Alexander Macgillivray's farewell message on Twitter.
(Credit: Twitter)Google lawyer Alexander Macgillivray has joined Twitter as its general counsel, according to posts on Sunday from Macgillivray's personal blog and Twitter account.
"Working in Google Legal has been a dream job," Macgillivray wrote on his blog. "The people at Google are phenomenal. In every part and at every level of the company there are great people with multiple useful talents in addition to those that got them the job. For a lawyer, the issues we dealt with every day were fascinating, the real-world impact of our work was humbling, and the ethical compass of the place remained true."
At Google, Macgillivray had served as associate general counsel for products and intellectual property, and had most recently been one of the company's voices in its tussle with publishers over their rights to link and reprint content.
We're not ones to sound the alarms over an alleged rush of Googlers fleeing the company for the likes of Facebook and Twitter (these things ebb and flow), but this one is a notable departure. With Twitter communication playing an increasingly prominent role in international news and affairs, the small company clearly needs to have solid legal counsel on board. For Macgillivray, it's undoubtedly more responsibility with fewer resources than the likes of Google--but a bigger space in Silicon Valley's spotlight at the moment.
Not a particularly surprising move: LinkedIn president Jeff Weiner has taken over as CEO of the company, according to an announcement Wednesday from the business networking site.
Weiner, a former executive vice president at Yahoo, joined the company in January after then-CEO Dan Nye stepped down in December and founder Reid Hoffman took over as interim CEO. Hoffman will remain executive chairman of the company.
"LinkedIn was founded to harness the power of the Internet to create a tool that would help individuals become more effective and successful professionals," Hoffman said in a release. "Over the past six months, Jeff has done an exceptional job leading the company and I look forward to continuing the work that we have begun together."
LinkedIn now has over 42 million members, the company said, and hopes to be profitable this year for the second year in a row; it makes money not only from ads, but from premium subscriptions and "corporate solutions."
The company was aiming for a billion-dollar valuation just around a year ago when it raised a $53 million Series D funding round. Hoffman has gone on the record saying that he hopes LinkedIn will eventually go public.
Considering that AllThingsD's Kara Swisher has a very good track record of knowing Van Natta's whereabouts, we're going to take this one as solid. The announcement could come as early as Friday, Swisher wrote, and though there's no word on timing, we're guessing that it'll either be after the market closes or possibly held off until Monday.
Owen Van Natta
Van Natta rose to the tech world's upper ranks as chief operating officer of Facebook, a position he took after a stint at Amazon.com. He left just more than a year ago, either because of internal disputes with CEO Mark Zuckerberg or because he saw no chance that he'd earn the top spot himself anytime soon (or both). He was then reportedly in the running for the head job at MySpace's new music service and apparently withdrew his candidacy.
Right now, he's the CEO of Project Playlist, one of the many "social music" start-ups that is technically a competitor to MySpace Music, and he has been inking deals with record labels to keep away its persistent legal problems.
DeWolfe's departure from MySpace was announced earlier this week as part of a management shake-up that was likely initiated by Jonathan Miller, the new digital boss at MySpace parent company News Corp. There will likely be other departures and new executives, but AllThingsD said they won't be announced quite yet.
Van Natta probably wasn't the only candidate under consideration: there were hints that News Corp. was also looking internally, possibly at sales and marketing executive Jeff Berman.
Either way, MySpace is in need of some fresh ideas, as it continues to slide into second place behind Facebook.
Facebook chief financial officer Gideon Yu is leaving the company, representatives from the social network confirmed Tuesday.
"Facebook confirms that CFO Gideon Yu will be leaving the company," a statement from Facebook read. "Gideon has played an important role in helping us achieve our financial success, building a strong finance team and establishing the core financial operations of our company. We are grateful to Gideon for his contributions to Facebook and what we are trying to accomplish."
But there's more: It looks like the reason for Yu's departure is because Facebook still hopes to be on track to file for an initial public offering.
"Despite the poor economic climate, we are pleased that our financial performance is strong and we are well positioned for the next stage of our growth," the statement from Facebook continued. "We have retained (search firm) Spencer Stuart to lead our search for a new CFO and will be looking for someone with public company experience."
The report was originally published in The Wall Street Journal.
Yu, a former Google employee who was brought on board there when it acquired YouTube, had been hired fewer than two years ago, and the Journal reported that Facebook is currently hunting for a replacement who has experience running a public company. Prior to YouTube, Yu had been employed as "treasurer" at Yahoo. He also has side projects, joining the team of high-profile investors--including the new Google Ventures--in e-commerce start-up Pixazza.
