Facebook Cofounder Quits To Start Facebook Competitor
"Dustin has always had Facebook's best interests at heart and will always be someone I turn to for advice," founder/CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement.
This summer, Facebook cofounder/CTO Adam D'Angelo, VP of Product Management Matt Cohler, and platform exec Ben Ling left the company.
Update: The new company will be building an "extensible enterprise productivity suite, along with a high-level open-source software development toolkit, built for the Web from the ground up." Rosenstein:
We see this new venture as very complimentary to Facebook. We hope our products will become to your work life what Facebook.com is to your social life. Our software will use Facebook Connect as the default option for identity and authentication. Our user interface will adopt many of Facebook’s conventions, creating a seamless and familiar experience for current Facebook users. And if our new development tools turn out to be useful, we hope the Facebook engineering team will come to adopt them.
"Our products will become to your work life what Facebook.com is to your social life"? For lots of us, Facebook is already for our work life. So it sounds like the new site may not just be "complementary" but competitive.
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They're going for Facebook. Unfortunately, there's only one Facebook, and that's FB itself.
doesn't mean their equity vaklue (high or low) will never be realized, maybe it willif the company ever gets sold or public (before it staggers onto the ash heap of silicon valley history)
so the defectors reason, why stay at facebook? for the salary and snacks? heck no, we can get that at any other startup, plus at other startups/companies we can get equity that will have value and hopefully increasing value
The collapsing ad market will hit them very hard. Don't be surprised if begin to hear about a hiring freeze or even layoffs.
No one from Google left until after their IPO. Facebook is losing or has lost nearly all of their senior executives *before* a liquidation event. This is simply not how the valley works unless trouble looms.
Thanks for the reflection.
TV1Turtle