CJ Desai says Salesforce recently marked its 25th anniversary and that SaaS has existed for at least 25 years.
“I think Salesforce had their twenty-five years anniversary recently, and so s aas has been around for at least twenty-five years”
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CJ Desai
1 episodes · 21 quoted claims
CJ Desai cites Meta's pivot toward mobile in early 2010 as an example of a company moving fast on a platform shift.
“Back in, uh, early 2010, when Meta made the pivot towards, uh, mobile, are you pivoting fast?”
CJ Desai says his hiring manager at ServiceNow, Frank Slootman, used to say 'tools are for fools'.
“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.”
CJ Desai says only a single-digit number of companies have more than $10 billion in pure-play software revenue.
“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?”
CJ Desai says the CTO of a bank in London told him the bank had built 300 applications on MongoDB.
“And finally, the CTO tells me in London, 300. I said, Wow, okay, that's great, 300 applications built on MongoDB.”
CJ Desai says the bank's total application count was 9,000, so its 300 MongoDB applications were a small share.
“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.”
CJ Desai says he started his career at Oracle Corporation after college and learned how Oracle scaled its database platform.
“I started my career out of college with Oracle Corporation and understood how they scale the database platform”
CJ Desai says Oracle will celebrate its fiftieth anniversary in about a year and a half, showing how long the database industry has existed.
“database industry, Oracle will celebrate its fiftieth in year and a half. So it has been around for a long time, fifty years.”
CJ Desai says MongoDB was created in 2007 and has been a disruptive force in the decades-old database market.
“MongoDB has been a truly disruptive force with being created in 2007, so it's been only eighteen-ish years.”
CJ Desai says MongoDB's previous CEO, Dave, told him that no challenger database had passed $1 billion in revenue before MongoDB passed $2 billion.
“Nobody has passed billion, and definitely nobody has passed 2 billion, and MongoDB did that, so there's something special there.”
CJ Desai says the cloud transition that began with AWS is approaching its twentieth year and is still under way.
“if cloud started with A W S, we are in the almost approaching twentieth year, and it's still going on.”
CJ Desai describes the fall 2022 launch of ChatGPT as a pivotal moment after which the future of software has been in question.
“I think that's probably a very, uh, pivotal moment with the chat G P T in the fall. Since 2022, now we are three years plus in that journey.”
CJ Desai says many Fortune 500 customers tried office-productivity copilots and report unclear value.
“A lot of them tried with the office productivity type co-pilots, unclear how much value they got out of it.”
CJ Desai says AI coding assistants started with GitHub Copilot in 2022, followed by other tools including Anthropic's.
“2024 and twenty-two started with GitHub co-pilot, then few others, all the way to Anthropic, uh, and so on.”
CJ Desai says 2025 was a breakthrough year for AI coding assistants and that customers give very positive feedback on them.
“So 2025 was a breakthrough year, from my perspective, on the coding assistance, and that's still going on.”
CJ Desai says a European retailer he met at NRF in New York had failed ERP implementations and decided to build its own system on MongoDB.
“they tried a bunch of systems of record for e r p, expensive, failed implementations, lots, lots of issues on supply chain, all the way to financials”
CJ Desai says he learned about customer engagement from John Thompson, then CEO of Symantec, around 2005.
“our C E O at the time was John Thompson at Symantec, and this was early 2,000 five-ish time frame”
CJ Desai says BlackBerry kept selling strongly for several quarters after the iPhone launched before it was disrupted.
“after the iPhone, BlackBerry was still selling a lot and was not being disrupted until it got really disrupted.”
CJ Desai says that when MongoDB published its Q3 results he was repeatedly asked whether growth came from AI and answered that it did not.
“MongoDB published our, uh, Q three results. I got asked this question over and over again, is this because of A I? And I said, absolutely not.”
CJ Desai says hundreds of AI-native companies build on MongoDB but that they are not what drove its core growth.
“Yes, we have A I native companies building on MongoDB, we have hundreds of them, but that's not this.”
CJ Desai says only about ten AI-native companies have reached roughly $100 million to $1 billion in annual recurring revenue.
“There are like ten companies like that today, today, right? There are not that many companies”