Yu was one of the first in a string of prominent Googlers to join Facebook's upper ranks as it rose to the top of Silicon Valley's pecking order. Eventually, sales chief Sheryl Sandberg joined the company as chief operating officer, and public affairs czar Elliot Schrage was hired as head of global communications.
So now it looks like Facebook's plan is to push for an IPO. With Yu at the helm of its finances, rumors had swirled for months that it was looking to raise additional venture capital funding to fuel its exponential growth. The company will likely hit 200 million members worldwide within days, a mass that requires costly hardware and personnel around the globe. Persistent reports hinted that not only was Yu attempting to drum up interest in more funding, but that he was having a tough time doing so.
Facebook's valuation was hit hard by the recession, with private stock trading dipping to lower and lower values and Forbes magazine speculating that founder Mark Zuckerberg had lost his status as a paper billionaire as a result.
In November 2007, Microsoft invested $240 million in Facebook at a $15 billion valuation. These days, Facebook is lucky if its valuation is a third of that. But it eventually became evident that the $15 billion was never a reality: Microsoft's stake was in preferred stock, and the $15 billion was a term of the deal.
Going public is a risky move for any company in a recession, particularly one that is still on the road to profitability but not there yet. But for Facebook, with the quest for more venture funding growing increasingly fruitless, it may be the best road out.
Three executives from social network MySpace, including Chief Operating Officer Amit Kapur, are departing the News Corp.-owned company to create a new venture.
The two execs leaving with Kapur are Jim Benedetto, senior vice president of engineering, and Steve Pearman, senior vice president of product strategy.
"We're incredibly excited to see what this team creates together and wish them the best of luck as they transition from helping run a company to building a new one," a statement from MySpace read. "Amit, Jim, and Steve depart as great friends of MySpace and of our executive team. They will remain on board for the next few weeks to ensure a smooth transition company-wide."
A company-wide memo from CEO Chris DeWolfe accentuated the health of MySpace, which has lost significant ground to rival Facebook in the past year. Facebook is now the industry leader worldwide, and while MySpace remains the U.S. leader in social networking, Facebook is expected to surpass it within a year or two. The memo highlighted recent initiatives from the five-year-old service like streaming music service MySpace Music, a redesign last year, and the HyperTargeting ad program.
MySpace has gone through a number of executive shakeups over the past year, including a big one late last July that saw five new executive hires at the same time as a number of departures.
The company would not comment on replacements for the three departing executives, and said that Kapur had not yet disclosed the nature of his new project.
In a post on the company's developer blog on Friday, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced some changes to the management of its third-party developer projects. This encompasses both the Facebook platform, which opened up the social network to third-party applications and took off like wildfire when it launched in 2007, and the newer Facebook Connect, which brings Facebook log-in credentials to participating outside sites.
No employees have departed the company or were laid off in the process, a Facebook spokesman told CNET News in an e-mail.
The new head of platform and Facebook Connect engineering is now Mike Vernal, who takes over from Charlie Cheever. Cheever will be "moving into a new role as an engineering manager where he'll be focused on building some of our new products and ways for people to share information," Zuckerberg wrote in the blog post.
More notably, platform marketing responsibilities will now be handled by Ethan Beard, who has until this point been in charge of business development at Facebook. He takes over from Elliot Schrage, Facebook's vice president of communications and public policy, who will remain in charge of his other tasks within the company.
This makes sense, since Schrage, who was hired away from Google in May to be Facebook's communications czar, wasn't the most logical fit for developer platform marketing. His background's in law, not programming; Schrage had taken over platform marketing duties when Benjamin Ling, another former Googler, left Facebook and returned to Google.
Business networking site LinkedIn has confirmed reports that its founder, Reid Hoffman, will return to the CEO post to replace resigning CEO Dan Nye.
Hoffman had stepped down as CEO in 2006 but remained chairman of the board and stayed active in product development operations. This month, LinkedIn hired Dipchand Nishar as vice president of products, with the objective of taking over some of the duties that Hoffman had been handling. Meanwhile, former Yahoo executive Jeff Wiener, currently the executive in residence at Accel Partners and Greylock Partners, will take over as interim president at LinkedIn.
Nye plans to step down in mid-January. No reason was provided for his departure.
"Dan joined LinkedIn with a mission to help us build a company that was strong and sustainable. In two years, he has succeeded in this objective, transforming LinkedIn from a young start up to a high growth business," Hoffman said in a release. LinkedIn does not make its financials completely public, but says it has been profitable since 2007.
