"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.
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.
100% this. The CEO at my last company squandered hundreds of millions of investor funds, and now he's the CEO at another company taking on hundreds of millions in debt.
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.
I am sure this poignantly describes some CEOs, but my guess is this is probably empirically false on average.
(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.)
Feels like survivorship bias to me. CEO's fail up, except those that fail down, and the latter group aren't CEO's anymore, so they're less likely to show up in a sample.
It might be, but ... there are a lot of us who've seen this happen time and time again.
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 we 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.
I have been in a CEO replacement at my previous job. The owners were not happy with how things were going and replaced him. It was a decision only two or three people on the board participated in, even most of the board had no idea. In public, however, the only information that came out was that the CEO decided that his mission had been accomplished and it was time to look for new opportunities. These people never publicly tell the truth, what you hear on the news is what they want you to hear. The truth is almost certainly something completely different.
>He's never going to be hired as CEO by anybody for the rest of his career.
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.
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.
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.
> He's never going to be hired as CEO by anybody for the rest of his career.
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.
> 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!)
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).
He is 60 years old per wikipedia, this is likely his last rodeo. He has held board positions at Datadog, Athena Health, App Dynamics and other places in addition to his job at Mongo per LinkedIn. He was also at Mongo for 11 years.
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.
I just don’t understand the drive of these people to keep seeking further power and wealth when they already are richer than most people could ever imagine. Just go enjoy your life.
I don’t think these people can sit around and enjoy nature. Nobody rewards you for enjoying nature. All their life they have learned to climb the social ladder and have become good at it, they keep getting rewarded and praised for it, so that’s what they do and keep doing.
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.
Or he told the board he’s resigning and they told him it’s immediate. It’s unlikely he resigned with zero notice so he could go the Meta the very next day.
> 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.
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.
Workers are so much more militant and punitive than executives. It's not other executives that will try and hurt his career because he made a decision and went with it. It will be the worker bees that will attempt to hurt him 5 years down the road -- without even knowing the full story.
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.
There’s some weirdness with the UFC’s struggle at the time.
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.
That was part of it, back in the early 2000s when people considered MMA "human cockfighting" (but bizarrely, boxing was OK) Trump let the events go on at his venues, however Dana is a pretty formidable businessman regardless of the connection to Trump.
No one has actually said that Dana White is a bad business man. It's just very difficult to believe that's the reason he was appointed to the board of a social media company on the same day that Donald Trump was inaugurated. If he was so consequential why wasn't he named to the board on Jan 7th 2021? I think we know why.
> AI makes it much less painful to move off of legacy and/or overpriced software.
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.
DynamoDB is really a fantastic product for the 99% percentile of workloads that need a particular kind of super low latency read operation at large scale.
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.
If your access patterns are fixed and not going to change, if your schema is pretty much solidified, then yes, I don't doubt that at all. But few things I've worked on have had such stable access patterns or schemas that they would benefit.
I enjoyed solving the challenges around using DynamoDB way more than I enjoyed using it on an ongoing basis.
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...
> your database is probably the hardest part of your application to migrate off of
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.
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.
This is mostly an artifact of their bonkers hyperscaler build up. The growth in their RDBMS has got to be 0 or negative, but existing customers are locked in tight imo.
Mongo’s biggest sell was it increases developer productivity so backlogs were burned down faster and managers all benefited.
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.
I worked there from around a year before the IPO until around three and a half years after. The IPO price was around $24 if I remember correctly, but it's been floating in the $300-450 range for a while now. I have no clue what the future holds for it, but the IPO clearly did what it was intended to do.
i think infra software will be just fine. ai isnt going to implement a saas-database. and why would anybody migrate of mongodb, just to put their business data elsewhere?
it's end user software that's absolutely getting crushed.
I recently took my app off of Mongo Atlas because I was tired of dealing with charges that caught me off guard. I was tired of feeling like I was getting nickel and dimed over every little thing.
I ended up migrating everything to DigitalOcean's managed database for 1/3 the price. Less headache, better performance, and less panic and anger.
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."
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?
> However I imagine those that are upset about CEO pay will find this unconvincing. Is there any other way to interpret this?
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.
>it looks like his total stock comp was ~$52m which was a bargain considering his departure cost the company billions.
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).
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.
>It sounds like you just have something icky against someone being worth billions to a business.
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
His departure causing a drop does not mean he was worth that drop. Investors think his departure signals internal issues and are trading based off that.
>You just can't admit what's obvious because you likely think it's morally icky to suggest someone can be 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.
