A Male CEO Leans Out

In this blog entry called “Why Am I Leaving the Best Job I Ever Had,” a male CEO with three kids explains why he’s quitting. He can’t do the “all in” thing anymore; he’s missing too much of the rest of his life.

Friends and colleagues often ask my wife how she balances her job and motherhood. Somehow, the same people don’t ask me.

A few months ago, I decided the only way to balance was by stepping back from my job. MongoDB is a special company. In my nearly 4 years at the company, we have raised $220 million, grown the team 15x and grown sales 30x. We have amazing customers, a great product which gets better with every release, the strongest team I have ever worked with, and incredible momentum in the market. The future is bright and MongoDB deserves a leader who can be “all-in” and make the most of the opportunity. Unfortunately, I cannot be that leader given the geography of the majority of the company in New York and my family in California.

I recognize that by writing this I may be disqualifying myself from some future CEO role. Will that cost me tens of millions of dollars someday? Maybe. Life is about choices. Right now, I choose to spend more time with my family and am confident that I can continue to have an meaningful and rewarding work life while doing so. At first, it seemed like a hard choice, but the more I have sat with the choice the more certain I am that it is the right choice.

The amount of “all in” we require seems kind of insane. Do we want the only people qualified to lead our companies to be people without families, or with families but without interest in spending time with them? Schireson seems like a mensch who has managed to be successful in business. That’s a golden combination. Shouldn’t we as a society figure out how to retain people like that, rather than drive them out?

Part of the reason my husband left the corporate law firm where he had been for seven-ish years is because they don’t have a part-time track — meaning any option besides the standard 60+ hours a week. In law as well as other fields, it’s a missed opportunity.

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