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CJ Desai

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2026-01-22
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2026-01-22
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  1. “Yeah, yeah, and then you go into a different cycle. And I said, yes, you know, whenever they do something at scale, because let's look at it. Like if you think about however you define success for AI native companies, whether it's 100 million ARR, billion ARR, pick one, there are like 10 companies like that today, today, right? There are not that many companies. And if they're not that many successful companies, they won't have a lot of data. Some of them who have data do use MongoDB, right? So from my standpoint, this will be an end, not an or, that when AI wave really takes off, that will of course add, but our core data platform and core business is still growing. That's the answer I gave because that was the truth.”

    2026-01-22 · No Priors · No Priors Live: Building Durable Software in the AI Age with MongoDB President & CEO CJ Desai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “Yeah, no, I said this is our core and our core on CNBC. I said it's our core. Yes, we have AI native companies building on MongoDB. We have hundreds of them. But that's not once then I give them X percent. This is how I think about AI native companies, then they're like, oh,”

    2026-01-22 · No Priors · No Priors Live: Building Durable Software in the AI Age with MongoDB President & CEO CJ Desai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “I agree. And the only thing I would say, that's why even MongoDB published our Q3 results, I got asked this question over and over again. Is this because of AI? And I said, absolutely not. Yes.”

    2026-01-22 · No Priors · No Priors Live: Building Durable Software in the AI Age with MongoDB President & CEO CJ Desai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “Investors wrong on the bare thesis because sometimes they don't get it right is by reaccelerating and showing that, hey, now we are back.”

    2026-01-22 · No Priors · No Priors Live: Building Durable Software in the AI Age with MongoDB President & CEO CJ Desai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “And even if you think about BlackBerry, do you know that when actually iPhone launched, I think I want to say three or five quarters after now, after the iPhone, Blackberry was still selling a lot and was not being disrupted until it got really disrupted. So these transitions is more of a change management thing, and that's when you achieve the staff function to say like MongoDB did the Atlas transition or multi-cloud transition nicely. and they have to do the AI transition nicely. Fortunately, a lot of architectural advantages are there, but they still have to nail it and get the trust information from the customer. And that's when it happens. Otherwise, you are on the bare thesis that I'm not sure. And the only way you prove”

    2026-01-22 · No Priors · No Priors Live: Building Durable Software in the AI Age with MongoDB President & CEO CJ Desai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “At some point. I don't know Yeah, you get comfortable, and I still remember we were early on ServiceNow on AI. And when I'll speak to our engineering team, they're like, oh, this is just something that's out there, not sure. And I said, no, not leaning in is not an option. This is a platform whether it matures two years from now or four years from now. We have to do that. So I think it is more of a change management thing because if you are doing something really, really well, I mean, I'm going to date myself. You think about Nokia handsets. They were doing really, really well.”

    2026-01-22 · No Priors · No Priors Live: Building Durable Software in the AI Age with MongoDB President & CEO CJ Desai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Your ecom application, he said, Yep, we're very happy e comm is 20% of our revenue. I said, great. Do you know that you are That does not happen. And that gives you the orientation that how do they think about deploying your product? How long will it take to deploy that product? How much value they expect? And these people, I never say that a large bank has bought, say, ServiceNower Cloudflare, I will say it is Jeremy at this large bank who made a bet on Cloudflare, for example. So that has been for last many, many years. That has given me a lot of fun how do sales teams show up? How do we price the customers if something bad happens and outage happens or something? How do we show up during the crisis? Those are the things that have really made me very, very grounded product person and understanding a go-to-market channel and the business.”

    2026-01-22 · No Priors · No Priors Live: Building Durable Software in the AI Age with MongoDB President & CEO CJ Desai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “What he basically taught me, Sarah, was, hey, when you speak to customers, not only you ask them how we can serve you better, but ask them, hey, what other problems they are having, what pain points they are having, and you fly there, you meet them, you have coffee with them, whatever it is, truly understand because it allows you to see around the corner. And you cannot be one of the best advice he gave me, you cannot be a great products and engineering person unless you speak to customers all the time all the time because that will allow you to not only do a pattern match, but see around the corner. So even when we have a platform story and I'll say, hey, this is what another retailer at NRF in New York on Monday or Sunday, I met him, and he's the CTO, reports to the CEO, and I said, oh, so you use MongoDB for.”