"Dan deserves tremendous credit for his contributions to LinkedIn. His passion and commitment will continue in the efforts of the team that he's helped build here."
Currently, LinkedIn has about 33 million members and has raised more than $100 million in venture capital, giving it a valuation that's reportedly right around $1 billion.
Twitter executives Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams are switching places.
According to a post on the microblogging service's official blog, co-founder Williams will resume the helm of CEO from Dorsey, who will take over Williams' position as chairman of the board.
"We're entering a new phase now and there are new kinds of challenges ahead. Healthy companies acknowledge the need for change even during the best of times," Williams wrote in the blog post. "As Twitter grows both internally and externally, we took a good look at our path forward and saw the need for a focused approach from a single leader."
Translation: It's time to get real.
Twitter execs Jack Dorsey, left, and Evan Williams are switching places. Williams will be the company's CEO and Dorsey will take over as chairman of the board.
(Credit: Twitter)Twitter is growing fast, and closed a $15 million funding round in May. It weathered an engineering shake-up this spring and has managed to largely overcome its well-publicized server problems. Plus, Twitter has become a staple in tracking political zeitgeist--cable network Current TV displayed real-time "tweets" onscreen during the presidential debates.
But Twitter still remains Silicon Valley's poster child for hyped companies without revenue models. With the financial crisis continuing to unfold daily, that simply isn't acceptable.
We've heard whispers about Twitter's ideas for making money: that the company has thought about offering premium accounts for businesses that want to use it as a marketing tool, for example, or that its acquisition of search tool Summize may start to play into an advertising model.
But all this is tentative; the fact of the matter is, in this kind of economic climate, Twitter needs to shape up. Whether this was the result of investor pressure or a voluntary decision by Dorsey and Williams still isn't certain. At least on a superficial level, this makes sense. Williams was a more prominent "face" for the company anyway, whereas Dorsey tended to stay behind the scenes.
Could an initial public offering be on the way for the highly ambitious Glam Media? The Valley-based advertising and media company has hired a new chief financial officer, Stephen E. Recht, who was the CFO of photo-printing site Shutterfly when it went public in 2006.
Recht replaces Ernie Cicogna, a co-founder of Glam. Cicogna will remain with the company as executive vice president of Glam Partners and general manager of the Glam Publisher Network.
"(Glam) has perfected a unique media business model and established itself as the leader in vertical content networks online," Recht said in a release. "I'm looking forward to the opportunity to contribute to the company's continued upward trajectory."
That could mean a few things: on one hand, an initial public offering, but on the other hand, Glam could have recruited him simply because it needs to make more money. With an advertising recession looming and talk of dot-com doom spreading all over the Web, Glam could just be getting down to business. For obvious reasons, a financial crisis isn't the greatest time to go public; Glam is also rumored to have gone through a round of layoffs earlier this fall.
That said, Glam (and its colorful CEO, Samir Arora) is known for its audacity. The company first made its name as an ad network on fashion and celebrity gossip sites, before branching out into everything from eco-living to African-American lifestyle to the luxury market. It's raised an astonishing amount of venture capital, has stocked its executive ranks with veterans of both print publishing and Silicon Valley, and was at the center of a rumored billion-dollar buyout offer.
Depending on whom you talked to, that buyout offer was either a fake rumor started internally to drum up Glam's market value or a savvy pre-IPO move. And that's the bipolar perception of Glam in both the tech and advertising sectors: some think it's the future of the industry, whereas skeptics see it as a big, drawn-out case of pride before a fall.
But now it looks as if there's one ex-Shutterfly executive who's betting on the former.
Another high-level Yahoo employee has left the building: Valeh Vakili, director of U.S. sales operations, will join News Corp.'s MySpace as senior vice president of sales strategy and operations.
At Yahoo, Vakili was in charge of integrating the sales teams from acquired properties like Right Media into Yahoo's own; at MySpace she will be in charge of the social network's account management team. Vakili will remain based in New York. (MySpace's headquarters are in Los Angeles.)
Yahoo's "executive exodus" has been well-documented, with dwindling search share and a disastrous takeover bid from Microsoft dampening employee morale.
MySpace announced in July the hiring of five new vice presidents, two of whom came from Yahoo--but at the same time underwent company layoffs. Statistics firm ComScore reported in June that MySpace had, ironically, surpassed Yahoo as the biggest destination for display ads on the Web.