Er, I'm not sure what exactly you're getting at, but the stop market drop was not because of his value-add to the company, it was because of the signal it sends by the CEO quitting.
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.
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.
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.
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?
30m unvested at what price? If you think it’s going to 2x, then it’s worth 60m. Maybe zuck paid an unrealistic multiple - 20x, but out side of that still a bearish signal
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.
> However I imagine those that are upset about CEO pay will find this unconvincing. Is there any other way to interpret this?
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.
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.
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.
"Effective immediately" is harsh even though perfectly legal. Does this mean nobody knew and it was a "Surprise!!!"? Extremely callous if that's the case, there is got to be more to the story.
It looks like that phrase was removed from the article, but that is standard for C-level jobs. When you resign, you're shown the door immediately. The same thing happened with Marissa Mayer when she left Google during a phone call. Call was ended and her accesses terminated. Can't risk any additional trade secrets leaving.
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.
Yeah, I wouldnt recommend doing MongoDB for EVERYTHING, but when you're using it for very specific things, you dont have to throw away everything you're already familiar with is all I was saying.
Please elaborate more instead of just "trust me" it would be nice to understand where this comes from. I'm sure back some years people would have said the same about MySQL, yet YouTube used the heck out of MySQL, they made an entire Go based runtime on top of it to scale MySQL.
You can scale nearly anything if you know what you're doing.
Curious to know what does actually scale according to your opinion (if not postgres) and what is the scale that we are talking about when mentioning some of the largest databases ever built (I hope you can talk more about it!)
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)
People do hate on it but MySQL is what I would reach for when needing tons of scale. Its correctness issues about type conversions are super well documented at this point and Innodb is really good at ingesting tons of data. There's also a lot of talent you can hire if you need exotic setup.
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.
MongoDB is a natural choice if you are working with denormalized deeply hierarchical data structure like JSON. It is also natural to JavaScript devs since the shell itself is JavaScript. This makes it super effective on modern web framework although I recently switched to Drizzle
MongoDB is a great db for agentic workloads to be honest. Thats probably why they are still seeing growth. They also have some very good embedding models. They should really make those available over their own API though.
They probably should look into JEV style models as well might make sense for automatic classification of data.
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.
MongoDB and its hype burned many, many people back in the day. It's hard to overstate how much it used to suck ass. At one point MongoDB client libraries would report that writes succeeded even if your box had no internet connection, that's how bad it was.
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.
And I'm pretty sure this "29-30 year old who was merely acquihired" probably knows more than these veteran/boomer execs about how to execute a consumer AI product strategy.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'd never heard of this. It turns out it is very rare for publicly traded companies [1]. In these cases, I would guess it comes down to contract terms. But again, it's not as though the law would compel an individual to continue working at a company. It would just come down to what the contracts say, and, potentially, how the courts interpret those contracts in the event of a lawsuit.
[1] Examples I found: Worksport Ltd., Exicure, Inc., Rainmaker Worldwide Inc., and Acorn Energy, Inc.
Yes, CEOs pay taxes on income. The only way around that is to structure the compensation so it's not income, and the IRS probably has tried to prevent that as much as possible. I'm not a tax or HR expert but I'd think unrealized gains on stock compensation might not be. Deferred compensation might not be, until it's actually paid.
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.
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).
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).
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
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.
"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.
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.
100% this. The CEO at my last company squandered hundreds of millions of investor funds, and now he's the CEO at another company taking on hundreds of millions in debt.
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.
Lol! Wat? Got more details?(On cerebras)
https://www.nhbr.com/ex-riverstone-execs-face-criminal-charg...
https://www.sec.gov/enforcement-litigation/litigation-releas...
Thanks! Always amazing that people don't know this stuff. Oh and the current CFO of Cerebras was the CFO of Bird, another giant failure.
I am sure this poignantly describes some CEOs, but my guess is this is probably empirically false on average.
(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.)
Feels like survivorship bias to me. CEO's fail up, except those that fail down, and the latter group aren't CEO's anymore, so they're less likely to show up in a sample.
It might be, but ... there are a lot of us who've seen this happen time and time again.
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 we 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.
I have been in a CEO replacement at my previous job. The owners were not happy with how things were going and replaced him. It was a decision only two or three people on the board participated in, even most of the board had no idea. In public, however, the only information that came out was that the CEO decided that his mission had been accomplished and it was time to look for new opportunities. These people never publicly tell the truth, what you hear on the news is what they want you to hear. The truth is almost certainly something completely different.
>He's never going to be hired as CEO by anybody for the rest of his career.
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.
