Facebook picked a new CFO quietly, after its cloddish public parting with longtime top financial exec Gideon Yu earlier this year.
The fast-growing social-networking site said in late March it was looking for a CFO with “public company experience,” and it seems to have gotten one in former Genentech CFO David Ebersman.
And, indeed, with the addition of Ebersman, Facebook inches ever closer to an IPO.
How much is BoomTown and everyone else in Silicon Valley trying to nab a copy of Ben Mezrich’s likely-to-be-entirely-made-up-but-who-cares tale of dirty doings at Facebook?
Muchety-much! But, so far I have come up peanuts in grabbing an early copy of the work of “fact”-ion–titled “The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal”–which is set to come out July 14, along with a movie later.
Facebook is not pleased, of course, and will likely be challenging Mezrich’s work as specious dreck, but here’s my own list of 10 completely made-up, utterly fabricated, just-call-me-Jayson-Blair facts that should be in the book.
Exactly how is the introduction of vanity URLs on Facebook going to go?
At 9:01 p.m. PDT on Friday, the giant Silicon Valley-based social-networking site will allow its 200 million members to log in and claim a friendlier username for part of their URLs instead of the long string of gibberish that is now there.
But, because it is about people’s names and because it is certain to be chaotic in its execution, I think we can pretty much slap the moniker “URLgate” on this one and just call it a night.
BoomTown tried to get Chris Kelly to give up more during an onstage interview I did with the Facebook chief privacy officer last night at the third “Tech Policy Summit” and was only moderately successful in the endeavor.
Oh he is a smoothie all right, as a lawyer and now as a wannabe politician.
Kelly–who is still working at the social-networking site, where his job is to make sure consumer data, privacy, the children and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s reputation are all safe and sound–is also running for the job of California’s attorney general.
Former Facebook COO Owen Van Natta has finally been officially named as CEO of MySpace, as BoomTown reported yesterday and News Corp. announced this morning.
He will replace CEO and co-founder Chris DeWolfe, who stepped down from the job earlier this week. DeWolfe will remain a strategic adviser at MySpace.
Here’s the full press release.
Former Facebook exec Owen Van Natta will be named CEO of MySpace as early as tomorrow said sources close to the situation.
He will replace CEO and co-founder Chris DeWolfe, who stepped down from the job yesterday. DeWolfe will remain a strategic adviser at MySpace.
No other top execs at the huge social-networking site will be named yet, as some have reported.
Finally, Owen Van Natta is about to win out over a founder.
The former Facebook COO is poised to become the CEO of MySpace, replacing co-founder and current CEO Chris DeWolfe.
DeWolfe will likely get a title as a special adviser to MySpace in a deal that is still coming together.
But the die seems cast for Van Natta to take over the thorny job of rehauling MySpace, which is owned by News Corp.
It’s familiar territory for him.
This weekend on Twitter, someone paid BoomTown a compliment of a sort: “I read you because you are a solid fact-based reporter with a Miss Cleo intuition :)”
Yipes, because of being fact-based and since I had brought her up in an originating tweet, I had to point out that the well-known-via-infomercials Psychic Friends Network shaman turned out to be a bit of a fraud, although she’s always entertaining, with her jaunty Jamaican accent (she was not, of course, from there).
Nonetheless, it got me thinking about how I would predict what would result from all the deal-making that is suddenly in the air, after six months of ennui from the current economic downturn.
In this digital era’s version of “Spy Vs. Spy,” Microsoft and Google find themselves in yet another sharp-elbowed battle to be the one to strike some sort of commercial search deal or product partnership with Twitter, many sources with knowledge of the situation said, as they also jockey for position to evaluate the potential of the much-hyped microblogging start-up.
After last week’s explosive rumor that Google was in “late-stage” talks to acquire Twitter, which BoomTown reported was wildly premature, I set out to try to sort out exactly what was going on.
As I found out, there was a lot–mostly much talking related to possible product and distribution partnerships, centered around Google or Microsoft, as both struggle to gauge the importance of Twitter.
It’s a familiar roundelay for the two most powerful companies on the Web.
Dear Elliot Schrage:
BoomTown wins.
As Sheryl knows from experience, don’t mess with the Swish. Or Texas. Or Zohan.
Just don’t mess.
For everyone else, here is the entire memo that Facebook sent out this week to its staff about the departure of CFO Gideon Yu and the financial status of the social-networking start-up, which some had been questioning.
Back in the heyday, Peter Currie was the money man to see in Silicon Valley.
As CFO of Netscape Communications, he led the famed browser start-up into history, as the first great Internet rocket ship, when it went public on Aug. 9, 1995.
Rising to insane levels, the stock was ground zero of the Internet gold rush, despite the fact that it had no profits to speak of. But it did have a 23-year-old co-founder and tech wunderkind in Marc Andreessen and a growth trajectory that was astounding.
If you think it sounds somewhat similar to Facebook today–where Currie will now help out as temporary financial adviser after the social-networking site parted ways with its CFO, Gideon Yu, yesterday–you are correct.
In a back-to-the-future move, former Netscape CFO Peter Currie will be the key adviser to Facebook about financial matters, until a new CFO is found, sources said.
The temporary move puts a well-known and well-liked Silicon Valley figure in place at the social-networking company at what is surely a tumultuous moment. Currie has most recently been a venture investor.
Today, Facebook parted ways with its CFO, Gideon Yu, saying it was prepping for an eventual IPO. But other sources said the departure was due to increasing tension with Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg.
Perhaps most interestingly, Currie is close with Facebook board member and Netscape Communications co-founder Marc Andreessen.
Facebook CFO Gideon Yu is leaving Facebook, as the company announced internally today that it was replacing him and searching for a new CFO on the path to an eventual IPO.
The Wall Street Journal also reported the news, noting that the huge social-networking start-up was looking for a CFO with “public company experience.”
But several sources within the company said the departure was more due to an increasingly strained relationship between Yu and Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg over strategic disagreements about a wide range of issues, from increasing ad revenue to fund-raising discussions with investors.
Here is a great chart, posted on Flickr by Facebook third-party app maker Narendra Rocherolle, that shows the rising popularity of the search word “Twitter” on the social-networking site’s Lexicon.
Facebook’s Lexicon counts “occurrences of words and phrases” on its Walls over time.
Interestingly, Facebook has recently done a redesign that some critics are saying is too much of a panicked reaction to the hype around the microblogging service, although Twitter’s audience is just a tiny sliver of Facebook’s.
Fresh from his puppy dog-esque “Oprah” interview, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg made good use of the press the talk show appearance engendered to hawk his wares, most especially new features the hot social-networking site has been coming out with of late.
Including some that look suspiciously like Twitter, which declined an acquisition offer from Facebook last year.
But what tool did the ever-clever Zuckerberg also use yesterday to flack his products?
Twitter, of course!
Here is his tweet in question and also a snippet of his appearance with Oprah too.
Kara Swisher started covering digital issues for The Wall Street Journal's San Francisco bureau in 1997 and also wrote the BoomTown column about the sector. With Walt Mossberg, she co-produces and co-hosts D: All Things Digital, a major high-tech and media conference.
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
D is unlike any other executive conference. Since its debut in 2003, D has brought to life the energy and excitement of the digital revolution in an unscripted, upfront and unparalleled way. Read more »
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