MongoDB CEO resigns to join Meta

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.

Maybe he had enough.

I'd eat my shorts if this was true. But even then he is likely set for life with his wealth, pre Meta offer.

I wish I had your belief in sensible logic like that.

But I suspect you're wrong, even though you shouldn't be.

"Hey the MongoDB guy left, is MongoDB okay?.... wait, no, of course it isn't. It's in that space that is completely screwed."

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.

https://stripe.dev/blog/how-stripes-document-databases-suppo...

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.

The stock dropped because it’s not a good sign when a company’s CEO abruptly leaves to be a not-CEO at another company. Doing it without a transition period is a wild signal.

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).

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.

1: Obviously exceptions will exist for unexpected major life events, etc.

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?

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.

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

Meta hires in strange ways. I’m convinced it’s more about your sales pitch going in.

From a technical standpoint? Very different. From a marketing standpoint when selling to software-development clients? Same space.

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.

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.