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#ceo#mongodb#company#going#meta#more#don#probably#years#might
Discussion (175 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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.
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'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.)
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.
https://www.heidrick.com/
From looking at the historical prices, it was down from $450 to $410 from a month ago, but still quite a bit from $235 six months ago, which is not anything close to what I'd consider "collapsed". Of course, he might have expected to continue going down, but that's going to be hard to measure in the short term given that announcements like this tend to affect the price directly in the short term (so far down to $338 today, close to double the loss of the entire previous month, although it seems far too soon to draw any conclusions).
Not that I think I'm saying anything that has any sort of bias, but it's probably reasonable in case anyone happens to read this and be suspicious: I did work at MongoDB for around five years (but haven't worked there for nearly as long), and from that stint I did have a sizable amount of shares, although as of last year I no longer hold any (for reasons completely unrelated to any personal opinions of the company; I had procrastinated way too much on making any sort of decision about how much to hold onto and for how long, so when my wife and I were buying a house, I decided it was time to just liquidate it and put it towards that instead).
I'd eat my shorts if this was true. But even then he is likely set for life with his wealth, pre Meta offer.
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 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.
His stocks/options vested/exercised last Friday. He's not forfeiting anything.
Maybe he had enough.
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.
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.
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.
I wish I had your belief in sensible logic like that.
But I suspect you're wrong, even though you shouldn't be.
https://www.crn.com/news/channel-news/2024/servicenow-presid...
https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/united-states-intervenes-...
I can't imagine the future is bright for MongoDB as AI makes it much less painful to move off of legacy and/or overpriced software.
Agreed. While DynamoDB != MongoDB, they are similar. I built a product on DynamoDB (Single-table-design) and while it was cool to find a way to make relational data work in DynamoDB, it was always a chore. New feature development was a huge PITA as was changing schema in any way. Sure, I might have been "holding it wrong" but after a weekend with Claude I migrated everything to Postgres and have been incredibly happy with that change something like 4-6 months later.
The simplicity of using it and the lack of operations is really why most people tend to reach for it over a relational option, although over the years the burden of managing an RDMS has consistently gone down.
I enjoyed solving the challenges around using DynamoDB way more than I enjoyed using it on an ongoing basis.
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.
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.
They're a hypercloud provider now. It may be awhile.
it's end user software that's absolutely getting crushed.
"Hey the MongoDB guy left, is MongoDB okay?.... wait, no, of course it isn't. It's in that space that is completely screwed."
Is a CEO really worth 20% of market cap? Nuts.
Two fun facts: ObjectID's are like Discord snowflakes: you can get a timestamp of when they were generated, you can also generate them client side, so you can filter items in a collection by when they were created.
The other one, that I always enjoyed is, you can take an existing ObjectId, and reinsert it into another document, you dont have to nest all your data, you can go kinda sorta relational about it.
Used it at a previous job, the first project could have just used a SQL db but because the person who made the intial one tried to do NoSQL using something in the cloud, they migrated it to MongoDB to keep it simple and consistent. The second project, well, we really discovered all the limits if you aren't Google with unlimited server memory available, like indexing as I mentioned. MongoDB pipelines are probably my favorite feature on the other hand.
and reinvent half of a SQL engine inside your backend logic, badly.
(source: for the 3rd time, I'm working on a system that uses Mongo extensively, the goal is to move to Postgres as soon as that's viable)
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
https://stripe.dev/blog/how-stripes-document-databases-suppo...
They probably should look into JEV style models as well might make sense for automatic classification of data.
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.
He hired cred CEO to be whatsapp CEO.
Scale CEO to be AI leader
Now Mongo ceo to lead the AI enterprise sales.
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?
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.
this same things can happen with any employee at any company and does not bolster your argument.
a $10/hr worker flipping burgers can take actions that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. burger king foot lettuce guy probably cost the company millions.
i could cause millions of dollars in damage this afternoon (i am not paid millions).
or, in other words, looking at the 6B loss and working backwards to say that the CEO was underpaid at 52MM is nonsensical
if "CEO Resignes" SELL SELL SELL
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.
Make adjustments based on ML
Actual analysis of this person's value to company not weighted as highly
In short: is it this particular CEO who is that valuable? Should I pay 100m to some Joe off the street since I know they will stay put?
CEOs leave all the time. Average tenure has dropped over the years suggesting a fierce competition for senior talent
One would be "the market processing the new information that MongoDB's legal department doesn't know how to draft contracts".
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.
Given this guy's job will be selling Muse to corporations, sounds like the best way to hire for that position.
From a technical standpoint? Very different. From a marketing standpoint when selling to software-development clients? Same space.
Which is like, not as weird as most AI company headlines, to be honest?
Both AI and Mongo can be used for good and quality code but that's not how they get sales.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1441816/000162828025...
As far as I can tell, there is no notice period.
Sometimes a new employer will offer compensation for any loss of stock options and/or to indemnify against any claim for breach of contract or similar.
But it could also be that Mongo have simply agreed to release him - he was only there for 10 months, and might not have turned out to be a great fit. Their share price has been more or less level in that time whilst competitors have been rising so it's not as if he had notable immediate success in boosting their appeal to enterprise customers.
In fact, they seem to have gone out of their way to minimise any mention of him which, to me, suggests that it might have been worded that way based on legal advice rather than for PR reasons.
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.
[1] Examples I found: Worksport Ltd., Exicure, Inc., Rainmaker Worldwide Inc., and Acorn Energy, Inc.
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).
https://www.youtube.com/@gar1t/videos
I worked at IMVU [1] so it was extra funny.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMVU
I wonder if they’ll pair him with another acquisition like Porcupine. META has now realized how much money there is in selling a picks and shovels (as we see with Muse Spark).
Well, this could end meta :) Once I get the Cloudflare prompt I bail assuming the site does not what me to read their content.
Yes, the number of sites I go to is decreasing daily, but gopher, gemini and USENET is still around and seems to be slowly growing.
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.