    2026-01-22 · No Priors · No Priors Live: Building Durable Software in the AI Age with MongoDB President & CEO CJ Desai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “I think it was our CEO at the time at Symantec. And this was early 2005-ish time frame. And I learned a lot from him. And specifically, his bar on how you interact with customers, how you sell to them, how you serve them, how you show up in front of them was very, very high. And through my early career as a product person, I was director of product management. I still remember, I made a huge impression on me.”

    2026-01-22 · No Priors · No Priors Live: Building Durable Software in the AI Age with MongoDB President & CEO CJ Desai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “I was talking to a European retailer day before yesterday at NRF in New York, and they said, they tried a bunch of systems of record for ERP, expensive, failed implementations, lots of issues on supply chain all the way to financials, and decided they are going to invest in just building it themselves. And they are building that on MongoDB. And I mean, that's a great use case. And I'm like, okay, you heard me at hello. And to do that, but if these kind of organizations are going to transform within or disrupt within, I ask deep hours, CIO the same question, that are there things that we can build ourselves to disrupt within on MongoDB. So that's the story and the compelling value we can articulate also to our customers.”

    2026-01-22 · No Priors · No Priors Live: Building Durable Software in the AI Age with MongoDB President & CEO CJ Desai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “I mean, absolutely. If you are our CIO here is in the audience deepa, and when we have this conversation, she gets approached by AI native companies daily, multiple times a day. And when she comes and asks me, how do you think about that, whether it's for go-to-market sales, marketing, whatever the case might be, I said, this is how I think about it, that if this allows us to hire fewer people, makes our people more efficient, then we will use that budget. And I want to be AI first organization on behalf of MongoDB to say, we are transforming our business, not making just productive. Productive is okay, but we are transforming our business using AI.”

    2026-01-22 · No Priors · No Priors Live: Building Durable Software in the AI Age with MongoDB President & CEO CJ Desai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “Yes. Salesforce. And if I'm using And I'm using, I have this disruptive company that came and said they can solve these problems, do these support cases. Should I think about that as an and or an or? And I ask them the same questions. These systems of record, SaaS systems of record. And when somebody comes and says, I'm like, are you a layer on the top of system of record? Or you can replace the whole system. Because you will have my attention as a leader if you say I'm going to replace it. It's going to be cheaper. It's going to be faster. It's going to be better. And oh, by the way, I have disrupted pricing. And for the value you get, that's when you pay me the money. That's a conversation I'll have every single day.”

    2026-01-22 · No Priors · No Priors Live: Building Durable Software in the AI Age with MongoDB President & CEO CJ Desai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “End to end customer experience. And the question that I get from these customers, they ask me my perspective on SaaS is that should I think about this AI native company and customer support as an end or an or? So, I have a system of record on one of the companies for customer support.”

    2026-01-22 · No Priors · No Priors Live: Building Durable Software in the AI Age with MongoDB President & CEO CJ Desai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “Support. You know that. And on customer support, they're like, okay, truly if I'm a large telco or I'm a large healthcare company, can that fully be done on this AI native company that does customers? Not there yet, right? They are going after initial use cases and that's great in certain industries.”

    2026-01-22 · No Priors · No Priors Live: Building Durable Software in the AI Age with MongoDB President & CEO CJ Desai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “Unclear how much value they got out of it. They're like, okay, this really works with my Excel, or can I really do this thing or create a PowerPoint slide using natural language? The feedback is not great on the value they got. The feedback on coding assistants that kind of took off in 2024 in a meaningful way, very, very positive. 2024 and 2020 started with GitHub co-pilot, then view others all the way to Anthropic and so on. So 2025 was a breakthrough year from my perspective on the coding assistance, and that's still going on. I get very positive feedback from customers, hey, I'm using this particular coding assistant or this one, and it has improved the innovation velocity, security, whatever I'm looking at, and so on. And then people are still tinkering around customers.”

    2026-01-22 · No Priors · No Priors Live: Building Durable Software in the AI Age with MongoDB President & CEO CJ Desai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “Yeah, so I would say I feel it's a total failure of a week if I don't speak to at least 10 customers a week. That requires a lot of prep, a lot of follow-up, but it's usually at least 10. And so I'm constantly getting these data points and trying to do pattern matching on what's going on. The first thing I would say is that when you think about Fortune 500 Global 2000 and the community there, some of them are here, it is still not moving very fast. A lot of them tried with the office productivity type co-pilots.”

