"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.
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 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.
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.
> It even seems true of roles like product manager.
Yes, but there are valid reasons for this. Speaking as someone who is currently in Product, let me point out that a lot of larger efforts in large organizations are inherently risky. This is probably measurable, but generally nobody invests in doing so, rather than that we model it with approximations. When an executive decides on a strategy which has a large effort as a downstream outcome, there is some risk possible that it becomes impossible, or that it is possible but at 2x, 3x, 5x, 10x the cost/time which erodes its value. Success doesn't look like hitting an arbitrary timeline or budget, success looks like getting to an outcome that aligns with the objectives/goals of the strategy, in a timeline that doesn't torpedo the strategy, and in a way which results in an economic ROI.
I am generally considered pretty good in my current organization. I have been lauded often. I don't think any of the major initiatives I've worked on have been "on time", but in almost every case it was due to cross-organizational dependencies dragging things out, which is an inherent risk accounted for when doing anything large in a large organization. But every single one of those initiatives has resulted in a positive ROI in a manner timely enough to support the strategy.
From the perspective of the organization, that's a win. And a win is rewarded.
I imagine similar things can be seen at executive levels. Nobody is asking detailed execution questions about your strategy to determine if its a win or a loss, they're looking at the aggregate outcome. Did your strategy result in improved profitability or reduction of cost or increase in share price, or not? CEOs seem to fail upward even on those metrics, but other executive roles seem to be more accountable.
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.
lemonade stands are staffed by 11 year olds and there can be one on every corner.
these stands do better than cerebras, which is an 11 year old deeply unprofitable company building a technology that no other company has bothered to try to even get close to replicating.
Cerebras got lucky with the ban on NVIDIA chips due to "security reasons" in the middle east, securing a massive deal with the UAE's sovereign fund. Of course, the leaders made a nice donation to the Trump crypto fund and coincidentally the ban on NVIDIA was lifted. That presented a danger for Cerebras, but they also pivoted almost entirely to an inference as a service company, maximizing tokens/sec metrics on a variety of open weight models. Then they landed the contract with OpenAI which has bought them another lifeline, and helped paper over the trail of fraud that delayed the S1 and IPO for a few years. Fascinating story indeed!
The problem with the pivot is that with only 44GB of memory, you can't run models unless you nerf them or you scale the hardware out horizontally, which takes up a lot of space, power and even more cost.
This is why their API has dumb limits on it. I'd estimate their $/tok cost around $4-5000/mtok based on hardware alone, which is insane. Sure, it is fast, but if it is heavily quanted, expensive, and can't scale, you're going to be in a world of pain.
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
Sell offs don't have to happen, and $25m isn't some small amount of money.
> how has cerebras not gotten their chip right?
It doesn't scale, and won't ever be profitable. They pivoted to inference, which has the unfortunate (for them) side effect of also requiring a boat load of memory. This is why they just partnered with AMD to offload onto their chips.
it kind of is, relatively - sean might just be having a galaxy blackhole supercluster installed at home for all we know
> It doesn't scale .. They pivoted to inference
they have more options than non-wafer-scale solutions, the chips are going 3d and meanwhile they benefit from the same interconnect progress as the wholly memory-bound alternatives
> Ah, investor. Explains your responses.
physician heal thyself like your not out here tryna manifest your short
> they have more options than non-wafer-scale solutions, the chips are going 3d and meanwhile they benefit from the same interconnect progress as the wholly memory-bound alternatives
If I was a Cerebras shareholder, I would be LIVID right now. Seriously, what the hell. Insiders dumping stock: CFO, COO, accounting officer. AND NO INFO about losing GPT-6.1 Ultrafast.
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 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. You 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 you 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 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.
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.
From experience I can say that people at level (particularly in sales) are very good at selling themselves - following through and delivering on those promises can be a very different thing.
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.
Usually referred to as "fractional" roles - often used for senior advisors and executive board level posts, and for CxO roles that aren't central to the business (eg. CFO for non-finance companies, CTO/CIO for non-tech companies).
I wouldn't expect to see it for sales so much, as it would mess with the incentive structure and you kind of want your salesfolk to be "all in". Same goes for CEO or COO - they might have a small portfolio of non-exec board memberships (or similar) on the side, but it's hard to do a good job if your primary focus is split between multiple distinct businesses.
Yeah, Fractional C-levels are definitely a thing. I've served as a fractional CTO before. It can be really helpful for a small-to-mid size company trying to grow, but not nearly as effective as a full time exec doing the same tasks. Not having someone dedicating all of their time to understanding the company and the problems that need to be solved really limits how useful they can be.
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!)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Interim is always a temp 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.
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.
I don’t need to be in “the club”. Some people badly want that. Let them have it. Why would I have a problem with an executive changing jobs? Because he gets paid more money than me?
it is advertised as eleven nines durability, however. That is better than anything you can build yourself, so if true, the best backup for your S3 bucket is an independent S3 bucket
Agile is dead. It presumed writing the code was the slowest part of the cycle. Now it makes more sense to only start writing code when the requirements are known as the code is quick and low cost to change if/when the requirements change later.
Agreed, this is very critical point, I always thought big part of software engineering is the art and science of managing ever-growing complexity.
The part I'm still not sure about is the 2nd point, I just don't know how good those LLMs will get at managing complexity and how important is for human to understand the details of the code. I'm personally not sure yet..I could imagine a future where we have have much more higher level tools to manage the comprehension and complexity challenges. Or it could be that LLMs will never fully comprehend the full architecture and humans will always be needed for that kind of big-picture analysis. I really don't know, and frankly I don't think anybody knows.
I find I can just about get by with coding every day on a Cursor $60/mth sub with Grok fast mode disabled.
Doing pretty heavy coding work/requirements etc, but not much sub agents and no loops.
For me and what I’m doing that’s insanely good value.
I find grok build chews through my SuperGrok sub very quick - but I think that is due to it having the 500k context window which uses more credits. Cursor limits it to 256K (tho I see in today’s update for Grok 4.7 there’s now a toggle for context size).
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