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"
>He's never going to be hired as CEO by anybody for the rest of his career
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.
> He's never going to be hired as CEO by anybody for the rest of his career.
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.
> 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!)
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).
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.
He is 60 years old per wikipedia, this is likely his last rodeo. He has held board positions at Datadog, Athena Health, App Dynamics and other places in addition to his job at Mongo per LinkedIn. He was also at Mongo for 11 years.
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.
Isn't it also a possibility that he gave notice and it wasn't announced to the world until his last day?
>he does and is willing to forfeit any benefit from it like share options
His stocks/options vested/exercised last Friday. He's not forfeiting anything.
Where do you see that information?
I just don’t understand the drive of these people to keep seeking further power and wealth when they already are richer than most people could ever imagine. Just go enjoy your life.
I don’t think these people can sit around and enjoy nature. Nobody rewards you for enjoying nature. All their life they have learned to climb the social ladder and have become good at it, they keep getting rewarded and praised for it, so that’s what they do and keep doing.
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.
high functioning sociopaths are still sociopaths. The domination and power are the point, not just something they are doing to make some cash.
> He's never going to be hired as CEO by anybody for the rest of his career.
Maybe he had enough.
Or he told the board he’s resigning and they told him it’s immediate. It’s unlikely he resigned with zero notice so he could go the Meta the very next day.
> 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.
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.
The third option could surely be he was fired ? Although I would imagine MongoDB would have organised someone already to take over.
The previous CEO immediately returned as interim CEO, so they sort of did have someone ready.
the share price dropping was due to him leaving, not the cause of him leaving (but this is very bearish for mongo)
> He's never going to be hired as CEO by anybody for the rest of his career.
You must be new to the corporate world or incredibly naive.
People get fired effective immediately.
Maybe this is a silly assumption, but, he reached the title, he’s got the ladder-climbing experience to understand his choice.
He is likely being promised a chance at succession to CEO.
no chance, will definitely be Mosseri, Mark is not handing the reigns to an enterprise guy
Agreed an enterprise guy is not the next CEO but I doubt Zuck has any near term succession plan.
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.
he got fired
If he makes Meta a shit ton of money then nobody will care and he’ll easily find more jobs.
or "resigned to spend more time with the family" aka was fired
He don't need to be CEO with the money he already have.
No way. CEOs with significant experience are not easy to find so he’s going to do just fine.
Not sure why he'd want to take the pay cut with being a CEO
> 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!)
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.
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.
You sound frustrated. He'll be fine.
Workers are so much more militant and punitive than executives. It's not other executives that will try and hurt his career because he made a decision and went with it. It will be the worker bees that will attempt to hurt him 5 years down the road -- without even knowing the full story.
There are very practical reasons to not hire someone who abruptly dips after less than a year on the job that have nothing to do with being punitive.
Yes, those poor executives.
The execs are fine. The barrel crabs certainly are getting active though. It's pure, unadulterated envy. Nothing more.
its a small club, and you ain't in it friend. No matter how many boots you lick.
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-...
A few days ago I learned Dana White (UFC's CEO) is on meta's board of directors, nothing will surprise me now.
Dana White turned a failing company into billions of dollars. Really, I think you are underestimating his ability.
There’s some weirdness with the UFC’s struggle at the time.
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.
I'm not sure that this was the deciding factor
I’m pretty sure it’s more about his close connection to Trump
That was part of it, back in the early 2000s when people considered MMA "human cockfighting" (but bizarrely, boxing was OK) Trump let the events go on at his venues, however Dana is a pretty formidable businessman regardless of the connection to Trump.
No one has actually said that Dana White is a bad business man. It's just very difficult to believe that's the reason he was appointed to the board of a social media company on the same day that Donald Trump was inaugurated. If he was so consequential why wasn't he named to the board on Jan 7th 2021? I think we know why.
Zuck is front row at a lot of fights and sometimes holds towels etc for fighters during walkons. Meta Threads is the official social media sponsor.
It is a scummy company run by scumbags, of course he would be.
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.
> AI makes it much less painful to move off of legacy and/or overpriced software.
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.
DynamoDB is very expensive.
DocumentDB more or less is MongoDB though
DynamoDB is really a fantastic product for the 99% percentile of workloads that need a particular kind of super low latency read operation at large scale.
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.
If your access patterns are fixed and not going to change, if your schema is pretty much solidified, then yes, I don't doubt that at all. But few things I've worked on have had such stable access patterns or schemas that they would benefit.
I enjoyed solving the challenges around using DynamoDB way more than I enjoyed using it on an ongoing basis.
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...
