MongoDB CEO resigns to join Meta
reuters.com
reuters.com
One reason might be the share price has collapsed and he has no confidence in it coming back (pretty scandalous if he's the CEO!), or Meta has offered him inducements > what he's walking away from.
Good way to burn a lot of bridges. He's never going to be hired as CEO by anybody for the rest of his career.
Maybe he had enough.
I wish I had your belief in sensible logic like that.
But I suspect you're wrong, even though you shouldn't be.
I'd eat my shorts if this was true. But even then he is likely set for life with his wealth, pre Meta offer.
just need to spin the departure as being decisive and able to make tough decisions and he'll be back in the ceo seat in no time. especially if muse does well.
Mosseri is basically the same age as Zuck, and Zuck still seems extremely hands on.
Check back in 10 years to see how things are going, maybe its Wang or a currently unknown 20 something.
Another example: current CEO of Cerebras, is an SEC felon from a prior company (for cooking the books), and now he's CEO of a public company.
It came back with Bob Komin.
"failed up" is currently defined as founding a company that goes public and being its CEO. I'd love to know what success is.
these stands do better than cerebras, which is an 11 year old deeply unprofitable company building a technology that no other company has bothered to try to even get close to replicating.
This is why their API has dumb limits on it. I'd estimate their $/tok cost around $4-5000/mtok based on hardware alone, which is insane. Sure, it is fast, but if it is heavily quanted, expensive, and can't scale, you're going to be in a world of pain.
They've pivoted many times over the years trying to make "wafer scale" work in a variety of use cases, and they still haven't gotten it right.
By the way, the CTO is dumping stock left and right and the stock is down nearly 5% today alone...
https://www.marketbeat.com/instant-alerts/insider-cerebras-s...
> how has cerebras not gotten their chip right?
It doesn't scale, and won't ever be profitable. They pivoted to inference, which has the unfortunate (for them) side effect of also requiring a boat load of memory. This is why they just partnered with AMD to offload onto their chips.
> I use cerebras.ai the token rate is amazing
Ah, investor. Explains your responses.
it kind of is, relatively - sean might just be having a galaxy blackhole supercluster installed at home for all we know
> It doesn't scale .. They pivoted to inference
they have more options than non-wafer-scale solutions, the chips are going 3d and meanwhile they benefit from the same interconnect progress as the wholly memory-bound alternatives
> Ah, investor. Explains your responses.
physician heal thyself like your not out here tryna manifest your short
I hear that CS-420 will be amazing.
Only needs to work once for him to get a passive payoff. Sitting in your lane usually doesn't buy you that.
(I'd ask some LLM to research it but the people who would be doubtful it's false significantly overlap with the people who distrust LLMs, so I'll just leave this as a random guess and nothing more.)
You have some startup, the founder is either young or doesn't want to do the CEO stuff. Things kind of eek along until the founder either steps aside or is removed by the board because a) it's time for a "grown-up" CEO; b) the CEO needs real sales experience; c) the founder overpromised and under-delivered; d) board/VC politics make it helpful to install a buddy as CEO; e) etc.
Then the CEO clock starts, typically they have 18 months to get lucky and hit their metrics. They do a lot of glad-handing. They hire "their team" of sales/marketing/etc people. They spend A LOT of money. And I mean A LOT. They talk about OKRs or SMRTs and KPIs. Out of nowhere a small army of project managers show up and try to tell you how to do your job and why you can't just talk to the <thing X> team directly but have to go through them for "efficiency" and "visibility."
In 3-6 months, senior engineering and R&D staff starts to leave. Whatever culture you had slips away. HR has "culture" meetings to "find the right company culture."
Sales/product can't sell and points the finger at R&D, maybe even for the right reasons. You OKR/KPI harder, but it doesn't matter because nothing addresses whatever the underlying problem is. Multiple senior people have pointed loudly to the problem and are ignored; they're often not managers so it's unclear if they were even heard.
At some point there are one or more rounds of layoffs; sometimes these are announced, sometimes it's just a gradual attrition.
