Cloudant

Dharmesh tells me that I’m supposed to write a blog post explaining how we got to where we are. I’ll try my best, but sometimes I feel like the guy in that Talking Heads song, looking around saying, “This is not my beautiful house. This is not my beautiful wife.” This company formed sometime between 2004 and 2008, but definitely around one of the rather large lunch tables on the first floor of the Stata Center at MIT. Adam, Mike, and I all worked in the same group in the physics department and every day we ate lunch around one of those oddly shaped tables. By January of 2008 came to the conclusion that we couldn’t leave MIT without starting a company. We didn’t really know what we wanted to do, but we did know 1) We were all fairly bright and industrious guys, 2) we enjoyed working together, and 3) we didn’t want to go look for “real” jobs.

Mike’s original idea was for an automatic tamale maker. I’m not kidding. That one got nixed when we found out we were way behind already.

Eventually we decided to play to our strengths, which were in large-scale data processing and analysis. Our high-energy physics experiments generated some of the largest data sets in the world. It was our job to sift through the terabytes and petabytes to find rare particles and strange interactions. This is what we did for fun. Turns out that we’re living in a data-centric world (more so every day) and many of the problems we had faced were popping up in the business world. What we wanted was a way to bring physics-style data analysis tools to the masses. All we had to do was build it.

Toward the end of March someone sent me Paul Graham’s essay “A Student’s Guide to Startups.” I had never heard of PG before, but his essay resonated with me, especially the part about getting to stop treading water. I stumbled upon YCombinator literally by clicking random links on Graham’s website. As it turned out, this YCombinator Company was pretty well known and respected, and they were asking for applications for startups that needed funding. Hey! We were a startup that needed funding and we were already in Boston. So we applied, almost on a whim. And to be honest, we were a little bit floored when we got accepted.

After a number of back-and-forths with PG and other YC companies, we decided to focus on building a database designed for the specific needs of the web (hence our tagline “A database for the web,” clever huh?) One that would scale horizontally, could run on commodity hardware in a fault tolerant fashion, with a simple interface, and a powerful built-in analysis engine. We stumbled on Apache CouchDB, which at the time was in its relative infancy, and were very impressed with what they had built, especially the natural JSON-over-HTTP interface. We decided to take Couch and build it into a true ‘cloud-ready’ database.

It’s been more than a year since we started working on Cloudant. Since then a huge community has sprung up around CouchDB. Our own Adam Kocoloski was tapped to be an official committer on the project. We were able to raise significant additional funding late last year, just as the economy was collapsing—a true testament to the vision of our amazing VC. The Cloudant Team has grown from 3 to 6 as we were able to convince a few top-notch hackers to help us build our vision.

We’ll soon be releasing a beta version of Cloudant: CouchDB-in-the-cloud. It seems as though we were on to something when we began tossing ideas around in the Stata Center 18 months ago. The nosql movement, which is gaining steam, indicates the need for a new type of database, one built for the specific needs of web applications. At Cloudant we hope to fill that need. If you want to learn more or sign-up to be notified of our impending release, click here.