> your database is probably the hardest part of your application to migrate off of
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.
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.
> We're early on in the LLM era, so I have hope that it can crush Oracle's business model.
They're a hypercloud provider now. It may be awhile.
Oracle seems to be doing their best to expedite their own crushing. I wish them success.
> Oracle seems to be doing their best to expedite their own crushing.
Ehhhhhh maybe https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/ORCL
As much as I'd like to believe this, they have their ways of making money.
don't look at the oracle stock price over the last year though
This is mostly an artifact of their bonkers hyperscaler build up. The growth in their RDBMS has got to be 0 or negative, but existing customers are locked in tight imo.
$322 to $130. ouch
Don’t look at oracle’s debts
Mongo’s biggest sell was it increases developer productivity so backlogs were burned down faster and managers all benefited.
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.
I worked there from around a year before the IPO until around three and a half years after. The IPO price was around $24 if I remember correctly, but it's been floating in the $300-450 range for a while now. I have no clue what the future holds for it, but the IPO clearly did what it was intended to do.
At this point I'd rather use a Claude-written database system than use MongoDB at any price.
MongoDB is the only open-source database that supports multi-master high-availability out of the box.
MongoDB has been proprietary since 2018.
Citus on Postgres used to have similar feature; Dead after Microsoft acquisition
Isn't this the default in Cassandra?
Uh, CockroachDB?
They changed licensing.
i think infra software will be just fine. ai isnt going to implement a saas-database. and why would anybody migrate of mongodb, just to put their business data elsewhere?
it's end user software that's absolutely getting crushed.
I recently took my app off of Mongo Atlas because I was tired of dealing with charges that caught me off guard. I was tired of feeling like I was getting nickel and dimed over every little thing.
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.
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?
P/E ratio 472.47
I had to google to see if this is correct. Completely absurd. At that rate MongoDB better pull out a cure for cancer out of their DB
Might have interpreted it as captain heading for lifeboat.
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.
Git can clone mongodb in far less than that. I think you might be misunderstanding where the revenue comes from.
It doesn't even need a couple days. I got Opus 5.5 to do it in like three or four hours, just out of curiosity.
crazy we're cheering on theft.
For folks who don’t know, CJ was the president of product and technology at Cloudflare for 6 months and CJ left them and joined MongoDB.
Cloudflare didn’t join MongoDB, did they?
My bad on the phrasing. CJ joined MongoDB. The modern gender pronouns are confusing.
Ah, I miss the days of NoSQL vs. SQL debates.
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.
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?
> However I imagine those that are upset about CEO pay will find this unconvincing. Is there any other way to interpret this?
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.
>it looks like his total stock comp was ~$52m which was a bargain considering his departure cost the company billions.
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).
Somehow missed this until now. Interesting read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burger_King_foot_lettuce
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.
>It sounds like you just have something icky against someone being worth billions to a business.
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
His departure causing a drop does not mean he was worth that drop. Investors think his departure signals internal issues and are trading based off that.
>You just can't admit what's obvious because you likely think it's morally icky to suggest someone can be 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.
Dude if you bought this morning on the news you would have made well over 10% back today. This smells more of a massive algorithmic sell off
if "CEO Resignes" SELL SELL SELL
Er, I'm not sure what exactly you're getting at, but the stop market drop was not because of his value-add to the company, it was because of the signal it sends by the CEO quitting.
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.
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.
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.
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
30m unvested at what price? If you think it’s going to 2x, then it’s worth 60m. Maybe zuck paid an unrealistic multiple - 20x, but out side of that still a bearish signal
Trading algorithms at big shops read headline "CEO of company leaves for greener AI pastures"
Make adjustments based on ML
Actual analysis of this person's value to company not weighted as highly
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
> However I imagine those that are upset about CEO pay will find this unconvincing. Is there any other way to interpret this?
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.
>Is there any other way to interpret this?
One would be "the market processing the new information that MongoDB's legal department doesn't know how to draft contracts".
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?
> Is there any other way to interpret this?
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
"Effective immediately" is harsh even though perfectly legal. Does this mean nobody knew and it was a "Surprise!!!"? Extremely callous if that's the case, there is got to be more to the story.
Is a CEO really worth 20% of market cap? Nuts.
It looks like that phrase was removed from the article, but that is standard for C-level jobs. When you resign, you're shown the door immediately. The same thing happened with Marissa Mayer when she left Google during a phone call. Call was ended and her accesses terminated. Can't risk any additional trade secrets leaving.
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.
> you can go kinda sorta relational about it.