    2026-01-22 · No Priors · No Priors Live: Building Durable Software in the AI Age with MongoDB President & CEO CJ Desai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “An AI native company for the insurance industry. Insurance industry has multitude of use cases. You say, okay, please move from old SaaS to new Y, and this new Y, the speed to value is going to be this fast, and we will always be ahead. And things that you thought were not possible with the old SAS are now possible because of AI. So, that use case focus on the top layer besides the LLM and the data layer will still always be critical.”

    2026-01-22 · No Priors · No Priors Live: Building Durable Software in the AI Age with MongoDB President & CEO CJ Desai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “I mean, LLMs will be there for the software stack for the foreseeable future when you are truly building AI applications that rely on that stack. And even you have seen a lot of innovations in, you look at XAI came from nowhere, kind of, and how well they are doing overall. That stack will be there in the ageentic software framework. So that's a constant. And the data layer has to be there because you need to store data somewhere. So the data layer has to be there. So that's the second one. Everything that is around that, that's going to evolve and you better show true value on whether you use the platform, analogy or whatever, whether it's the top layer of the stack, where you really understand use case for the insurance industry. And you are building...”

    2026-01-22 · No Priors · No Priors Live: Building Durable Software in the AI Age with MongoDB President & CEO CJ Desai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “Just even speaking to since 2022, I think that's probably a very pivotal moment with the Chat GPT in the fall. Since 2022, now we are three years plus in the journey. I have never seen this because it's been pretty static for a while. The future of software is in question. It's definitely in question. And this is from the investor community, but also customers that are asking, hey, should I use X or should I use Y and whatever, right? So definitely it is a very pivotal moment on the software stack. And then you look at the software stack and you say, okay, what is the one thing that will always be there”

    2026-01-22 · No Priors · No Priors Live: Building Durable Software in the AI Age with MongoDB President & CEO CJ Desai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “Previous CEO, Dave, wonderful human being, told me that CJ, you know that there have many attempts have been made by many folks to create next version of database and this and that or next disruptive database. Nobody has passed billion and definitely nobody has passed 2 billion and MongoDB did that. So there's something special there.”

    2026-01-22 · No Priors · No Priors Live: Building Durable Software in the AI Age with MongoDB President & CEO CJ Desai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “This is what AI applications just the data is so messy. MongoDB is perfect for that. So I said, okay, cloud transition is going on, it's still going on. When I speak to Fortune 500, I can tell you without hesitation, they are all still talking about I need to move X percent of apps to GCP, AWS, Azure, some combination, Alibaba in Europe, whatever the case might be. So that's one. But second, AI transition has just started. So, if cloud started with AWS, we are in almost approaching 20th year and it's still going on. AI will still go on and this is a layer you must have. That's it. So TAM must have layer, no risk of disruption.”

    2026-01-22 · No Priors · No Priors Live: Building Durable Software in the AI Age with MongoDB President & CEO CJ Desai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “50 years. MongoDB has been a truly disruptive force with being created in 2007, so it's been only 18-ish years. So there is a large temp that could be disrupted. And whether you believe database market has been around 50 years or 60 years. And MongoDB is truly the only disruptive force. And then the second thing I learned by speaking to some of the companies here in San Francisco area was that some of the digital natives around 2010, 15 time frame and some of now the AI natives that I spoke to were building on top of MongoDB. And I'm like, wow, okay. So there is something. And when the founders created the company, they didn't know that, hey, it was like almost accidental that it will be full of unstructured data and you would want very high velocity and you will need to be able to search on.”

    2026-01-22 · No Priors · No Priors Live: Building Durable Software in the AI Age with MongoDB President & CEO CJ Desai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “Yeah, it's absolutely true that I had choices and choices are always hard or I could have Cloudflare as a great company and I could have stayed at Cloudflare. From my perspective, the first thing I look for is that is there a durable TAM, right? And I started my career. When I truly talk to, I want to say many, many customers when I did my own diligence on MongoDB, one of the surprises I had was mission-critical apps, whether it's an e-commerce app or a retailer, or whether it's a commercial banking app or a healthcare app or an insurance claims processing app, these are a very critical app. And Database industry, Oracle will celebrate its 50th in year and a half. So it has been around for a long time.”

