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MongoDB CEO resigns "effective immediately" to join Meta, stock drops 20%

48 pointsby 56m agoreuters.com
31 comments
50m agoHN ↗

Interesting choice, his prior experience doesn't seem AI related yet he's going to lead an AI strategy at Meta?

32m agoHN ↗

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.

36m agoHN ↗

Facebook going to be selling Muse into your company as your AI coworker

29m agoHN ↗

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?

26m agoHN ↗

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.

21m agoHN ↗

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.

16m agoHN ↗

A contractor CEO? I know it is extremely common for directors to be contractors for tax reasons.

11m agoHN ↗

it simply works, that's how you optimise tax on million+ sums, do you think ceo-s pay taxes on par with regular workers?

15m agoHN ↗

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.

28m agoHN ↗

I wonder if people like this actually try to get into the company, or if they just got a very attractive offer instead?

19m agoHN ↗

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.

10m agoHN ↗

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.

8m agoHN ↗

poor souls stuck maintaining brownfield webshit developed during the height of mongo's marketing campaign 10 years ago.

14m agoHN ↗

Desai led product and engineering at Cloudflare

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.

14m agoHN ↗

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).

13m agoHN ↗

So turns out nosql is no place for "structured" role like ceo.

11m agoHN ↗

"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.

7m agoHN ↗

He's never going to be hired as CEO by anybody for the rest of his career.

Maybe he had enough.

9m agoHN ↗

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?

4m agoHN ↗

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."

8m agoHN ↗

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?

7m agoHN ↗

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.

6m agoHN ↗

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?

7m agoHN ↗

Ah, I miss the days of NoSQL vs. SQL debates.