published more of my thoughts on $EMPD this morning: seekingalpha.com/article/495…

Instinct CEO Noah Shinn says agents will let restaurants give tables to birthdays and anniversaries over whoever clicks first "And traditionally, because of the way that the internet has worked, at least for reservations, it's been first come first serve. So anyone that comes in, no matter how important or how not important it might be, whoever gets in first gets the reservation." "But what if you had the ability for the agent to be able to communicate on both sides, communicate, hey, this is important. This is actually the person's spouse's birthday, the 30th birthday, a very special event is coming up." "And the restaurant too can say, let's actually prioritize birthdays or major decade birthdays or major anniversaries or these certain people, I don't know, whatever it might be, right?" "So now with the ability, with all of the logistical burden of having to describe exactly what your case is and what's happening and why it's important. Now we have the ability to perfectly match what does the restaurant want? What does the user want?" "And that will result in more special events for the users being able to actually have a spot in the restaurant."

Very weird to see the CEO of highly regarded & scaled enterprise software firm leave for a non-CEO role elsewhere… Even if they’re leaving for $META. CJ Desai was at $MDB for less than a year. Their investor day is this week. Again. Weird. This is not the kind of news that makes me eager to jump in on a large correction. It’s the type of news that makes me think “what does he know?” Kind of a red flag.

I am not convinced this sudden departures of MongoDB's $MDB CEO is a red flag. If you look through his LinkedIn profile, he is a career professional and his last job before MongoDB was at CloudFlare $NET where he only lasted for a little over a year. There were other companies (Symantec, Pivotal) where he only lasted for a year or two. An opportunity to have a larger impact at $META was probably hard to pass up for a career CEO.

No company has meant more to me professionally than MongoDB. I spent more than 11 years as CEO, and even after stepping down last year, I never really left. Serving on the board kept me close to our people, our customers and the business, and only strengthened my conviction in MongoDB’s future. Today, I’m returning as interim CEO. I’m grateful for the trust of our board and our team, and I’m ready to get to work. I also return with a different perspective. As a Partner and Senior Advisor at Sequoia Capital, I have a front-row seat to the founders, technologies and companies shaping the AI era. I see firsthand how AI is not only changing how software is built and businesses operate, but expanding technology’s role from helping people manage work to increasingly helping perform the work itself. I look forward to bringing those insights back to MongoDB as we help our customers capitalize on what may be the most consequential platform shift of our generation. And we’re getting started immediately. Tomorrow at 11 AM ET, we’ll host Investor Day and share our long-term strategy, market opportunity and the product innovation driving MongoDB forward. On Wednesday, our sold-out .local NYC event will bring together developers and business leaders focused on putting AI into production and moving from generating answers to taking action at scale. We’ll have exciting announcements at both events. What has always made MongoDB special is the ambition of our people, the importance of what our customers build with our technology, and the size of the opportunity ahead. I’m proud to lead this team again. There is a lot to do, and I couldn’t be more excited to get back to work. mongodb.com/company/newsroom…