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, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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
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).
"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.
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.
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.
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.
yea this isn't "and another example just off the top of my head" - this guy co-founded seamicro then cerebras both pretty badass companies, he was a vp of marketing not ceo when the sec sued not just him but the entire executive team. trudging up 20 year old nonsense to try and punch a guy who legit deserves his success is bullshit
that's an automatic, prenegotiated sell off - calling that dumping is worse than calling the ceo a felon (at least one is technically true). are any of the big ai companies actually profitable? how has cerebras not gotten their chip right? they're the only company shipping wafer scale inference hardware, and they're shipping to the largest labs in the world. and it works - I use cerebras.ai the token rate is amazing
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. We 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.
Perhaps CEOs are like NFL quarterbacks. They get all the credit when things go right and all the blame when they go wrong. In reality, they only have a limited number of levers to pull. Only extraordinary ones can overcome a bad team or a more hostile external environment.
I think this is broadly true of leaders including lesser ones. It even seems true of roles like product manager.
The vast majority of projects seem to not meet their stated goals or KPIs or mission, be late, not follow remotely the planned path, etc. Whether blame falls on poor execution, poor planning, or overpromsing, those are precisely the things that chosen leaders are supposed to have been chosen to avoid—and what they would in theory fail downwards for. Unpredictable things do happen, but the commonality of these projects (and products as a whole) means we're systematically choosing the wrong ones, there aren't many capable ones (period), and/or that we shouldn't be org'd to need them in the first place. The last one is simply saying that if the environment is unpredictable enough that you can't plan well, then let's not spend time and money on planning. That in itself axes large chunks of the things product leaders do before work starts.
It makes iterating a more likely plan, but most leaders, teams, and workstreams don't iterate much despite thinking they do. They might do better without all the planning and overpromised timelines, which gut iterating. Iteration is only sort of a strategy anyhow (depends on what layer we're talking about when we say strategy). Iteration is what hedges a lack of vision.
New devs learn quickly that when the TPM over promises it's the devs job to take the fall when delivery is late, or kill themselves so the TPM can take credit.
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.
There's multiple of these for executives. We tried using one at my last company to find a Sales exec (I think they would have been c-level). I was part of the interviewing process and what we found out was that we absolutely needed the ideas and practices these candidates had and simultaneously couldn't afford them at even half their asking price. It was a real conundrum and the company more or less failed 18 months later after management decided "doing nothing" was the right decision.
I worked at one company hire a part-time CFO. Apparently part time execs are thing - late in their career and established and successfully to think about retiring, but don't want to get out of the game completely. Or to be e.g. a CFO for 3-4 startups at once. Not sure if that exists for sales, but I thought it was a neat idea.
Side note: I interviewed at Heidrick two weeks after 9/11. Manager said they had several employees quit on the spot. They offered terrible compensation so I passed.
> 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.
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.
Interim is always an inverse one though, and the fact it was the previous feels to me at least like them saying "Hey we need a favour" but I have no insight.
> 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'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.
I think the most instructive example of this is Stephen Elop. He had ONE (1) successful business venture in the 90's and has done a horrible, laughably destructive job at everything he has ever touched since, and is still a CEO.
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.
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 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.
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."
MongoDB's net profit margin has been improving significantly over the last 5 years, increasing from -35% to +2%. This makes the P/E ratio not a very reliable lens to value the stock, vs using P/E ratios to compare mature companies that have relatively stable net profit margins.
To crudely estimate a fundamental valuation for MongoDB as a discounted sequence of future earnings, we'd need some understanding of the main factors that are driving this change in the net profit margin (over the next 5 years do we expect those factors to persist? to decay? to accelerate?), some modelling assumptions & forecasts for how they'll evolve over the next decade or two, and a discount factor.
Out of curiosity, I bashed together a naive NPV valuation, in complete ignorance of MongoDB's underlying business.
Completely unjustified modelling assumptions: suppose MongoDB can grow revenue at +20% / year for 5 years, then +5% / year for the next 5, then hitting a steady state +2.5% / year revenue growth; MongoDB grows net profit margin by +5% every year until hitting a 25% net profit margin, where it tops out; discount factor of 9.5% (= 5% risk free rate + 4.5% equity risk premium); no change in number of shares outstanding (perhaps optimistic, given they issued a bunch of stock within the last 5 years). Projecting this out 20 years & then using a 20x P/E valuation multiple at year 20 for the terminal value gives us an NPV estimate of the value at about $290 / share.
So if you believe MongoDB's business will do about that well, with your fundamental valuation investor hat on you could consider buying some stock if it were offered at, say, half the current market price or less -- assuming there isn't anything more attractive to invest in.
If you believe MongoDB's revenue growth & improvement in net profit margin will be much stronger over the next decade, maybe you'd be comfortable buying closer to the current market price.
(I don't hold any MongoDB stock & find it hard to stomach investing in growth companies vs companies that are more mature & easier to understand, but I appreciate that to value growth stocks you're not going to have much luck using P/B or P/E ratios)
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
>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).
If a Burger Flipper leaves the company, it costs them exactly the amount of Burgers they fell short of making (to meet the demand) till they find the replacement burger flipper and they are exactly paid that much.
Anyone can burn/bomb a company and cause millions in damages. Doesn't mean they are worth that much
>Anyone can burn/bomb a company and cause millions in damages. Doesn't mean they are worth that much
yes, that's my point.
and it absolutely extends to unexpectedly leaving. there have been plenty of times in my career that simply leaving without notice would have cost my company many times my salary.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Demis Hassabis decided not to sell DeepMind to Facebook after testing Mark Zuckerberg at dinner and realizing Zuckerberg sounded "Equally Excited" about every tech trend brought up.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 94.1 ms ] threadMeta 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.