Eventually the CEO clock runs out. They don't get lucky. Nothing they did helped, and some of it hurt. They collect their $1M severance, get to keep their stock, get 9-12 months of health insurance, and move on. In a year or two you hear about them joining a new company as CEO.
In the meantime, you've either moved on or have a new CEO with a new 18-month clock.
Even if it’s only 30% of CEOs and 15% of other CxOs there’s still an anomaly there to be explained.
That would actually be interesting if LLMs were to ever refer to LLM trust in the way I did. Kind of a scary thought.
The vast majority of projects seem to not meet their stated goals or KPIs or mission, be late, not follow remotely the planned path, etc. Whether blame falls on poor execution, poor planning, or overpromsing, those are precisely the things that chosen leaders are supposed to have been chosen to avoid—and what they would in theory fail downwards for. Unpredictable things do happen, but the regularity of these outcomes for projects (and products as a whole) means we're systematically choosing the wrong ones, there aren't enough capable ones (period), and/or that we shouldn't be org'd to need them in the first place. The last one is simply saying that if the environment is unpredictable enough that you can't plan well, then let's not spend time and money on planning. That in itself axes large chunks of the things product leaders do before work starts.
It makes iterating a more likely plan, but most teams and workstreams don't iterate too much. The iterating that sometimes is done is typically downstream of the plan, strategy, architecture that leadership leadershipped. They might do better without all the planning and overpromised timelines, which gut iterating. Iteration is only sort of a strategy anyhow (depends on what layer we're talking about when we say strategy). Iteration is what hedges a lack of vision.
Citation needed
Yes, but there are valid reasons for this. Speaking as someone who is currently in Product, let me point out that a lot of larger efforts in large organizations are inherently risky. This is probably measurable, but generally nobody invests in doing so, rather than that we model it with approximations. When an executive decides on a strategy which has a large effort as a downstream outcome, there is some risk possible that it becomes impossible, or that it is possible but at 2x, 3x, 5x, 10x the cost/time which erodes its value. Success doesn't look like hitting an arbitrary timeline or budget, success looks like getting to an outcome that aligns with the objectives/goals of the strategy, in a timeline that doesn't torpedo the strategy, and in a way which results in an economic ROI.
I am generally considered pretty good in my current organization. I have been lauded often. I don't think any of the major initiatives I've worked on have been "on time", but in almost every case it was due to cross-organizational dependencies dragging things out, which is an inherent risk accounted for when doing anything large in a large organization. But every single one of those initiatives has resulted in a positive ROI in a manner timely enough to support the strategy.
From the perspective of the organization, that's a win. And a win is rewarded.
I imagine similar things can be seen at executive levels. Nobody is asking detailed execution questions about your strategy to determine if its a win or a loss, they're looking at the aggregate outcome. Did your strategy result in improved profitability or reduction of cost or increase in share price, or not? CEOs seem to fail upward even on those metrics, but other executive roles seem to be more accountable.
I wouldn't expect to see it for sales so much, as it would mess with the incentive structure and you kind of want your salesfolk to be "all in". Same goes for CEO or COO - they might have a small portfolio of non-exec board memberships (or similar) on the side, but it's hard to do a good job if your primary focus is split between multiple distinct businesses.
Or there's something else scandalous happening and he wants to halt a bad look ASAP? I don't get why he or Meta couldn't have waited a couple weeks otherwise.
Is it?
Scandals require consequence. He's getting a new job at Meta. It'll take lawsuits to suss all of this out and those take years.
Worth noting: CJ wasn't just the CEO, he was also board member and president.
This is what happens when you don't have effective corporate governance.
His stocks/options vested/exercised last Friday. He's not forfeiting anything.
From looking at the historical prices, it was down from $450 to $410 from a month ago, but still quite a bit from $235 six months ago, which is not anything close to what I'd consider "collapsed". Of course, he might have expected to continue going down, but that's going to be hard to measure in the short term given that announcements like this tend to affect the price directly in the short term (so far down to $338 today, close to double the loss of the entire previous month, although it seems far too soon to draw any conclusions).
