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.

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/

>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.

> 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).

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.

This is a great example of saying how things should work, which is almost the exact opposite of how they actually work.

> 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.

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.

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.

Isn't it also a possibility that he gave notice and it wasn't announced to the world until his last day?

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

Maybe he had enough.

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.

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.

>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.

> One reason might be the share price has collapsed and he has no confidence in it coming back

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/

> 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.

> 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.

No way. CEOs with significant experience are not easy to find so he’s going to do just fine.

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.

Do you think he needs to make any more money in his life, or can he retire tomorrow and live comfortably long past his death?

The third option could surely be he was fired ? Although I would imagine MongoDB would have organised someone already to take over.

Maybe this is a silly assumption, but, he reached the title, he’s got the ladder-climbing experience to understand his choice.

the share price dropping was due to him leaving, not the cause of him leaving (but this is very bearish for mongo)

People get fired effective immediately.

> 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.

Which probably means it's time for the adventurous to try and short MongoDB

Not sure why he'd want to take the pay cut with being a CEO

He don't need to be CEO with the money he already have.

or "resigned to spend more time with the family" aka was fired

If he makes Meta a shit ton of money then nobody will care and he’ll easily find more jobs.

He is likely being promised a chance at succession to CEO.

he got fired

[dead]

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.

Even CEOs gotta job hop to beat that 23% inflation!! (Y/y airline prices).

data point #3 if you include his stint at Symantec 10+ years ago.

> 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.

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.

Oracle is still making a very, very healthy amount of money on legacy db products. Momentum is a very powerful thing.

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.

At this point I'd rather use a Claude-written database system than use MongoDB at any price.

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.

the more integrations are made to enable 'a.i' the more use cases for document databases.

Dana White turned a failing company into billions of dollars. Really, I think you are underestimating his ability.

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.

Trump and Dana are close, and when Trump got re-elected, Dana was suddenly added to the Meta board as I think he was seen as a way to influence the Trump administration.

Same as how Clegg was brought in when the EU were on meta's case.

It is a scummy company run by scumbags, of course he would be.

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."

P/E ratio 472.47

Might have interpreted it as captain heading for lifeboat.

Stock prices have nothing to do with business performance anymore

Also claude can probably knock out a mongodb clone in a couple of days.

Cloudflare didn’t join MongoDB, did they?

MongoDB is aggressively hiring in Dublin, though.

> 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).

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

> 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.

> 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

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.

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.

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 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

poor souls stuck maintaining brownfield webshit developed during the height of mongo's marketing campaign 10 years ago.

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.

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'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.

At least it’ll be Webscale.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

in case anyone who doesn't get the reference: https://youtu.be/b2F-DItXtZs?si=gxrqufTAy-YQ88wW

Does Muse support sharding?

Because there might now be people on this site literally born after that fad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs

Web scale is old hat. We're now on planet scale.

thats an excellent question

needs more sharding.