Owen Van Natta was't fired, "we just decided it was time for him to go"
As congratulations rain down on new Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, her predecessor, Owen Van Natta, is left under a cloud. Van Natta left Amazon.com for Facebook when it was barely out of an Ivy League dorm, and turned it into a company with plans to take over the world. Then he got demoted. Then he abruptly left. Why? Because he wanted to be a CEO someday. But his ambitions did not match his talents, Mark Zuckerberg now implies. In Zuck's words: "With bringing in a COO, we just decided it was the right time for him to go and do that." Somewhere else. Ah, then we shouldn't call it a firing.