Not that I think I'm saying anything that has any sort of bias, but it's probably reasonable in case anyone happens to read this and be suspicious: I did work at MongoDB for around five years (but haven't worked there for nearly as long), and from that stint I did have a sizable amount of shares, although as of last year I no longer hold any (for reasons completely unrelated to any personal opinions of the company; I had procrastinated way too much on making any sort of decision about how much to hold onto and for how long, so when my wife and I were buying a house, I decided it was time to just liquidate it and put it towards that instead).
I haven't had this experience I have found a lot of people who burnt the damn house down get hired in a company for a similar role in a few months especially CEOs and executives. Including large companies, I had someone I know in a c suite role who burnt a few other companies to join competitors now working in Tesla and a friend who burnt the bridges with supposedly half the SF who is still employed in a similar c-suite role in SF.
I really don't think people care unless you are a nobody sofware developer who tried to do the same perhaps, mostly because I can't prove it.
I think they’re missing some internal loop. Only external rewards satisfy them and they maximise for that. Stopping is not an option, because then the rewards stop coming and they have no idea how to exist when that happens.
It seems he is deeply connected, and probably approaching centimillionaire wealth.
Even if he is burning some bridges, its not going to affect his career at this point.
Edit: I looked at the current interim CEO's profile, not the outgoings, but its almost the same story- he is 55, been on other boards, has experience at director+ level since 1995 listed... this isn't going to hurt his career.
You must be new to the corporate world or incredibly naive.
This is a great example of saying how things should work, which is almost the exact opposite of how they actually work.
Not sure how you made that assessment!
52 Week Range: 215.68 - 473.10
Yesterday, it closed at 410.44. Clearly, very far away from collapse. In fact, it made a solid comeback (almost doubled from lows).
https://www.crn.com/news/channel-news/2024/servicenow-presid...
https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/united-states-intervenes-...
I can't imagine the future is bright for MongoDB as AI makes it much less painful to move off of legacy and/or overpriced software.
They're a hypercloud provider now. It may be awhile.
Ehhhhhh maybe https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/ORCL
As much as I'd like to believe this, they have their ways of making money.
They bought Cerner early in the decade and have whittled it down to absolutely nothing. This is a problem when the software that Cerner sold was EMRs and I have people who used to work there telling me that the perioperative and anesthesia suites now have one person working on them, and no one's fixing issues.
Oracle has understood this for a long time. RDMBS have seen many generations of application tech stacks rise and fall. Other than C and unix they have outlasted almost everything.
Agreed. While DynamoDB != MongoDB, they are similar. I built a product on DynamoDB (Single-table-design) and while it was cool to find a way to make relational data work in DynamoDB, it was always a chore. New feature development was a huge PITA as was changing schema in any way. Sure, I might have been "holding it wrong" but after a weekend with Claude I migrated everything to Postgres and have been incredibly happy with that change something like 4-6 months later.
The simplicity of using it and the lack of operations is really why most people tend to reach for it over a relational option, although over the years the burden of managing an RDMS has consistently gone down.
I enjoyed solving the challenges around using DynamoDB way more than I enjoyed using it on an ongoing basis.
it's end user software that's absolutely getting crushed.
AI greatly removes that differentiator. AI doesn’t care if it needs schemas or if there’s an idiomatic driver for Python or Node. Even schema changes aren’t an issue and most databases support complex data anyways.
> Huh, taking care of your body, being interested in a sport, and not being a robot is now labelled as an alpha male?
You're doing a lot of projecting here.
> “And Zuck’s sudden interest in MMA/boxing/Jiu Jitsu as part of his “alpha male” rebranding”
equates general interest in fitness with being an “alpha male”. Because to me it is pretty clearly referring to the interest in combat sports, not fitness.
The Fertitta brothers are who actually bought it. Before owning the UFC, Lorenzo Fertitta was on (maybe the head?) of the Nevada State Athletic Commission- the very body who were refusing to sanction UFC events at the time, and the most important governing body in the combat sports world.
Obviously the UFC was hurting bad at that time since they couldn’t be sanctioned, were getting booted from arenas they booked, and were getting dropped by Pay Per View carriers. This decimated their value and the Fertittas scooped up the company for a song.