    2026-01-22 · No Priors · No Priors Live: Building Durable Software in the AI Age with MongoDB President & CEO CJ Desai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “Then you have potentially issues no matter who you are, any company. It's a generic comment. But can you innovate more? Can you disrupt within and can you sell more? That's what if I'm an investor, and we speak to investors all the time, that's what they are looking for, that, hey, would this, will AI re-accelerate this company's growth? And unless you show reacceleration, they're going to say, okay, maybe I'm neutral, or in some extreme examples, I'm a bear.”

    2026-01-22 · No Priors · No Priors Live: Building Durable Software in the AI Age with MongoDB President & CEO CJ Desai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “You really, really need to understand what is that moat you have and you need to protect that moat or maybe strengthen that mode even more using AI. Whatever that mood is, okay? If the mode is truly, you are the platform, you already have integrated with 50 different systems in that large healthcare company, great. Why can you now integrate with 100 more companies in there? Why can't you create additional products for additional use cases really fast using AI and continue to show, I want to say, re-acceleration of growth that AI is really helping us innovate more and sell more. Because if you can't say you're innovating more, but you're not selling more”

    2026-01-22 · No Priors · No Priors Live: Building Durable Software in the AI Age with MongoDB President & CEO CJ Desai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “What would I do if I was there recently at Cloudfair? I would say. The TAM for these platforms still exist and the TAM is still large. So that's a good thing because if you feel like your TAM is decreasing or all of a sudden not relevant anymore, that's an issue. But whether it's MongoDB or anybody here who are working on their company, I would say”

    2026-01-22 · No Priors · No Priors Live: Building Durable Software in the AI Age with MongoDB President & CEO CJ Desai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “Could hold you up that is this truly an enterprise class application that you can go to a healthcare company or a public sector federal customer and do that. So yes, vibe coding will allow you to create an app fast. You have a great use case. You have some disruption in mind. That's excellent. But then there is a lot of things that you need from a go-to-market perspective to be able to break in, pass all their checks, governance, security audits and things like that.”

    2026-01-22 · No Priors · No Priors Live: Building Durable Software in the AI Age with MongoDB President & CEO CJ Desai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “Will this work? Will it pass our regulatory test? We need resiliency. Oh, what do you mean you have just built in AWS? It doesn't work in GCP. I need multi-cloud resiliency. Oh, I really need for this banking application in on-prem, truly sandboxed or better way to say it is in air gap network. I mean, these are like enterprise class things that you need where the TAM is. And so that's”

    2026-01-22 · No Priors · No Priors Live: Building Durable Software in the AI Age with MongoDB President & CEO CJ Desai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “But if you are trying to sell banks have huge budget for technology. So, okay, you stay a web coding platform, A, B, and C, you created an app, great. So your app velocity has increased. If you used MongoDB, it accelerated. Just kidding. But your app velocity is high, caught it, but you still need that go-to-market channel. How are you going to approach the bank? And then what is your true disruptive way? And then the bank will ask you, hey, we talk to regulators a lot more than we speak to our customers and vendors.”

    2026-01-22 · No Priors · No Priors Live: Building Durable Software in the AI Age with MongoDB President & CEO CJ Desai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “Platforms are there and platforms are there. So one is your dream or aspiration as a software. And if that's where the time is and you go there, and if it is just a product, eventually you're going to max out and then you will have to add multiple things. So if your platform you're sticky, products work with each other, and then those products work with all the systems you have. And I'll just make it very specific. Speaking to a bank on behalf of MongoDB, they run their commercial banking applications on top of MongoDB. They have built a lot of other integrations. They have done all the security checks, governance, all of that stuff. And I said, wow, gee, how many applications you have built on MongoDB? This is very critical, and that matter. I said, how many? And finally, the CTO tells me in London 300. I said, wow, okay, that's great. 300 applications built on MongoDB. It said, CJ, don't worry. Thank you for coming to London. We are not going anywhere. I said, can I just ask you, was the denominator? I understand that.”

    2026-01-22 · No Priors · No Priors Live: Building Durable Software in the AI Age with MongoDB President & CEO CJ Desai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “Billion plus. I mean, how many companies today that are there that are more than 10 billion in software, 10 billion in just pure play software revenue? How many companies are there? It's single digits. Okay. Why is that? The software industry has been around for a long time created by many, many smart people like yourselves. Why is it only single digit companies are more than 10 billion in revenue?”

