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Interesting choice, his prior experience doesn't seem AI related yet he's going to lead an AI strategy at Meta?
At least it’ll be Webscale.
Meta’s chief AI officer is a 29-30 year old who was acquihired as part of his data labelling company. He’s not a model developer.
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.
MongoDB is the textbook success of "Zero friction and slick marketing beats good engineering discipline" that is the AI froth right now.
From a technical standpoint? Very different. From a marketing standpoint when selling to software-development clients? Same space.
Yeah, glancing at headlines this is basically "MongoDB is a company with a lot of experience selling to enterprise clients (and by extension the CEO knows how to run such a company), Meta wants to sell enterprise clients their AI offerings".
Which is like, not as weird as most AI company headlines, to be honest?
Not just that, they're also kinda similar value proposition, in that it's "holy crap look how fast you can develop code if you just ignore all of the longer-term risks you're creating".
Both AI and Mongo can be used for good and quality code but that's not how they get sales.
I've run out of fingers for the amount of people in my network that are now leading/head of AI xyz at their employers yet have little to no understanding of AI beyond asking ChatGPT simple questions.
Facebook going to be selling Muse into your company as your AI coworker
Finally we'll get authentic webscale AI.
Does Muse support sharding?
Yes but only when using /dev/null for backing the shard storage layer
in case anyone who doesn't get the reference: https://youtu.be/b2F-DItXtZs?si=gxrqufTAy-YQ88wW
I've always wanted model sharding.
As a non-joke question - I am surprised a CEO can do this. Wouldn't there be contract terms about notice period, orderly transition etc?
Likely anything that goes beyond missing out on compensation (ex: unvested RSUs) or even clawing back some comp would violate labor laws. CEOs are still employees, and legislation regulating employer-employee relations trumps all contracts.
There are many many instances where the CEO is not an employee, but they operate via their own legal entity. To be honest I don't know how this works at larger companies.
A contractor CEO? I know it is extremely common for directors to be contractors for tax reasons.
it simply works, that's how you optimise tax on million+ sums, do you think ceo-s pay taxes on par with regular workers?
I have never heard of this. Do you mind sharing some examples?
A lot of these labor laws get less protective for higher-ranked people in a company, whether it be due to thresholds based on compensation or explicit carve-outs for executives/board members. It varies a lot from place to place.
In the US, there is only one labor law that is different for execs and high paid employees and that is overtime rules. Fiduciary duty does govern how a director or officer behaves while in the role, loyalty, no self-dealing, no stealing corporate opportunities etc. It doesn't oblige them to stay or dictate how they must leave.
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.
Yeah, notice periods are typical at that level even in the USA where they're not often used for the rank and file. A star candidate may have had sufficient leverage to negotiate them away, but I don't expect that to have been the case here.
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.
Anytime someone is at a company for less than a year and "departs," rightly or wrongly I assume there was some lack of meeting of the minds. I've known professional friends in that position but never asked about details.
The only thing that might give me pause is that there's no conciliatory language coming from Mongodb to indicate that it was a negotiated exit, not even a bland "by mutual agreement".
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.
I wonder if people like this actually try to get into the company, or if they just got a very attractive offer instead?
So when you say "try", it's not like he was leetcoding on the side or anything. The way roles work at this level is a combination of network, exec recruiters, and eventually you talk comp. I hate to stereotype, but I'm going to assume in this case that there is someone senior at Meta that he is strongly connected to who referred him in. And by "referred him in" I don't mean submitted his name to some recruiter, I mean informing him the role even existed and making sure he was on the short list of consideration. Often this person is even the hiring manager, these are not roles you just let the recruiting pipeline fill with any person who fits the screening profile.
By "try", I mean there's a difference between applying and getting accepted, and getting an offer out of the blue. They've sent out some unsolicited offers before, and poached some executives that way, so that's why I ask.
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).
People still use MongoDB?
MongoDB is not a bad database, it is not my first immediate choice for everything, but it is very easy to get into, super easy to prototype with. My biggest pet peeve is how it handled indexes, shoves it all into memory. That and how people use it sometimes bewilders me.