All of a sudden, now that they owned it, the sanctioning bodies agreed on a set of unified MMA rules, the UFC was re-sanctioned, and they started selling PPVs again.
It was actually quite a success from the very beginning. Their troubles were likely imposed on them by their prospective buyers in order to get the sale done, and all they and Dana White did really were take their foot off the company’s neck.
Same as how Clegg was brought in when the EU were on meta's case.
"Hey the MongoDB guy left, is MongoDB okay?.... wait, no, of course it isn't. It's in that space that is completely screwed."
To crudely estimate a fundamental valuation for MongoDB as a discounted sequence of future earnings, we'd need some understanding of the main factors that are driving this change in the net profit margin (over the next 5 years do we expect those factors to persist? to decay? to accelerate?), some modelling assumptions & forecasts for how they'll evolve over the next decade or two, and a discount factor.
Out of curiosity, I bashed together a naive NPV valuation, in complete ignorance of MongoDB's underlying business.
Completely unjustified modelling assumptions: suppose MongoDB can grow revenue at +20% / year for 5 years, then +5% / year for the next 5, then hitting a steady state +2.5% / year revenue growth; MongoDB grows net profit margin by +5% every year until hitting a 25% net profit margin, where it tops out; discount factor of 9.5% (= 5% risk free rate + 4.5% equity risk premium); no change in number of shares outstanding (perhaps optimistic, given they issued a bunch of stock within the last 5 years). Projecting this out 20 years & then using a 20x P/E valuation multiple at year 20 for the terminal value gives us an NPV estimate of the value at about $290 / share.
So if you believe MongoDB's business will do about that well, with your fundamental valuation investor hat on you could consider buying some stock if it were offered at, say, half the current market price or less -- assuming there isn't anything more attractive to invest in.
If you believe MongoDB's revenue growth & improvement in net profit margin will be much stronger over the next decade, maybe you'd be comfortable buying closer to the current market price.
(I don't hold any MongoDB stock & find it hard to stomach investing in growth companies vs companies that are more mature & easier to understand, but I appreciate that to value growth stocks you're not going to have much luck using P/B or P/E ratios)
I ended up migrating everything to DigitalOcean's managed database for 1/3 the price. Less headache, better performance, and less panic and anger.
I'll never, ever use Mongo Atlas again.
One interpretation is that senior leadership (e.g. CEO) matters a lot. But it flies against the idea that CEOs are overpaid. From a quick search, it looks like his total stock comp was ~$52m which was a bargain considering his departure cost the company billions. Perhaps he would not have left if he had a higher pay, more in line with the value the market ascribes to him.
However I imagine those that are upset about CEO pay will find this unconvincing. Is there any other way to interpret this?
In short: is it this particular CEO who is that valuable? Should I pay 100m to some Joe off the street since I know they will stay put?
CEOs leave all the time. Average tenure has dropped over the years suggesting a fierce competition for senior talent
But possible it could have been over-valued before, unbeknownst to low-information external investors. After all, right now it as a PE of 450+. (Google PE is 17, Meta PE is 27, Tesla PE is 330)
The stock dropping on CEO departure had nothing to do with his personal performance, and everything to do with the information that he revealed on the way out. Why would the CEO leave a rising and successful company on the verge of innovation?
And thus tying it back to pay - people should be paid based on their output and their personal performance, not based on simply serving as a signal which any warm body can do. That said, I don't think truly amazing CEOs are overpaid, e.g. steve jobs of old.
Sure: Destructive actions have a lower bar than constructive ones.
My company doesn't pay me millions, but I were motivated to do so, I could probably cost my company millions. Similar principle here: regardless of whether the CEO is any good, simply by virtue of their position they can tank the stock by making wild moves that undermine confidence.
