Sold!
Auction site eBay has, as long anticipated, sold off the Skype telephony service to a group of investors that includes Marc Andreessen's new Andreessen Horowitz group, Silver Lake, and the Skype co-founders' Joltid Ltd. The investor group now holds about 70 percent of the company; eBay retains the rest in a minority stake. Joltid was brought into the investor group as part of the settlement of a copyright suit that the Skype co-founders, Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, filed against eBay over Skype's technology. At one point, that dispute was looking so ugly that eBay was reportedly considering rebuilding Skype's technology altogether.
The sale amounted to approximately $1.9 billion in cash and a note from the buyer in the principal amount of $125 million, for a total of $2.025 billion.
eBay's plans to get rid of Skype, a purchase that had never fit quite well into its auction business, had been well-publicized. Last spring, the company formally announced that it planned to spin off Skype as a publicly traded company in the first half of 2010.
The final $2.75 billion valuation is only slightly higher than the $2.6 billion that eBay originally acquired Skype for in 2005.
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.
Facebook announced on Tuesday that it has hired a new chief operating officer to replace the outgoing Owen Van Natta. Starting on March 24, veteran Google employee Sheryl Sandberg will take on the executive role at the social network.
For six years, Sandberg was vice president of global sales and operations at Google, where she helped to grow the company's AdWords and AdSense products, as well as its Google.org nonprofit division.
As part of her new job, according to a statement from the social-networking company, she will "be responsible for helping Facebook scale its operations and expand its presence globally," as well as "manage sales, marketing, business development, human resources, public policy, privacy, and communications."
Sheryl Sandberg, the Google veteran who will be Facebook's new COO.
(Credit: Dan Farber/CNET Networks)Sandberg is also an alumna of both Harvard University's undergraduate college and Harvard Business School; Facebook famously got its start in dorm rooms at the elite Cambridge, Mass., institution.
Hiring an experienced Silicon Valley executive is no surprise on Facebook's part. Founder Mark Zuckerberg has yet to reach his 24th birthday, and the fast-growing company has run into some rocky patches over projects like the "Beacon" advertising campaign and members' ability to delete their profiles.
Some critics have suggested that in order for the company to stay on top of Silicon Valley, it would need more seasoned employees in high places.
Additionally, Sandberg's experience in building the Internet's most successful digital-advertising giant will be a valuable asset to Facebook, which is in the process of building a "social advertising" model that can boost the company's profits.
Social-media advertising's less-than-stellar reputation was solidified when Google co-founder Sergey Brin said the search giant's contract with News Corp.'s MySpace.com, Facebook's chief rival, had produced disappointing revenue results.
By pulling in a Google advertising veteran, Facebook likely hopes to bring new levels of legitimacy to its advertising strategy, boosting advertiser confidence and eventually profit margins.
"Sheryl is a great manager who will help scale Facebook's operations globally," Zuckerberg, to whom Sandberg will report, said in a statement. "She has relevant experience and a track record of scaling business operations and building new kinds of advertising networks. Sheryl understands Facebook's goal of connecting everyone in the world and is passionate about building a business that will enable us to realize this mission."
Sandberg, 38, is by no means the first Google staffer to defect to a high-profile post at Facebook. The company's chief financial officer is Gideon Yu, formerly of YouTube, and former Google Checkout czar Benjamin Ling is in charge of product marketing for the Facebook Platform developer initiative.
Sandberg and Zuckerberg, according to an article in The New York Times, met at a Christmas party last December. Negotiations between the two reportedly began with the help of venture capitalist Roger McNamee of Elevation Partners.
Sandberg had joined Google prior to the company's initial public offering, and before that was chief of staff for former Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers when he was secretary of the treasury in former U.S. President Bill Clinton's administration.
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