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)
Postgres does not scale. I have extensive experience in some of the largest databases ever built, postgres doesn't even come close.
MongoDB's biggest weakness was its default settings, which made it insecure and very vulnerable to data consistency failures. An absolute nightmare for PR. It's not perfect, but it's comparable to other NoSQL databases now.
Their biggest weakness was that their marketing promised way, way more than they could deliver.
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.
[0] https://aphyr.com/posts/284-jepsen-mongodb
poor souls stuck maintaining brownfield webshit developed during the height of mongo's marketing campaign 10 years ago.
MongoDB has been a good database for years.
IIRC (from my time there) Stripe still uses MongoDB for it's main datastore.
https://stripe.dev/blog/how-stripes-document-databases-suppo...
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.
I mean, Mongo is to be a $600 dollar stock imho. You see, the amount logs AI creates or intermediary text storage it creates is just stunning. Nice entry for leaps. Plus, Mongo swiftly added their vector db too. It’s a obvious play.
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).
So turns out nosql is no place for "structured" role like ceo.
"effective immediately" means either... he doesn't have a contract with a notice period, or he does and is willing to forfeit any benefit from it like share options, etc.
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.
He's never going to be hired as CEO by anybody for the rest of his career.
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.
The halo effect of being in the orbit of a product on the way up (as Muse appears to be) can offset almost any wrong. If Muse succeeds, he could get a CEO job anywhere he likes.
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.
Not sure why he'd want to take the pay cut with being a CEO
or "resigned to spend more time with the family" aka was fired
He is likely being promised a chance at succession to CEO.
CEOs manage to fail upwards their entire career, I don't suspect this will be any different. Just some "nerds on a forum" who got annoyed with his personal decisions.
Yeah there’s a recruiting firm that literally hires ex-CEOs, puts them on the bench, then searches for their next “assignment”. They pay these people to golf until they place them.
https://www.heidrick.com/
It's common for VCs to do the same as "entrepreneur in residence"
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.
You sound frustrated. He'll be fine.
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.
Oh man, he'll probably just have to eke out a living on $300m or something to last him the rest of his life. It will be tough.
Isn't MongoDB relatively stable? I can't think of why it would need any particular CEO, and an executive moving to a company that burns money for fun doesn't say much about their previous job. So why the huge stock drop?
Probably just because it reminded everybody that MongoDB exists as a corporate entity and everybody is re-evaluating investment in "Open Core" products where the paid value-add is consultancy because learning to us the product is so difficult, since LLMs for all their faults are good at "how do I use this hard-to-learn tool?"
"Hey the MongoDB guy left, is MongoDB okay?.... wait, no, of course it isn't. It's in that space that is completely screwed."
Stock prices have nothing to do with business performance anymore
Also claude can probably knock out a mongodb clone in a couple of days.
CEO leaves, stock market value drops ~$6.5B
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?
ole Zuck just buying what he wants - for any price, cause that is what the richest in the world can do? Also using the market cap / paper valuation isn't aligned with 'actual value' imo.
How much closer can you get to “actual value” than a long standing publicly trades business with deep liquidity?
How much of the drop do you think is due to the bearish nature of ceo departure? One would have to assume that if the company was going to go gangbusters the ceo would stay.
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?
Zuck probably outbid him. He walked away from $30m unvested. If they paid him more, he likely would have stayed and the stock wouldn't drop $6b
CEOs leave all the time. Average tenure has dropped over the years suggesting a fierce competition for senior talent
Just because the market reacts to a piece of information to the tune of 6B, doesn't mean the guy is providing 6b of value. It's just a piece of information and the market reacts to what it may or may not mean. Any other goober with an MBA in that role who quits with no notice may induce the same market reaction, even if they were a shit ceo.
If you think his departure won't impact the company, it looks like you're smarter than other investors and you get to buy MongoDB at a 25% discount. Also there's a job opening at the top spot, although you may be better suited as an investor with this kind of insight.
departure could also mean, private information about MongoDB problems that is not public, so I would not invest in MongoDB
You made the assumption that it was fairly valued before and the loss was a "true" loss.