Imagine a generic human blob CEO with minimal VORP[0], you could swap him out with anyone else in the organisation and get the same results. But if he gets on twitter and announces, "This company is trash and I'm leaving this trash fire," he's going to cost them millions.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_over_replacement_player
I would argue that at most he's a signal about company value that people reacted to. Maybe the company lost 6 billion dollars in underlying value, but it wasn't from the CEO change itself.
this same things can happen with any employee at any company and does not bolster your argument.
a $10/hr worker flipping burgers can take actions that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. burger king foot lettuce guy probably cost the company millions.
i could cause millions of dollars in damage this afternoon (i am not paid millions).
or, in other words, looking at the 6B loss and working backwards to say that the CEO was underpaid at 52MM is nonsensical
It sounds like you just have something icky against someone being worth billions to a business. It's not a moral worth, it's just a market value as perceived by the market. In other words, a rational investor would gladly pay the CEO $1b for him not to leave and save $6b in market cap. So by definition he must be worth at least that much.
there's many explanations as to why the stock dropped the amount it did. one of the least likely was that desai's leadership is worth billions of dollars. it has nothing to do with "icky".
a rational investor would not want desai to receive a ~20x raise to stay, either. i have no idea why you think they would.
MongoDB reaffirmed both Q3 and full-year FY2027 guidance this morning.
There was no revenue warning, earnings revision, or deterioration disclosed alongside Desai’s departure.
There was no major analyst downgrade today driving the move. In fact, Citizens maintained its Buy rating and $519 target.
There's literally no other reason I can reasonably think of for the large stock drop apart from his departure. So I think you're stretching here. You just can't admit what's obvious because you likely think it's morally icky to suggest someone can be worth that much.
Also you have to consider that Zuck is probably paying him 9 figures to leave. So another person validating that he really is worth that much
you keep saying this, but you have literally no idea who i am or what my morals are. perhaps you should not speak so confidently about things you know nothing about.
i dont find anything "icky", i just disagree with you.
>Also you have to consider that Zuck is probably paying him 9 figures to leave. So another person validating that he really is worth that much
you can't make up a random number then use that made up number as "validation" for your point.
if "CEO Resignes" SELL SELL SELL
If a Burger Flipper leaves the company, it costs them exactly the amount of Burgers they fell short of making (to meet the demand) till they find the replacement burger flipper and they are exactly paid that much.
Anyone can burn/bomb a company and cause millions in damages. Doesn't mean they are worth that much
yes, that's my point.
and it absolutely extends to unexpectedly leaving. there have been plenty of times in my career that simply leaving without notice would have cost my company many times my salary.
mongodb ceo is not worth 6 billion dollars.
1: Obviously exceptions will exist for unexpected major life events, etc.
One would be "the market processing the new information that MongoDB's legal department doesn't know how to draft contracts".
Judging by your recent comments, you seem to have an axe to grind with people who are "upset about CEO pay" and I don't think it's possible to convince you to look any things from any other angle.
A CEO abruptly resigning is read by the market as a signal. Unless you think this person is ~$6.5B more valuable than any potential replacement, the full quantity of the loss cannot be ascribed to the value he provides as an employee.
Make adjustments based on ML
Actual analysis of this person's value to company not weighted as highly
So… I guess you could make an argument that that merits higher pay, but it'd be saying it's due to his blackmail power.
Two fun facts: ObjectID's are like Discord snowflakes: you can get a timestamp of when they were generated, you can also generate them client side, so you can filter items in a collection by when they were created.
The other one, that I always enjoyed is, you can take an existing ObjectId, and reinsert it into another document, you dont have to nest all your data, you can go kinda sorta relational about it.
Used it at a previous job, the first project could have just used a SQL db but because the person who made the intial one tried to do NoSQL using something in the cloud, they migrated it to MongoDB to keep it simple and consistent. The second project, well, we really discovered all the limits if you aren't Google with unlimited server memory available, like indexing as I mentioned. MongoDB pipelines are probably my favorite feature on the other hand.
and reinvent half of a SQL engine inside your backend logic, badly.
(source: for the 3rd time, I'm working on a system that uses Mongo extensively, the goal is to move to Postgres as soon as that's viable)
There seems to be many many options at attempting/trying to scale postgresql, what are your opinions of them?
Also It is my sort of opinion that you really have a good problem if postgresql isn't working you because of the problem of scale and that, evaluation of other problems become much easier but in general, its easier to start with postgresql.
