers.
On the environment: data centers overwhelming use natural gas today, which is the cleanest power source outside of nuclear, solar and wind. And the companies that are building the data centers are committed to carbon neutrality such that an equivalent amount of solar will likely be built. Maybe more importantly, the data centers need batteries to function effectively and these batteries can also sell energy back into the grid (which recently prevented blackouts in Texas). Over time, data centers will run on solar plus batteries.
On the towns: Poverty in Quincy, WA fell from 29% to 6%. Data center taxes paid for a new high school, a hospital, a library, police and fire stations. This is happening in many left for dead former mill and farm towns that had no other bidder for the land.
Data centers are actually reindustrializing parts of America and creating the kind of working-class jobs both parties have spent decades claiming to support. That should not be a partisan issue. Data centers can and should be awesome for America and they increasingly, overwhelmingly are. Supporting the outsourcing of data centers to China will likely age just as well as support for the outsourcing of high quality, blue collar manufacturing jobs to China has aged.
When the facts change, I change my mind. I hope that reasonable people who had good faith reasons to oppose data centers at least consider updating their beliefs given the change in the facts over the last 18 months. This really matters for America.
I will say I also think the idea of making data centers beautiful is a good one that has yet to be implemented. Data centers should be just as beautiful as Grand Central Station. We can learn a lot from the railroad buildout. Neoclassical revival ftw.
Might write up open-weight AI tomorrow as this is equally essential to America.
8
3
24
11,708
Dev Ittycheria retweeted
Californians could soon see some relief from their sky-high electric bills.
The reason? Data centers.
Thanks to data centers, PG&E has been able to offer rate cuts for the fourth time in two years.
Let's keep building!
228
679
4,913
780,901
This is so depressing.
Legitimate concerns about power, water and costs have been turned into a broader story that data centers are bad for communities.
Disinformation works by taking something that is partly true, exaggerating it and repeating it until people believe the exaggerated version is the truth.
Meanwhile, in China….
2
4
1,901
This quote stands the test of time.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his livelihood depends on his not understanding it.” — Upton Sinclair
Meta will enforce a two-hour daily limit on Instagram and Facebook for children as part of a record $17.1B settlement with 29 states over social media addiction claims:
• The “Productive Pauses” for children include mandatory pauses after 15 minutes of continuous use and again at 60 and 90 minutes to interrupt endless scrolling
• “Nighttime blocks” restricting children’s access from 12:00 a.m. to 6:00 a.m.
• Limited school-time access for children, eliminating push notifications on weekdays from 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. during the school year
• Robust age assurance measures to more effectively verify the age of young users
• Safer, age-appropriate content controls, including stronger safeguards against bullying, content promoting eating disorders, and content related to suicide and self-harm
• Stronger, more user-friendly parental controls
• Limits on social comparison features, including beauty filters and visible “like” counts, that have been linked to poor mental health outcomes in kids and teens
• Both the implementation and effectiveness of the features will be regularly assessed by an independent auditor and the settling states
variety.com/2026/digital/new…
1
29
9,326
Ticking time bomb….
At least one in four NFL players who died between 2016 and 2021 had the degenerative brain disease known as CTE, a new study has revealed.
The study, published by the British Medical Journal, focused on how common chronic traumatic encephalopathy might be among NFL players. spr.ly/6014B1QXNg
4
3,302