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).
I don't think the CEO sabotaged anything or created legal liability causing the $6b drop. I think you're stretching here.
the point is that the amount of money you make is not really tied to the amount of many you can cause the company to lose (on purpose, by accident, by departure, etc.).
or, in other words, looking at the 6B loss and working backwards to say that the CEO was underpaid at 52MM is nonsensical
I think it's a pretty clear counterfactual. Someone works there company is worth X. If he doesn't work there, what would the company be worth? Note that the role itself doesn't go away, it will get replaced, but the difference in market value is his worth to the company compared to a median CEO.
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.
This was sudden very large drop, coincided exactly with announcement CEO would be leaving.
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
Another reading is this: CEOs don't quit without notice [1], it's bad form and bad for both the company and for the reputation of the person leaving. Regardless of the value he as an individual was providing it speaks to substantial disfunction in the overall leadership of the company and a major lack of confidence from the person who presumably had the best idea of how the company was doing on the whole. The market suddenly learning those things resulted in a substantial market correction. It doesn't really matter whether he was a particularly good or bad CEO; the situation would indicate something is majorly wrong in either case.
1: Obviously exceptions will exist for unexpected major life events, etc.
Ah, I miss the days of NoSQL vs. SQL debates.
But is MongoDB's stock web scale?
Because there might now be people on this site literally born after that fad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs
I wish he'd make more videos - they were really funny
https://www.youtube.com/@gar1t/videos
Speaking of xtranormal, around the same time there was a great treatment of the lean startup (you have to iterate!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3J9KhpgYVB0
I worked at IMVU [1] so it was extra funny.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMVU
thats an excellent question
Web scale is old hat. We're now on planet scale.
I still think regular people, and markets, have not caught onto the implications of superintelligence. Its happening, and the tech oligarchs have seen it behind closed doors
I think so too.
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.
Yeah, it's definitely this and not that Meta probably offered him a salary package that ensures generational wealth measured in centuries. Definitely the science fiction scenario, that is totally the realistic one and not a greedy wealthy CEO doing something that enables their greed.
Anecdotally, I've seen a surprising number MongoDB employees applying to our job listings for the last 6-9 months (enough to feel like a trend).
TIL MongoDB is a publicly traded company.
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.
Oracle is still making a very, very healthy amount of money on legacy db products. Momentum is a very powerful thing.
We're early on in the LLM era, so I have hope that it can crush Oracle's business model. That said, your database is probably the hardest part of your application to migrate off of...
They're a hypercloud provider now. It may be awhile.
I was thinking maybe investigations and prison time should crush Oracle's business model.
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.
At this point I'd rather use a Claude-written database system than use MongoDB at any price.
I think its Zuck's new hiring strat,
He hired cred CEO to be whatsapp CEO.
Scale CEO to be AI leader
Now Mongo ceo to lead the AI enterprise sales.
This is data point #2 in his executive career, it's now a trend.
https://www.crn.com/news/channel-news/2024/servicenow-presid...
Even CEOs gotta job hop to beat that 23% inflation!! (Y/y airline prices).
You missed the point. The reason behind the job hops is worth looking at closely. In retrospect, his time at MDB appears to launder a reputation that was shattered. Ending up at meta, therefore, seems to suit him well.
data point #3 if you include his stint at Symantec 10+ years ago.
Wow, TIL servicenow was his second run-in with the US government. I believe this is what you were referring to:
https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/united-states-intervenes-...
I was surprised Facebook Workplace lasted as long as it did. But, hey, it took Google a few tries to get GCP (anyone remember the Search Appliance?) to a solid place so I wouldn't count Meta out of being able to make an enterprise splash just yet.
MongoDB does seem to be in a rough spot. Their pitch is an easier to get started with database, which longer term gives you problems and higher costs. And since we all have AI agents, why would you select that for any use case?
Not to mention it is a painful database to work with... Doc DBs were simple 15+ years ago, but turns out most data is relational and it's just simpler to use postgres.