362 points•diek•2 days ago•299 comments•

299 comments

everfrustrated2 days 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.

0x1ch2 days ago
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.
cm112 days ago
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 regularity of these outcomes for projects (and products as a whole) means we're systematically choosing the wrong ones, there aren't enough 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 teams and workstreams don't iterate too much. The iterating that sometimes is done is typically downstream of the plan, strategy, architecture that leadership leadershipped. 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.

latchkey2 days ago
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.

meowface2 days ago
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.)

brabel2 days ago
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.
john_strinlai2 days ago
>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.

ChicagoDave2 days ago
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/

apocalyptic0n32 days ago
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.
ChicagoDave2 days ago
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.
jmalicki2 days ago
It's common for VCs to do the same as "entrepreneur in residence"
orsorna2 days 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.

bloodyplonker222 days ago
Right. He was "set for life" pre MongoDB even. He was an early investor in Datadog.
beembeem2 days ago
This is data point #2 in his executive career, it's now a trend.

https://www.crn.com/news/channel-news/2024/servicenow-presid...

bix62 days ago
Even CEOs gotta job hop to beat that 23% inflation!! (Y/y airline prices).
beembeem2 days ago
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.
umeshunni2 days ago
data point #3 if you include his stint at Symantec 10+ years ago.
beembeem2 days ago
Wow, TIL servicenow was his second run-in with the US government. I believe this is what you were referring to:

https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/united-states-intervenes-...

xnx2 days ago
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.

joshstrange2 days 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.

maerF0x02 days ago
DocumentDB more or less is MongoDB though
Thaxll2 days ago
DynamoDB is very expensive.
richwater2 days ago
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.

saghm2 days ago
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.
Hasz2 days ago
Oracle is still making a very, very healthy amount of money on legacy db products. Momentum is a very powerful thing.
jjice2 days ago
We're early on in the LLM era, so I have hope that it can crush Oracle's business model. That said, your database is probably the hardest part of your application to migrate off of...
vanuatu2 days ago
don't look at the oracle stock price over the last year though
fendy30022 days ago
IMO because usually the ones that use Oracle are usually slow at changing, usually risk-averse, CYA culture and big bureaucracy.
dgellow2 days ago
Don’t look at oracle’s debts
glimshe2 days ago
At this point I'd rather use a Claude-written database system than use MongoDB at any price.
bradleyjg2 days ago
MongoDB is webscale.
otabdeveloper42 days ago
MongoDB is the only open-source database that supports multi-master high-availability out of the box.
trgn2 days ago
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.

toasty2282 days ago
A few days ago I learned Dana White (UFC's CEO) is on meta's board of directors, nothing will surprise me now.
tudelo2 days ago
Dana White turned a failing company into billions of dollars. Really, I think you are underestimating his ability.
toasty2282 days ago
I'm not sure that this was the deciding factor
lobf2 days ago
There’s some weirdness with the UFC’s struggle at the time.

The Fertitta brothers are who actually bought it. Before owning the UFC, Lorenzo Fertitta was on (maybe the head?) of the Nevada State Athletic Commission- the very body who were refusing to sanction UFC events at the time, and the most important governing body in the combat sports world.

Obviously the UFC was hurting bad at that time since they couldn’t be sanctioned, were getting booted from arenas they booked, and were getting dropped by Pay Per View carriers. This decimated their value and the Fertittas scooped up the company for a song.

All of a sudden, now that they owned it, the sanctioning bodies agreed on a set of unified MMA rules, the UFC was re-sanctioned, and they started selling PPVs again.

It was actually quite a success from the very beginning. Their troubles were likely imposed on them by their prospective buyers in order to get the sale done, and all they and Dana White did really were take their foot off the company’s neck.

dgellow2 days ago
I’m pretty sure it’s more about his close connection to Trump
nailer2 days ago
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.
TheqO1 day ago
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.

jst1fthsdys2 days ago
It is a scummy company run by scumbags, of course he would be.
Dylan168072 days 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?
testuser19842 days ago
P/E ratio 472.47
sajithdilshan2 days ago
I had to google to see if this is correct. Completely absurd. At that rate MongoDB better pull out a cure for cancer out of their DB
Pxtl2 days 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."

nitwit0052 days ago
Might have interpreted it as captain heading for lifeboat.
smt882 days ago
Stock prices have nothing to do with business performance anymore
empath752 days ago
Also claude can probably knock out a mongodb clone in a couple of days.
saghm2 days ago
Git can clone mongodb in far less than that. I think you might be misunderstanding where the revenue comes from.
tombert2 days ago
It doesn't even need a couple days. I got Opus 5.5 to do it in like three or four hours, just out of curiosity.
trgn2 days ago
crazy we're cheering on theft.

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