An apparently they already pay for themselves: "“Business is fantastic,” 10gen President Max Schireson told me. “We keep outperforming every goal that we set for ourselves and the market just feels like it’s huge.” In fact, he said, new sales people pay for themselves almost immediately upon joining the company."
So I wonder what they are going to do with that huge pile of cash? R&D for a single DB surely can't be that expensive (or at least it would be difficult to get that many people to suddenly work on productive things that would actually improve the product and not just make it bloatware).
Apparently the hype works, for a DB that is about scaling but doesn't scale yet? "Just another $100m and we'll get there"?
How many people actually need a DB that "scales" better than mysql/postgres which are much easier to use and better supported and understood?
" Among other things, it has been criticized for being rather difficult to manage at scale. This is somewhat ironic, as scalability, along with the flexibility that comes with being schemaless, is among the driving factors behind the NoSQL movement. One would expect the most-popular of the bunch to scale with ease."