Mark Loves Tech

An archived copy of MongoDB's company values, preserved from mongodb.com.

An archived copy of Grab's company values — the 4Hs — preserved from grab.careers.

An archived copy of the dbt Labs company values and leadership principles, preserved from getdbt.com before the company's closure.

Verbatim text of Amazon’s sixteen Leadership Principles, archived from amazon.jobs in July 2026.

Mark moderates a panel at RAISE Summit 2026 on why open source is the engine of AI innovation, with Ion Stoica, Thomas Wolf, Dillon Rolnick, Eiso Kant, and Robin Rombach.

In this talk, I focused on what works for teams and what doesn’t.

A company succeeds or fails based on the speed and quality of the decisions it makes.

A pro forma process for incubating new ideas alongside the regular flow of a product engineering org.

A working framework for thinking about every decision in five distinct phases.

On Patrick Lencioni’s The Motive: rewards-based leadership vs. value/team-based leadership, and why senior leaders never change because they’re told to — only because they change what they value.

A framework for understanding the fundamentally different jobs at each rung of the engineering leadership ladder — IC, Manager, Director, VP, C-Level, and CEO.

A single-dimensional performance rating loses a huge amount of information about most humans.

Sometimes people need to change to adapt to the company, and we’re not sure of the journey or how to help them.

Reorganizations are hardly ever viewed as positive by the troops.

Fleet uptime is a fine starting point, but it doesn’t represent the customer experience.

Cascading isn’t just forwarding emails.

In this talk, I work to empower people to manage their own careers and give pointers from my own limited experience on things that work and things that don’t.

Highlights from Mark’s March 2023 reading of Patrick Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team — absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results.

Eight cultural guidelines for product and engineering organizations, written during my 18 months as CTO at MongoDB.

An argument against the false fairy-tale of cloud-agnostic abstractions.

Three talks I gave at the MongoDB World 2022 Builder’s Fest in New York City — slide decks below.

Thirteen leadership principles from a leader I admire — included here in their original framing as a reference for the parent Leadership Principles page.

For my first-ever Techsylvania talk, I talked about the challenges in culture and operations that occur as companies grow.

Mark's thoughts on the AWS Service Outage of Dec 7, 2021 -- examining AWS's response during and after the outage, plus implications for affected customers.

MongoDB CTO Mark Porter contests AWS's characterization of DocumentDB as 'MongoDB compatible'

Highlights from Peter Drucker’s The Effective Executive — the five habits of effectiveness, managing time, focusing on contribution, building on strengths, and concentration.

Highlights from No Rules Rules on Netflix’s culture of freedom and responsibility — talent density, candor, removing controls, and leading with context instead of process.

About 70% Clay Christensen, 30% me.

Highlights from Chris Voss’s Never Split The Difference — mirroring, labeling, calibrated questions, and the illusion of control.

Highlights from Jocko Willink’s Extreme Ownership — on standards, Decentralized Command, Cover and Move, and the Dichotomy of Leadership.

People ask me this often enough that I decided to put it on my home page: Aren't you one of the SQL folks?

ACM SIGMOD '94 paper on the Oracle Media Server platform for distributed multimedia access