No Priors Live: Building Durable Software in the AI Age with MongoDB President & CEO CJ Desai

**CJ Desai** (0:00)
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 are more than 10 billion in the world? Because platforms are rare. Platforms are there. 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 building 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?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:59)
Welcome to the very first live recording of the No Priors Podcast with host Sarah Guo and MongoDB President and CEO, CJ Desai. Hey everyone.

**Sarah Guo** (1:10)
I am so happy to be here with you guys and my longtime friend CJ. I know you guys have had a great day of announcements and learnings here at the conference, but I'm really excited personally to have the opportunity to zoom out with CJ to talk about the future of software, what's happening in SaaS and where the value is going to be. These are important questions to me in my day job as a venture investor.
So CJ, you have worked at these platform enterprise software and infrastructure companies, became CEO of MongoDB recently. I feel like the one question that we were just talking about, that every investor asks you and then everybody in the technology ecosystem has the back of their mind is, what is the value of software when you can generate a bunch of software? So I'd love to just get your thoughts on this.

**CJ Desai** (2:02)
It's a very spicy question to start with. I like it.

**Sarah Guo** (2:04)
I'm making sure everybody's awake.

**CJ Desai** (2:06)
Yeah. First, thank you for doing No Priors live for the first time. It's made in and we have a really good crowd here, so it's always exciting.
When you think about technology transition software, whether you look at Internet age or mainframe, all the way to AI, you have to really think through what is the mode here. Whichever applications you create, SaaS applications got created late 90s. Late 90s, I think Salesforce had their 25 years anniversary recently. SaaS has been around for at least 25 years from a transition perspective. 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 mode as a company or not? There are folks who will say, hey, my mode is I have a great customer relationship, or my channel is amazing and that's my mode, as I disrupt myself within. 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, the just going on the extreme terminal value being zero for some of the software, they are overblown. And we will figure this out together.

**Sarah Guo** (4:18)
Part of your career, you were leading product at ServiceNow.
It is one of the most durable enterprise software companies. Or so everyone assumed until relatively recently. And now this question is up for debate. I think for a lot of people within an engineering mindset who think about buying developer tools or using developer infrastructure, the word like customer stickiness or distribution as the moat, it feels very abstract. Can you just talk a little bit about how important ServiceNow, as an example, is to its customers and what you think about that?

**CJ Desai** (4:55)