No Priors: CJ Desai in Conversation with Sarah Guo | MongoDB.local San Francisco 2026

That's a very spicy question to start with. I like it.

Yeah. First, thank you for doing No Priors live for the first time. It's a maiden voyage and we have a really good crowd here. So it's always exciting. You know, when you think about technology transition, software, whether you look at internet age or mainframe all the way till AI, you have to really think through what is the moat here, right? Whichever applications you create, you know, SaaS applications got created late 90s, right? Late 90s. I think Salesforce had their 25 years anniversary recently. And 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? And 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. 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 that 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'll figure this out together.

Sure. One of the things is platforms are sticky, products are not. So no matter which software company you create today in the age of AI or you created in the past, products can be replaced. My hiring manager at ServiceNow, Frank Slootman, 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 software is a disruptive market. So 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.

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, Sarah, from 100 to billion, billion to 5 billion, and then 10 billion plus. I mean, how many companies today that are there that are more than 10 billion in software?

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? Because platforms are rare. Platforms are rare. So one is your dream or aspiration as a software company should be that you become a platform. And once you are a platform, that means you have n equals at least two. You have two plus products being used by your customers from whatever you are offering. They all work in unison with each other. So it's sticky truly from a technology perspective. And then what I would argue further, all the integrations that your customer has to do with their existing systems, because remember if you go to a large bank, bank has been around for some of them 100 plus years. You go to a large insurance company, they've been around for 100 plus years. If you go to a healthcare company, same thing. You look at Fortune 10, Fortune 100, Fortune 500, that's where the TAM is. And if that's where the TAM is and you go there and if it is just a product, eventually you're going to max out and then you'll have to add multiple things. So if you're a 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? They say 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. And said, CJ, don't worry, we thank you for coming to London, we are not going anywhere. I said, can I just ask you what's the denominator? I understand the numerator is 300. He said, 9,000. I said, 9,000, that's a great opportunity for MongoDB. So, and he said, I'm not going anywhere. I'm not going. So that's when the more they use, the more sticky we get. And then we are in the fabric of their infrastructure.

Yeah. But if you are, you know, trying to sell, banks have huge budget for technology, right? So, okay, you used a vibe 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. Okay. But your app velocity is high. Got 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. Yeah, 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 on-prem truly sandboxed or better way to say it is an air-gapped network. I mean these are like enterprise-class things that you need where the TAM is. Right. And so that's what 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.

Wow, it's a tough question. What would I do if I was there? So recently at Cloudflare, 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. So I would say you really, really need to understand what is that moat you have and you need to protect that moat or maybe strengthen that moat even more using AI, whatever that moat is. Okay. If the moat is truly you are the platform, you already have integrated with 50 different systems in that large healthcare company. Great. Why can't 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, if you say you're innovating more but you're not selling more, then you have potentially issues no matter who you are. Any company, I'm just, 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, will AI re-accelerate this company's growth? And unless you show re-acceleration, they're going to say, okay, maybe I'm neutral or in some extreme examples, I'm a bear.

Be a platform. Yeah. It's absolutely true that I had choices and choices are always hard. I could have, Cloudflare is a great company and I could have stayed at Cloudflare. So from my perspective, the first thing I look for is that is there a durable TAM, right? And I started my career out of college with Oracle Corporation and understood how they scaled the database platform, truly created apps on top of it and a bunch of other things during Oracle's organic growth days before they started buying various assets and learned a lot on how did they really think about the database platform, then the middleware, then the application layer on top of it and so on. So one, with Cloudflare, having understanding of the database market, large TAM, that's great. And then MongoDB is also a large TAM. So that's the sequencing between Cloudflare and MongoDB. Second, with MongoDB, when I truly talked 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 for a retailer or whether it's a commercial banking app or a healthcare app or an insurance claims processing app, these are very critical apps. And database industry, Oracle will celebrate its 50th in a year and a half. So it has been around for a long time. MongoDB has been a truly disruptive force with being created in 2007. So it's been only 18-ish years. And so there is a large TAM that could be disrupted, 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 2005 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 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 this, which is what AI applications, just the data is so messy. And 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% 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 the 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.

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

That's the bear thesis, right?

Dominant thesis. Okay. Well, you know, change my mind on any of the assumptions. What do you feel like more confident on, you know, in terms of ways in which applications will be valuable in the future?

Since 2022, I think that's probably a very pivotal moment with the ChatGPT 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 is definitely in question and this is from the investor community but also customers 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? I mean, LLMs will be there for the software stack for foreseeable future when you are truly building AI applications that rely on that stack. And even you have seen a lot of innovations, you look at xAI came from nowhere kind of and how well they are doing overall, but that stack will be there in the agentic 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 an AI native company for the insurance industry. Insurance industry has multitude of use cases. You say, okay, please move from old SaaS X 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 SaaS 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. What is your sense? You have startup and individual developer customers all the way to Fortune 10.

Yeah. So I would say on the office, and I speak to customers all the time, and I feel this is something I've shared with the team, but 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. Okay. 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. Unclear how much value they got out of it. They're like, okay, this really works with my Excel or, you know, 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 assistance that kind of took off in 2024 in a meaningful way, very, very positive. 2024 and 2025 started with GitHub Copilot, then few 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 customer support. You know, that and on customer support, they're like, okay, truly if I'm a large say telco or I'm a large healthcare company, can that fully be done on this AI native company that does customer support? Not there yet, right? They are going after initial use cases and that's great in certain industries.

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 and or an or? So I have a system of record on one of the companies for customer support and...

Yes. Salesforce. And if I'm using Salesforce and I'm using, I have this disruptive company that came and said they can solve these problems, these support cases, should I think about that as an and or an or? And I ask them the same questions, you know, we use 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? 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. That...

Yes.

I mean, absolutely. If you are, you know, 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 just making productive, productive is okay, but we are transforming our business using AI.

That's correct.

Yeah. 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're 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 had me at hello. And to do that, but if these kind of organizations are going to transform within or disrupt within, I asked Deepa, our 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.

Yeah. I think it was our CEO at the time was John Thompson 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, it made a huge impression on me. And then...

Yeah. 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 a great product, 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. Okay, 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 your e-com application? He said, yep, we're very happy, e-com is 20% of our revenue. I said, great. Do you know that you are not using our search? Do you know we also have vector search? He's like, oh, I didn't know that. Does my team know that? And we are following up with him. But this kind of having that customer intimacy makes you much better of a product person. I would say any product person who thinks as you build, they will come. 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 ServiceNow or 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 insight on how do sales teams show up, how do we price the customers, if something bad happens, an outage happens or something, how do we show up during the crisis? Those are the things that have really made me a very, very grounded product person and understanding the go-to-market channel and the business strategy.

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. Not leaning in. 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. 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 the iPhone, BlackBerry was still selling a lot and was not being disrupted until it got really disrupted. So these transitions, you know, is more of a change management thing and that's when you achieve the step 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 and permission from the customer and that's when it happens. Otherwise, you are on the bear thesis that I'm not sure. And the only way you prove investors wrong on the bear thesis, because sometimes they don't get it right, is by re-accelerating and showing that hey, now we are back.

Yes.

Yeah, right. 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, we have AI native companies building on MongoDB. We have hundreds of them. But that's not because, once then I give them X%, this is how I think about AI native companies. Then they're like, you can optimize for that.

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 there are 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 and, not an or, that when AI wave really takes off, that we'll 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.

Yes, and thank you very much. Really appreciate it. Thank you.