EBITDA is a better metric, and that number was getting dramatically worse every year until 2023.
But even in 2023, EBITDA was -$202M. I don't see it ever approaching $0.
So it's still a shit business on top of a shit product that no one ever really needed.
Try to upgrade a running instance node between some versions, and one may thrash object keys or worse. Best to dump and re-load your data every major upgrade to recover all set properties... and there still may be slight differences in the query language later. Wait, your data sets are 1.5TiB per node.... that is a lot of downtime...
The cursor, projection, and re-format queries can be very good at reducing reporting traffic. However, the 3 page long syntax can be unreadable to the uninitiated. The json essentially jams a bunch of equivalent SQL queries in 1 transaction, but you still have to be careful as there is no real guarantee of ordering without auto-indices in clusters.
mongodb is not as clean as SQL, but works for storing constantly changing meta data. i.e. if you find your SQL schema ends up with tuples that have a lot of poorly designed null entries, table edits, and or simply implements an object storage class abstraction in massive meta-data and object-class catch-all tables.
And yes, the mongodb new licensing model telegraphs an unfavorable policy posture. However, I do understand not wanting fortune 500 companies exploiting your teams time for free.
Profit is not an indication of quality, but rather fiscal utility. ;-)
While the article and significant sentiment in threads suggest a push off MongoDB toward PostgreSQL, I do think MongoDB has its own place in the stack and that it won't be obsoleted. I've personally had many pleasant experiences working with it in past projects.
Regarding business metrics, I may have a slight bias coming from the startup world but we often value revenue the most, especially in the earlier stages of a company; we can reduce costs and perform various optimizations in the future but what stays at the foundation is whether or not there is strong product market fit such that more customers keep coming in and coming back to use the underlying product — I would say MongoDB's current growth trajectory is in line with that.
I'm hopeful overall that they can turn profitable (maybe not this year or next but eventually so).
The reason we don't just look at revenue is that you can "buy" revenue with ads and sales teams. But if that revenue growth costs more than it pays because your customers aren't sticky, then your business doesn't work. You can't apply startup principles to this large, aging public company.
Mongodb is foolproof and works out of the box.
The other alternative here isn't Mongodb, it's Couchdb, but that isn't an RDBMS.
(171,150)
(343,375)
(309,090)
So there you go...
That measure won't be good for MongoDB Inc. either; they've been millions in the red for years. Losing $100 million in a year would be the best result they've achieved in a while now.
Can someone tell me what their licensing changes are?
EBITDA is used in the industry because it is a proxy for operating cash flow. Sometimes you don't have all the available data needed to get to OCF, or you're looking at company guidance (for future EBITDA values) or analyst estimates. It's easier to keep the conversation at the EBITDA level because it requires fewer assumptions. Generally the revenue line is ~easy to estimate because you can conceptualize how to go from the current number of customers to some future number of customers, how many dollars per customers and so on and so forth.
Then as you work your way to EBIT (Operating Income) you still have to assume some gross margin, R&D expense, etc. These are pretty tangible. It should be pretty easy to get to estimated EBIT from what the company discloses in guidance or what analysts forecast. Since D&A is pretty linear over time, people generally assume it just remains constant as a % of revenue, so now you have EBITDA which is very much like cash flow
EBITDA is similar to cash flow because it adds back to EBIT the non-cash expense that is D&A. The reason it's good to look at it before interest and taxes is because you're also thinking about how much cash the whole enterprise generates, not how much cash goes to equity holders at the end (which is often called "Free" Cash Flow because it's not tied up with commitments to others)
Coming back to Buffett, in the industries he tends to pick stocks from, CAPEX is a major thing. Companies need to build factories, buy equipment, etc. So if you just look at future EBITDA without accounting for future CAPEX needs, you're fooling yourself.
Truth be told, in those industries everyone also looks at "EBITDA minus Capex". Maybe they do so now that he's bemoaned everyone for not doing it in the first place, but IMHO his criticism largely doesn't apply among valuation professionals. Maybe it does for stock traders, but not for valuation purposes like in an M&A context