Monday’s founders are getting a raise. Now they have to prove they deserve it
Shareholders approved new compensation packages for Roy Mann and Eran Zinman just days before the company reports earnings. The bigger question is whether monday can deliver growth in an industry being reshaped by AI.
The uproar over the doubling of monday executives Roy Mann and Eran Zinman’s compensation packages is an interesting story, but it is not the most important one currently facing the company. After laying off 20% of its workforce and holding a contentious shareholder vote on executive pay, monday is about to face a far more consequential test: the publication of its second-quarter financial results.
On Monday, Mann and Zinman will have to face investors and demonstrate which camp of software companies monday belongs to, those capable of turning AI into a competitive advantage, or those that will struggle to survive the revolution. Of course, that question will not be answered definitively by the second quarter of 2026. But if Mann and Zinman want to justify compensation packages that could reach $14 million each in 2029, most of it in shares, they will need to convince investors that they know how to steer monday through the upheaval brought by AI. If monday succeeds in reinventing itself for the new era, $14 million could ultimately look like small money.
The problem is that, to date, Mann and Zinman have not demonstrated that they recognized early enough the depth of the transformation taking place in the software market, and particularly in enterprise workflow management software.
Monday’s stock began its decline in late 2024, as investors increasingly recognized that AI could replace significant parts of the enterprise software market. For a long time, the company’s executives dismissed the shift, arguing that the weakness was largely the result of negative sentiment toward software stocks. It was only at the beginning of 2026 that Mann and Zinman appeared to acknowledge the scale of the challenge facing monday. Even then, however, the company had yet to take meaningful action, despite increasingly clear signals from the capital markets.
The business itself continued to grow, albeit more slowly, while the stock collapsed. Over the past 12 months, monday’s shares have lost 62%, leaving the company with a market value of about $4 billion, almost 50% below its valuation at the time of its 2021 IPO.
Meanwhile, monday continued to operate largely as it had before. The company rented additional office space in Israel and continued hiring at a rapid pace. In fact, at the beginning of this year, even as the software industry was increasingly talking about a “SaaS apocalypse,” monday said it planned to increase its workforce by another 11%-15% in 2026.
At the end of 2025, management also issued an ambitious forecast of $1.8 billion in revenue in 2027, compared with $1.2 billion in 2025.
Within just a few months, monday made a dramatic U-turn on virtually all of those decisions. It canceled its planned office expansion and, after months of denying that it was considering layoffs, not only stopped hiring but cut 620 jobs. Monday’s annual report shows that the company added 647 employees during 2025. In other words, almost as many employees as the company hired during the entire year were subsequently let go.
The company also sought to withdraw its 2027 revenue forecast, which it had presented to investors only months earlier, at the beginning of 2026.
This abrupt reversal is the biggest question mark hanging over monday today. The executive compensation controversy is merely another symptom of it.
The issue is not simply the size of Mann and Zinman’s packages. If monday’s stock does not rise, the two executives will receive little of the headline amount, since most of the compensation is equity-based. Nor is the central issue the timing of last Thursday’s vote, which came shortly after hearings for employees who had been laid off.
The more troubling point is that monday itself said the work on the new compensation package began six months ago, in the winter of 2026, when management already knew it was preparing to withdraw its optimistic 2027 forecast and when the collapse in software stocks was at its most severe.
There is no doubt that Mann and Zinman are talented entrepreneurs. They took monday from a startup that few investment funds initially believed in, and whose product was dismissed by some as “Excel with colors”, to a company generating $1.2 billion in revenue in 2025. They also built a public company that went through an IPO in 2021.
But precisely because of the scale they have achieved, the nature of their responsibility has changed.
After the layoffs, monday still employs about 2,500 people. It sells to thousands of customers, and its shares are held by a large number of investors. That is the difference between being a successful startup entrepreneur and running a public company.
The shareholder meeting approved the compensation packages on Thursday, as was widely expected. The new salaries are not particularly unusual by the standards of public companies traded on Wall Street, where large compensation packages and mass layoffs in the name of efficiency are hardly exceptional.
Fortunately for monday, the company did not succumb to the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange’s efforts to persuade it to list its shares in Israel. Had it done so, local institutional investors would have faced far greater pressure over the compensation vote and might well have rejected the new pay policy.
But all of that is yesterday’s story.
On Monday, the focus will shift to the financial statements. If monday fails to demonstrate convincing growth or provide investors with an optimistic outlook, those same shareholders who approved the compensation packages could punish the stock severely. Unlike the Israeli market, Wall Street offers investors an almost endless number of alternatives.
Monday has not yet changed its forecast for $1.46 billion in revenue this year, which would represent 20% growth. In the second quarter, it is expected to report revenue of about $355 million, essentially flat from the previous quarter.
The results from monday’s American peers, released at the end of last week, offer no simple answer. They point in different directions. Atlassian, the company behind Jira, delivered strong results and saw its stock jump 30%. HubSpot, by contrast, fell by a similar amount after issuing a weak outlook.
That divergence is important. AI is not necessarily destroying every software company indiscriminately. It is creating winners and losers, depending in part on how effectively companies adapt to the new environment.
That is the burden of proof now facing Mann and Zinman. The compensation controversy may have dominated the headlines, but the more important question is whether monday can prove that it has finally understood the scale of the change, and knows what to do about it.