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)
Yeah, I wouldnt recommend doing MongoDB for EVERYTHING, but when you're using it for very specific things, you dont have to throw away everything you're already familiar with is all I was saying.
Postgres does not scale. I have extensive experience in some of the largest databases ever built, postgres doesn't even come close.
It's not that it does not scale but it does not scale out of the box.
Please elaborate more instead of just "trust me" it would be nice to understand where this comes from. I'm sure back some years people would have said the same about MySQL, yet YouTube used the heck out of MySQL, they made an entire Go based runtime on top of it to scale MySQL.
You can scale nearly anything if you know what you're doing.
there are mountains of evidence that postgres does indeed scale if thoughfully designed.
Migrate to yugabyte? It's a multi-raft fork of postgres.
Curious to know what does actually scale according to your opinion (if not postgres) and what is the scale that we are talking about when mentioning some of the largest databases ever built (I hope you can talk more about it!)
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)
People do hate on it but MySQL is what I would reach for when needing tons of scale. Its correctness issues about type conversions are super well documented at this point and Innodb is really good at ingesting tons of data. There's also a lot of talent you can hire if you need exotic setup.
It would be nice if you could substantiate this a bit.
Like, what kind of measurement is "largest"? Most bytes on disk?
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
IIRC (from my time there) Stripe still uses MongoDB for it's main datastore.
https://stripe.dev/blog/how-stripes-document-databases-suppo...
MongoDB has been a good database for years.
MongoDB is a natural choice if you are working with denormalized deeply hierarchical data structure like JSON. It is also natural to JavaScript devs since the shell itself is JavaScript. This makes it super effective on modern web framework although I recently switched to Drizzle
MongoDB is a great db for agentic workloads to be honest. Thats probably why they are still seeing growth. They also have some very good embedding models. They should really make those available over their own API though.
They probably should look into JEV style models as well might make sense for automatic classification of data.
poor souls stuck maintaining brownfield webshit developed during the height of mongo's marketing campaign 10 years ago.
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.
MongoDB and its hype burned many, many people back in the day. It's hard to overstate how much it used to suck ass. At one point MongoDB client libraries would report that writes succeeded even if your box had no internet connection, that's how bad it was.
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.
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).
MongoDB is aggressively hiring in Dublin, though.
So turns out nosql is no place for "structured" role like ceo.
Interesting choice, his prior experience doesn't seem AI related yet he's going to lead an AI strategy at Meta?
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.
> 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.
And I'm pretty sure this "29-30 year old who was merely acquihired" probably knows more than these veteran/boomer execs about how to execute a consumer AI product strategy.
"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.
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.
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.
At least it’ll be Webscale.
People still use MongoDB?
Meta stock down 4% on the news...
Right, and lets ignore the fact that Meta rocketed up 50% in a month, and the rest of the market is also down ~1% because of crude going up.
-4% means nothing in context.
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?
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.
We don't have to guess, his offer letter is public record:
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1441816/000162828025...
As far as I can tell, there is no notice period.
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.
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.
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.
I have never heard of this. Do you mind sharing some examples?
I'd never heard of this. It turns out it is very rare for publicly traded companies [1]. In these cases, I would guess it comes down to contract terms. But again, it's not as though the law would compel an individual to continue working at a company. It would just come down to what the contracts say, and, potentially, how the courts interpret those contracts in the event of a lawsuit.
[1] Examples I found: Worksport Ltd., Exicure, Inc., Rainmaker Worldwide Inc., and Acorn Energy, Inc.
it simply works, that's how you optimise tax on million+ sums, do you think ceo-s pay taxes on par with regular workers?
Yes, CEOs pay taxes on income. The only way around that is to structure the compensation so it's not income, and the IRS probably has tried to prevent that as much as possible. I'm not a tax or HR expert but I'd think unrealized gains on stock compensation might not be. Deferred compensation might not be, until it's actually paid.
A contractor CEO? I know it is extremely common for directors to be contractors for tax reasons.
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.
This is insane
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).
I've always wanted model sharding.
He doesn't believe in Mongodb anymore. That is how I read it.
lol
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
needs more sharding.
Web scale is old hat. We're now on planet scale.
thats an excellent question
Finally we'll get authentic webscale AI.
in case anyone who doesn't get the reference: https://youtu.be/b2F-DItXtZs?si=gxrqufTAy-YQ88wW
Does Muse support sharding?
Yes but only when using /dev/null for backing the shard storage layer
thought it was million monkeys consistency, so `/dev/urandom`
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).
>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.
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.
Facebook going to be selling Muse into your company as your AI coworker