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Another high-level Facebook departure
June 20, 2008
The exodus of early Facebook executives continues. Six weeks after Facebook announced the departure of co-founder and technology guru Adam D’Angelo, the social network said on Thursday that Matt Cohler, one of Mark Zuckerberg’s first hires, is on his way out.
Well, not exactly. Cohler is leaving his position as VP of product development to become a general partner at Benchmark Capital, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm. But he will stay on at Facebook in an “advisory” capacity, whatever that means.
Cohler’s not-quite departure is the latest evidence of the changes underway at a company that is trying to mature beyond its scrappy startup beginnings. Of the original, core team of executives that led Facebook up from obscurity to take on MySpace for the title of world’s biggest social network, only Mr Zuckerberg and his former Harvard roomate, Dustin Moskovitz, remain.
It’s not hard to understand why. It has been ten months since Facebook garnered its eye-popping $15bn valuation in an investment round with Microsoft, and the pressure to drum up the sales and profits necessary to justify such a high price tag remains intense.
Yet for all the work Facebook has been doing to develop its business model, it has little to show for it publicly. Over the past few months, the company’s PR operation has fallen largely silent, while the focus of internet buzz has shifted to other services like Twitter and Friendfeed (a Benchmark company).
There is little doubt that Zuckerberg and his new number two, Sheryl Sandberg, are hard at work on the business model needed to carry Facebook through the next stage of its development, perhaps paving the way for an eventual IPO. But there is also little doubt that Facebook isn’t quite the free-wheeling startup it used to be.
Tags: Digital media, Facebook, Internet, people
Interesting blog, Kevin. To me, Facebook is very compelling because people actually use their real names and their real e-mails…i.e. on Facebook, I’m “John Earnhardt”…not “XYZ8211″ like I could be on other social media sites.
I clearly don’t understand advertising, but it seems that since everybody VOLUNTEERS how old they are, where they went to school and what they are interested in, etc., it would be great for marketers to, say, target white 39-year-old males from the south who live in California, are married and have a 1 year old. Seems like at the very least Pampers would be all over that profile. We shall see. And, I searched for you on Facebook, but couldn’t find you…are you on it? If no, join the fun.
Posted by: John Earnhardt | June 20th, 2008 at 9:47 pm | Report this commentThe pressure on the Facebook management team to monetize their audience must be enormous. At INFINICOR we have worked with a number of the big-name US venture capital firms, such as Benchmark. All of them say the same thing: great to have a community with detailed data and a detailed advertising platform but at the end of the day it is extremely hard to monetize a community. Do people really look at banners? The click-through rates are really low.
No-one really seems to understand how Facebook could have achieved the implied valuation that it did. But perhaps the answer is that it is a platform for others to create revenue generating content and applications for.
One of the really innovative things we have noticed out there is Playfish. Playfish are creating free social games with built-in advertising content for distribution through Facebook. With a game you can run a pre- and post roll adverts that you can be sure the user is watching intently.
Posted by: Christian Olsen | June 27th, 2008 at 5:49 pm | Report this comment