Meta poaches MongoDB CEO CJ Desai to run its new enterprise AI platform; MongoDB stock drops 18%
- Meta hired MongoDB CEO Chirantan "CJ" Desai as chief enterprise platform officer, reporting directly to Mark Zuckerberg, to lead the newly created Meta Enterprise Platform that sells its AI models, agents and coding tools to businesses.
- MongoDB shares fell 18% in morning trading. Desai leaves the top job after less than a year, and the company named predecessor Dev Ittycheria interim CEO while it searches for a permanent replacement.
- Meta launched Muse earlier in September, a personal AI agent that shops, books travel, sends email and makes payments for users. It has climbed Apple App Store and Google Play rankings, and analysts call it potentially the biggest US app launch since ChatGPT in November 2022.
- Before MongoDB, Desai ran product and engineering at Cloudflare and spent nearly eight years at ServiceNow, including a stint as president and chief operating officer.
- Brokerage Piper Sandler, whose note the article cites, called the departure disappointing but said MongoDB remains strategically well positioned and the share price reaction is overdone.
Hacker News opinions
His background isn't AI at all and he's now running Meta's AI strategy? Interesting choice.
Meta hires on the pitch, not the resume. Their chief AI officer is a 29 or 30 year old acquihired out of a data labeling company, not a model developer.
MongoDB is the textbook case of slick marketing beating engineering discipline, and that's exactly what the AI froth rewards right now.
I've run out of fingers counting people in my network who lead AI something at their employer and understand AI about as far as asking ChatGPT simple questions.
So Facebook is going to sell Muse into your company as your AI coworker.
Real question though: can a sitting CEO just walk like that? I'd expect contract terms on notice period and an orderly transition.
His offer letter is public record in the SEC filings, and as far as I can tell there's no notice period. Labor law trumps most of those contract clauses anyway.
At that level it's network plus exec recruiters, not leetcoding on the side. Someone senior at Meta probably told him the role existed and made sure he was on the short list.
People still use MongoDB?
It's a fine database, super easy to prototype with and the aggregation pipelines are my favorite feature. My pet peeve is how it handles indexes, it wants to shove everything in memory.
Stripe still uses MongoDB as its main datastore, if I remember right from my time there.
Mongo is a $600 stock to me. AI creates an absurd amount of logs and intermediate text, and they shipped their vector db fast. It's an obvious play.
"Effective immediately" means he has no notice period or he's forfeiting unvested stock. That's a good way to burn bridges.
He'll get hired as a CEO again. Nobody holds a departure against you when it's spun as decisive, and if Muse keeps climbing he can go anywhere.