Meta poaches MongoDB CEO to lead its enterprise AI push
MongoDB CEO resigns "effective immediately" to join Meta, stock drops 20%
Meta has hired MongoDB CEO Chirantan "CJ" Desai to head a new enterprise platform unit, reporting directly to Mark Zuckerberg. MongoDB shares fell 18% on the news, as Desai leaves after less than a year. The move signals Meta's ambition to sell AI tools to businesses, including its Muse agent, which has climbed app store charts and drawn comparisons to ChatGPT's launch.
While the departure is disappointing, we believe MongoDB remains well-positioned strategically and view the share-price reaction as overdone.
- everfrustrated
"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.
- beembeem
This is data point #2 in his executive career, it's now a trend.
https://www.crn.com/news/channel-news/2024/servicenow-presid...
- toasty228
A few days ago I learned Dana White (UFC's CEO) is on meta's board of directors, nothing will surprise me now.
- xnx
TIL MongoDB is a publicly traded company.
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.
- Dylan16807
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?
- ramijames
I recently took my app off of Mongo Atlas because I was tired of dealing with charges that caught me off guard. I was tired of feeling like I was getting nickel and dimed over every little thing.
I ended up migrating everything to DigitalOcean's managed database for 1/3 the price. Less headache, better performance, and less panic and anger.
I'll never, ever use Mongo Atlas again.
- vira28
For folks who don’t know, CJ was the president of product and technology at Cloudflare for 6 months and CJ left them and joined MongoDB.
- joduplessis
Ah, I miss the days of NoSQL vs. SQL debates.