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Another high-level Facebook departure

June 20, 2008 2:15am

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.

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June 20, 2008 2:15am in Tech | Comment

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