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Facebook, the most successful internet company of the last ten years, is facing a small, but interesting, Diaspora. Facebook’s employees are not leaving the company, but the most relevant people in the company have left it more than once. Since the beginning of Facebook, three key figures have left the company.
We are talking about Adam D’Angelo, Dustin Moskovitz and Bret Taylor. The question is why?
Why should they want to leave a well established company such as Facebook in order to launch a young and weak startup? Is this the right thing to do?
Adam D’Angelo
He was one of the first to leave the company. He resigned his role as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) in order to start Quora, a Questions and Answers site which we have covered a lot in the previous entries. What it is remarkable here is that Adam with almost 0.8% of Facebook, a great position at one of the best companies of the last years and a NetWorth which is pretty close to 1B$, decided to have fun with another interesting project. He taught us a lesson, he taught us that it is not about money, but it is about doing what you love and what you care about.
Dustin Moskovitz
We covered this guy before int the Top Tech Living Entrepreneurs List; he was Mark Zuckerberg’s room mate and he left Harvard with his buddy in order to develop and spread Facebook around the world. While being at Facebook he developed an internal web based system to make the work more efficient. That product was the beginning of Asana, his new startup, whose aim is to manage your things between your employees and colleagues in a more productive way.
Bret Taylor
Last week Bret announced his departure from Facebook as CTO. He has been pretty well known in the social networking world since he was the founder and CEO of FriendFeed, a real time feed aggregator. The founders of this startup were all former Google’s employees. Facebook acquired the company and its team in August 2009. Now Bret Taylor, as he wrote on his profile, is leaving Facebook to found a startup with Kevin Gibbs.
I wanted to let you all know that I’ll be leaving Facebook later this summer. I’m sad to be leaving, but I’m excited to be starting a company with my friend Kevin Gibbs.
While a transition like this is never easy, I’m extremely confident in the teams and leadership we have in place. I’m very proud of our recent accomplishments in our platform and mobile products, from Open Graph and App Center to Facebook Camera and our iOS integration. I’m even more excited for the world to see all the amazing things these teams have coming.
I’ve learned more than I ever imagined in my time at Facebook. I’m also extremely grateful for my relationship with all of the amazing people I’ve worked with here.
I want to give a special thanks to Mark Zuckerberg. You’ve not only been my boss for the past three years, but my mentor and one of my closest friends.
Thanks to all of you at Facebook for the most incredible three years of my life.
The first two moved in Knowledge and Enterprise, now we need to see what he is up to.
Facebook, Google, Apple and dozens of companies are the best places to work in, but everyone has that small and tiny desire to start his own company; people want to share their knowledge or ideas by being the leader of what they think and not by playing in second base. It is great to see this and it is great to see the innovation that is coming from this Entrepreneurs, which believe that the web is the place where we are going to live in the next decades.
