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

https://www.reuters.com/technology/mongodb-ceo-desai-steps-down-lead-metas-enterprise-platform-2026-09-28/
59•diek•1h ago

Comments

Insanity•54m ago
Interesting choice, his prior experience doesn't seem AI related yet he's going to lead an AI strategy at Meta?
bombcar•38m ago
At least it’ll be Webscale.
dagmx•36m ago
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.

Pxtl•6m ago
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.

htrp•40m ago
Facebook going to be selling Muse into your company as your AI coworker
12982712•37m ago
Finally we'll get authentic webscale AI.
1123581321•34m ago
Does Muse support sharding?
baby_souffle•6m ago
Yes but only when using /dev/null for backing the shard storage layer
mshockwave•11m ago
in case anyone who doesn't get the reference: https://youtu.be/b2F-DItXtZs?si=gxrqufTAy-YQ88wW
fred_is_fred•34m ago
I've always wanted model sharding.
fred_is_fred•33m ago
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?
next_xibalba•30m ago
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.
jtwaleson•25m ago
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.
Onavo•20m ago
A contractor CEO? I know it is extremely common for directors to be contractors for tax reasons.
kiicia•15m ago
it simply works, that's how you optimise tax on million+ sums, do you think ceo-s pay taxes on par with regular workers?
SkyPuncher•6m ago
I have never heard of this. Do you mind sharing some examples?
LoganDark•32m ago
I wonder if people like this actually try to get into the company, or if they just got a very attractive offer instead?
sulam•7m ago
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.
spicybright•28m ago
People still use MongoDB?
giancarlostoro•23m ago
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.

Salgat•14m ago
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.
vlyan•12m ago
poor souls stuck maintaining brownfield webshit developed during the height of mongo's marketing campaign 10 years ago.
d2kx
jmclnx•19m ago
>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.

general_reveal•18m ago
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).

abhirajabhi312•17m ago
So turns out nosql is no place for "structured" role like ceo.
everfrustrated•15m ago
"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.

dingdingdang•12m ago
> He's never going to be hired as CEO by anybody for the rest of his career.

Maybe he had enough.

b112•7m ago
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.

orsorna•6m ago
>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.

reticulates•4m ago
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.
Dylan16807•13m ago
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?
Pxtl•8m ago
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."

smt88•5m ago
[delayed]
bko•12m ago
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?

redorb•11m ago
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.
AnthOlei•10m ago
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?

bko•5m ago
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

rozap•7m ago
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.
joduplessis•11m ago
Ah, I miss the days of NoSQL vs. SQL debates.
d2kx•8m ago
But is MongoDB's stock web scale?
hedgehog•4m ago
Because there might now be people on this site literally born after that fad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs
mikert89•6m ago
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
rcxdude•19m ago
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.
roryirvine•2m ago
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.

•
7m ago
MongoDB has been a good database for years.
bko•3m ago
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.
gretch•5m ago
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.

ForHackernews•5m ago
> 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

Dylan16807•4m ago
> 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.

john_strinlai•3m ago
>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.

i could cause millions of dollars in damage this afternoon (i am not paid millions).

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