"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.
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.
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.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1441816/000162828025...
As far as I can tell, there is no notice period.
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)
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)
You can scale nearly anything if you know what you're doing.
Like, what kind of measurement is "largest"? Most bytes on disk?
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.
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 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).
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.
I wish I had your belief in sensible logic like that.
But I suspect you're wrong, even though you shouldn't be.
I'd eat my shorts if this was true. But even then he is likely set for life with his wealth, pre Meta offer.
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.
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.
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.
"failed up" is currently defined as founding a company that goes public and being its CEO. I'd love to know what success is.
They've pivoted many times over the years trying to make "wafer scale" work in a variety of use cases, and they still haven't gotten it right.
By the way, the CTO is dumping stock left and right and the stock is down nearly 5% today alone...
https://www.marketbeat.com/instant-alerts/insider-cerebras-s...
(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.)
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. We 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.
Even if it’s only 30% of CEOs and 15% of other CxOs there’s still an anomaly there to be explained.
The vast majority of projects seem to not meet their stated goals or KPIs or mission, be late, not follow remotely the planned path, etc. Whether blame falls on poor execution, poor planning, or overpromsing, those are precisely the things that chosen leaders are supposed to have been chosen to avoid—and what they would in theory fail downwards for. Unpredictable things do happen, but the commonality of these projects (and products as a whole) means we're systematically choosing the wrong ones, there aren't many capable ones (period), and/or that we shouldn't be org'd to need them in the first place. The last one is simply saying that if the environment is unpredictable enough that you can't plan well, then let's not spend time and money on planning. That in itself axes large chunks of the things product leaders do before work starts.
It makes iterating a more likely plan, but most leaders, teams, and workstreams don't iterate much despite thinking they do. They might do better without all the planning and overpromised timelines, which gut iterating. Iteration is only sort of a strategy anyhow (depends on what layer we're talking about when we say strategy). Iteration is what hedges a lack of vision.
Citation needed
https://www.heidrick.com/
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.
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.
His stocks/options vested/exercised last Friday. He's not forfeiting anything.
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 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.
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.
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.
You must be new to the corporate world or incredibly naive.
This is a great example of saying how things should work, which is almost the exact opposite of how they actually work.
Not sure how you made that assessment!
52 Week Range: 215.68 - 473.10
Yesterday, it closed at 410.44. Clearly, very far away from collapse. In fact, it made a solid comeback (almost doubled from lows).
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/MDB/
"Hey the MongoDB guy left, is MongoDB okay?.... wait, no, of course it isn't. It's in that space that is completely screwed."
To crudely estimate a fundamental valuation for MongoDB as a discounted sequence of future earnings, we'd need some understanding of the main factors that are driving this change in the net profit margin (over the next 5 years do we expect those factors to persist? to decay? to accelerate?), some modelling assumptions & forecasts for how they'll evolve over the next decade or two, and a discount factor.
Out of curiosity, I bashed together a naive NPV valuation, in complete ignorance of MongoDB's underlying business.
Completely unjustified modelling assumptions: suppose MongoDB can grow revenue at +20% / year for 5 years, then +5% / year for the next 5, then hitting a steady state +2.5% / year revenue growth; MongoDB grows net profit margin by +5% every year until hitting a 25% net profit margin, where it tops out; discount factor of 9.5% (= 5% risk free rate + 4.5% equity risk premium); no change in number of shares outstanding (perhaps optimistic, given they issued a bunch of stock within the last 5 years). Projecting this out 20 years & then using a 20x P/E valuation multiple at year 20 for the terminal value gives us an NPV estimate of the value at about $290 / share.
So if you believe MongoDB's business will do about that well, with your fundamental valuation investor hat on you could consider buying some stock if it were offered at, say, half the current market price or less -- assuming there isn't anything more attractive to invest in.
If you believe MongoDB's revenue growth & improvement in net profit margin will be much stronger over the next decade, maybe you'd be comfortable buying closer to the current market price.
(I don't hold any MongoDB stock & find it hard to stomach investing in growth companies vs companies that are more mature & easier to understand, but I appreciate that to value growth stocks you're not going to have much luck using P/B or P/E ratios)
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?
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
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.
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.
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).
if "CEO Resignes" SELL SELL SELL
If a Burger Flipper leaves the company, it costs them exactly the amount of Burgers they fell short of making (to meet the demand) till they find the replacement burger flipper and they are exactly paid that much.
Anyone can burn/bomb a company and cause millions in damages. Doesn't mean they are worth that much
yes, that's my point.
and it absolutely extends to unexpectedly leaving. there have been plenty of times in my career that simply leaving without notice would have cost my company many times my salary.
mongodb ceo is not worth 6 billion dollars.
1: Obviously exceptions will exist for unexpected major life events, etc.
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.
One would be "the market processing the new information that MongoDB's legal department doesn't know how to draft contracts".
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.
Make adjustments based on ML
Actual analysis of this person's value to company not weighted as highly
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.
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.
it's end user software that's absolutely getting crushed.
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.
He hired cred CEO to be whatsapp CEO.
Scale CEO to be AI leader
Now Mongo ceo to lead the AI enterprise sales.
https://www.crn.com/news/channel-news/2024/servicenow-presid...
https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/united-states-intervenes-...
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.