(Personally, I use sqlite + golang static binaries on a 500mb/1gb ram server, so I can't comment too much on the scale part as I am focused much more on simplicity yet I admire how aside from sqlite (which is also more scalable than people think!) postgresql is almost always good enough in my opinion though I can be wrong and I usually am)
You can scale nearly anything if you know what you're doing.
Like, what kind of measurement is "largest"? Most bytes on disk?
Aphyr's original examination [0] took them to task so much so that I always think of it as the start of the "end", at least of the "web scale" obsession.
https://stripe.dev/blog/how-stripes-document-databases-suppo...
They probably should look into JEV style models as well might make sense for automatic classification of data.
He hired cred CEO to be whatsapp CEO.
Scale CEO to be AI leader
Now Mongo ceo to lead the AI enterprise sales.
Meta hires in strange ways. I’m convinced it’s more about your sales pitch going in.
Given this guy's job will be selling Muse to corporations, sounds like the best way to hire for that position.
"Chief AI officer" does not mean he leads AI research efforts, its just a title. He just takes care of hiring and product direction, both of which I'd say hes done well in. They obviously have actual researchers working on models.
I'd go as far as to say Alexandr Wang can do this better than most other leaders. Young people should be in charge of products, they generally have a better sense of what resonates with consumers, and Meta is a consumer company at the end of the day.
From a technical standpoint? Very different. From a marketing standpoint when selling to software-development clients? Same space.
Which is like, not as weird as most AI company headlines, to be honest?
Both AI and Mongo can be used for good and quality code but that's not how they get sales.
Is a CEO really worth 20% of market cap? Nuts.
Isn't the standard they get a made up advisor role for some months? Though usually that involves the ex-C-level to understand the implicit expectation of not starting immediately at the next place.
The Mongo fans claim "no really, it's good now", but I was one of the people burned so badly that I'll never touch it with a ten-foot pole again for as long as I live. I assume this toxic reputation is a big part of the problem.
[1] Examples I found: Worksport Ltd., Exicure, Inc., Rainmaker Worldwide Inc., and Acorn Energy, Inc.
In US and English law, "specific performance", so a court ordering you to do what you promised, isn't available for personal service contracts. In the US that's reinforced by the 13th Amendment's ban on involuntary servitude. So even if a CEO signed a contract promising 6 months notice and a smooth handover, the company can't make them do it, they can only enforce any financial penalties that are contracted.
Sometimes a new employer will offer compensation for any loss of stock options and/or to indemnify against any claim for breach of contract or similar.
But it could also be that Mongo have simply agreed to release him - he was only there for 10 months, and might not have turned out to be a great fit. Their share price has been more or less level in that time whilst competitors have been rising so it's not as if he had notable immediate success in boosting their appeal to enterprise customers.
In fact, they seem to have gone out of their way to minimise any mention of him which, to me, suggests that it might have been worded that way based on legal advice rather than for PR reasons.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1441816/000162828025...
As far as I can tell, there is no notice period.
You're right though that the process in practice can be more fuzzy (e.g., you weren't looking, but heard of an attractive opportunity and then applied that way).
exec on corporations is more about trust, family, and connections than anything else. previous work is mostly irrelevant.
MongoDB a product which had hard issues with keeping data, never solved a real problem.
And then Meta...
Garbage in garbage out?
-4% means nothing in context.
Just now in 2026 we start to see glimpses of AI supremacy, e.g. navier stokes.
It’s similar to the deep blue moment. It took a while before consumer hardware could beat Kasparov, but the watershed moment was deep blue.
I reckon some private demos using far more compute than is available to us peasants convinced the tech oligarchs 3 years ago to pursue their seemingly coordinated AI push.
I worked at IMVU [1] so it was extra funny.
I wonder if they’ll pair him with another acquisition like Porcupine. META has now realized how much money there is in selling a picks and shovels (as we see with Muse Spark).
Well, this could end meta :) Once I get the Cloudflare prompt I bail assuming the site does not what me to read their content.
Yes, the number of sites I go to is decreasing daily, but gopher, gemini and USENET is still around and seems to be slowly growing.