    2026-01-22 · No Priors · No Priors Live: Building Durable Software in the AI Age with MongoDB President & CEO CJ Desai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  32. “I mean, you need an initial use case, and that initial use case has to be a killer use case because if you go in front of a large bank or a healthcare company or a manufacturing company, say you are building something here with this great audience we have, you can say, okay, this is a disruptive way to think of a legal use case or a finance use case or a help desk use case. That's great. That's your entry point. But then the entry that was easy for you to get in if it was disruptive exit would be in a similar way easy because they have not built things around you, right? So that's the main part that, okay, today it will work for your maybe 0 to 100 million, 0 to 10, 10 to 100, whatever steps you want to go in, but it gets harder and harder setup from 100 to billion, billion to 5 billion and then 10.”

    2026-01-22 · No Priors · No Priors Live: Building Durable Software in the AI Age with MongoDB President & CEO CJ Desai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  33. “You want to make sure that you have a platform, that you are positioning to the customer, whether it's a builder here in San Francisco that is creating a brand new company for a use case all the way to a very large company that is selling to, say, a large bank. So one is when you position yourself as a platform, maybe that increases your sales cycle versus selling, hey, you are using this, now you can use this, go ahead and replace it, right? So platforms are sticky because it's a thoughtful decision from a customer's perspective. The second thing that”

    2026-01-22 · No Priors · No Priors Live: Building Durable Software in the AI Age with MongoDB President & CEO CJ Desai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  34. “One of the things is platforms are sticky, products are not. So, no matter which software company you create today in the world, in the age of AI, or you create it in the past, products can be replaced. My hiring manager at ServiceNow, Frank Slutman, used to say tools are for fools, as in if you say this is a software tool, that's never a good sign. And that's why he used to say that tools are for fools. So one is products can be replaced because that's a fast software is a disruptive market.”

    2026-01-22 · No Priors · No Priors Live: Building Durable Software in the AI Age with MongoDB President & CEO CJ Desai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  35. “But from my standpoint, speed matters, right? Speed matters. So when technology transitions happen, are you building as fast as you can? And then are you learning on the technology shift, whether it's the internet age or AI age or mobile back in early 2010 when Meta made the pivot towards mobile? Are you pivoting fast? And if you pivot fast to leverage the technology, whatever the platform shifts are happening, I think it is fine. It's just that you have to stay ahead of that game. If you fall behind that game, investors or customers will always ask you that question, what is the future of your company? And that is something you have to be on the leading edge. Not every bet will work. But from my standpoint, just going on the extreme”

    2026-01-22 · No Priors · No Priors Live: Building Durable Software in the AI Age with MongoDB President & CEO CJ Desai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  36. “First, thank you for doing No Priors Live for the first time. It's Maiden, and we have a really good crowd here, so it's always exciting. You know, when you think about technology transitions, software, whether you look at internet age or mainframe all the way till AI, you have to really think through what is the mode here, right? Whichever applications you create, SaaS applications got created late 90s, right? Late 90s, I think Salesforce had the 25 years anniversary recently. So SaaS has been around for at least 25 years from a transition perspective. And now with AI, the question is, just in general, what is the future of software? What's the stack? And do you really have a moat as a company or not? There are folks, Sarah, who will say, hey, my moat is I have a great customer relationship or my channel is amazing and that's my moat as I disrupt myself within.”

    2026-01-22 · No Priors · No Priors Live: Building Durable Software in the AI Age with MongoDB President & CEO CJ Desai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  37. “Other speed matters. When technology transitions happen, are you building as fast as you can and then are you learning on the technology shift whether it's the internet age or AI age or mobile? Are you pivoting fast? It's just that you have to stay ahead of that game. If you fall behind that game, investors or customers will always ask you that question, what is the future of your company?”

    2026-01-22 · No Priors · No Priors Live: Building Durable Software in the AI Age with MongoDB President & CEO CJ Desai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  38. “Since 2022, the future of software is in question. This is from the investor community, but also customers. It is a very pivotal moment on the software stack. And then you look at the software stack and you say, okay, what is the one thing that will always be there? How many companies today that are there that are more than 10 billion in just pure play software revenue? It's single digits. Why is that? The software industry has been around for a long time created by many, many smart people like yourself. Why is it only single digit companies or more than 10 billion in revenue?”

    2026-01-22 · No Priors · No Priors Live: Building Durable Software in the AI Age with MongoDB President & CEO CJ Desai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT