What does Camille Hart know about Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg's plans that we don't? Hart, Sandberg's longtime executive assistant who followed her from Google to Facebook, has left the company after less than a year, we've learned, confirming a note left by commenter insidefb. We can't wait to hear Sandberg's spin on this departure. Remember her now-classic line about the series of executives leaving Facebook this summer? "There is no specific underlying story behind the few execs leaving our company,"As much fun as Hart seemed to be having at Facebook, there's a long list of reasonable reasons for Hart to leave: She already made money by joining Google before its IPO. She's shortening her commute by taking a job with the San Francisco Giants. She doesn't want to keep working from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. But I am skeptical. Why not stay a year and vest a first round of stock options? I can't help wondering if the timing of Hart has something to do with the election — and the opportunities a Democratic administration has opened up for former D.C. power player Sandberg to return to Washington.

BitTorrent cofounder and president Ashwin Navin is leaving the company. He has plans for a startup incubator in San Francisco's Mission District. Good! That means he'll be screwing up far less consequential companies from here on out. Navin deserves credit for persuading Bram Cohen, the creator of the BitTorrent file-sharing protocol, for building a company around it. But that's about it.Navin wasted years and millions of dollars trying to turn BitTorrent Inc. into a competitor to Apple's iTunes store. He struck splashy deals with Hollywood studios by paying them large upfront guarantees, which depleted BitTorrent's bank account but got Navin into the right parties. Meanwhile, BitTorrent's other line of business, which used file-sharing technologies to deliver content more efficiently for corporate customers, suffered from lack of focus, and more established competitors like Akamai moved in. Sometimes losing a founder is bad for a company. In this case, it's nothing but good.

Vudu, which makes a nifty little set-top box that no one is buying, beat the rush by laying off employees in August. Today, an alert tipster notes that CEO Mark Jung has disappeared from the company's management page. Jung's LinkedIn profile has also been updated, putting Vudu in past tense. San Francisco's 7x7 magazine scored this shot of Jung with Mrs. Jung at a fundraiser in May. The boss wants me to draw some big conclusion here. I think it's: Go to the party. You can always work yourself to death when Web 3.0 comes around.

When will Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang figure out that everyone wants him to leave? Matt Marshall at VentureBeat aired a rumor that a memo had gone out at 8 a.m. to Yahoo's workforce to expect some kind of "historic announcement" later today — a coded way of saying Yang was on his way out. Marshall wondered if it was true, or just an attempt to manipulate Yahoo's stock price. We called some Yahoos we know, and, alas, no such email exists. Even debunked, the rumor is telling: Sentiment against Yang is so strong that people are willing to believe a rumor he's leaving. (Photo by Yodel Anecdotal)

Why did Tony Fadell, the driving force behind the iPod, leave Apple? We know this much: Apple is willing to pay him handsomely not to make a fuss on the way out. Digital Daily notes that he's getting paid $300,000 a year through March 24, 2010. That's a 40 percent paycut from his regular salary of $500,009, but the salary is the least of his post-Apple compensation. according to Apple's 10-K filing. If he keeps his gig as as a "special advisor," doesn't sue Apple, and agrees not to recruit Apple employees to any new venture, he'll get 77,500 shares of Apple stock — currently worth a cool $8.4 million.

A tender postscript at the bottom of a New York Times article about iPod creator Tony Fadell's departure from Apple: His wife, Danielle Lambert, who works as a VP of human resources at the company, is leaving, too. A good thing: If she had stayed at Apple, the line that Fadell was leaving to spend more time with his family might not have run true.

Heavy.com continues to get lighter; Eric Hadley, who only joined the funny-videos-for-guys startup a year ago as chief marketing officer, has joined Yahoo as its VP of advertiser and partner marketing. He'd previously worked for a decade at Microsoft. We see the hand of Joanne Bradford in this; she's the former MSN chief who now runs ad sales at Yahoo. The pattern here?Yahoo has lacked a strong sales leader since the departure of Wenda Harris Millard, whom President Sue Decker disgracefully drove out of the company. With the hiring of Hadley to run marketing and Jeff Dossett to run media, Bradford is assembling her own team of loyalists, from Microsoft and elsewhere. In sales, personality rules. And every cult needs its leader. (Photo by Andy Plesser)

The departure of Scott Moore, head of Yahoo's Media Group, seemed hasty. Microsoft exec Jeff Dossett, in talks with Yahoo for an entirely different job, ended up replacing Moore. And in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Moore only gave the vaguest of hints as to what he'd do next — which suggests he hadn't really had time to think it through. But a tipster suggests why Moore might be leaving now: Retention bonuses, issued to top execs after Microsoft's takeover offer, are kicking in.

Tony Fadell, the head of Apple's iPod division, is exiting Steve Jobs's reality distortion field. While Fake Steve Jobs likes to take credit for inventing the frigging iPod, its real mastermind is Tony Fadell, who took his plans for an MP3 player to Apple in 2001 as a consultant. His replacement: Former IBM chip expert Mark Papermaster, whose erstwhile employer is suing Apple to prevent him from taking a job there. That Papermaster is replacing Fadell makes its lawsuit even stranger; it is seeking to enforce a noncompete clause in his contract, but a job overseeing MP3 players and cell phones hardly seems a competitive threat to IBM. Fadell is planning to take some time off Pity. Since he joined Apple, Fadell's homepage has turned into a placeholder. We were looking forward to the return of the "jazzy, shameless self-promotion" it once offered.

Mountaineer, philanthropist, and longtime Microsoftie Jeff Dossett has a new claim to fame: He's brave enough to join Yahoo — but it took a while to convince him. Two months ago, Dossett, who joined Microsoft in 1991, went through a curious back-and-forth: BoomTown's Kara Swisher reported he was leaving Microsoft to join Yahoo. A Microsoft rep promptly denied the report, claiming Dossett was leaving a job at the software giant's MSN Web business, but looking at other opportunities within Microsoft. We could speculate about how Microsoft and Yahoo were bidding for Dossett's services, but the real lesson here is: Never, ever believe a Microsoft flack. Dossett replaces Scott Moore, who's leaving Yahoo as reported.

The latest we're-supposed-to-care chatter from the tipline: "It was just announced yesterday that Ziff-Davis Chief Technology Officer Robyn Peterson is leaving to go to NBC. Ouch!" Ouch? The real ouch is that Ziff-Davis Media, the considerably reduced tech-magazine publisher, was paying someone to be its CTO in the first place.

We hear Spencer Greene, long the right-hand man of Juniper Networks chairman Scott Kriens, is on his way out. Not entirely surprising, since Kriens was recently replaced as CEO by Kevin Johnson, a former top Microsoft executive. Our source tells us Greene is currently on a two-month "vacation" — the source used scare quotes — overseas.

Billionaire Andreas von Bechtolsheim — "Andy" to us — cofounded Sun Microsystems in 1982. The original Sun team of Bechtolsheim, Vinod Khosla, Bill Joy, and Scott McNealy were like the Beatles to a previous generation of Silicon Valley engineers. Now, Bechtolsheim's using the current imaginary financial apocalypse to plant good news about Arista Networks. "Innovations in Cloud Networking" is the company's meaningless slogan. What Andy really wants to say: Throw those stinky old Cisco routers away! Oh, here's the part where Sun PR tells everyone a lie about Bechtolsheim "continuing his present involvement" at Sun as an advisor. Never mind that — just read the nut from his NYT article.

The good news: Jack Dorsey, the handsome programmer ousted as Twitter's CEO yesterday, can put his nose ring back in and stop seeing that CEO coach he hired. The bad news: His cofounder, Ev Williams, who's replacing him as CEO, is sugarcoating Dorsey's exit. Dorsey is not going to be working in Twitter's office, and his coworkers are saying their tearful goodbyes; he's effectively out of the company, though he retains the title of chairman and what is presumably a large stake in the messaging startup. So why did Dorsey get fired?"This has nothing to do with the economy," Fred Wilson, a partner at Twitter investor Union Square Ventures, told The Deal. True enough — but it does have to do with Dorsey's incompetence. One industry insider says he botched several acquisition offers — one by nattering on about his original idea for Twitter as a messaging service for ambulance drivers and bicycle couriers, an idea he still wanted to pursue after a Twitter acquisition.

Here's the narrative you're going to hear about Tesla Motors, the Silicon Valley electric-car company which is prepping layoffs and replacing its CEO: The company's founding investor sweeps in to save the day. It is true that Elon Musk, the company's main financial backer, is stepping in to replace CEO Ze'ev Drori, who's staying with the company as vice chairman and a member of the board. But anyone with a sense of history should be very worried at the prospect of Musk taking the wheel.Musk lucked out twice, with the $300 million of a long-forgotten Internet portal, and the survival, despite his best efforts, of PayPal, the payments site now controlled by eBay. According to Elon Musk, Elon Musk was the driving force behind PayPal during his brief, tumultuous reign as CEO of the payments company. Musk's version of events is a fiction believed by no one else. I know this because I spoke to PayPal insiders regularly while he was CEO, and they told me of chaotic management, boneheaded marketing and technology decisions, and serious turnover under Musk's reign. That is what Tesla has to look forward to. In some sense, it's already been enduring it since Musk ousted founder Martin Eberhard and replaced him with Drori last year. Musk has been working at the company for several days a week, Darryl Siry, Tesla's VP of marketing, tells me, in an effort to portray Drori's beheading as some kind of smooth transition. With a parlous economy, Tesla was already in for a bumpy ride. Musk is keeping his second job as CEO of SpaceX, a private rocket company which has seen several botched launches. Add to that the infamous tale of his PayPal-era car crash, and you've got an entrepreneur who's better known for destroying vehicles than building them.

Here's a career tip from Ed Sussman, the fired head of Mansueto Digital: Have a startup in your back pocket. Since March, he reveals, he's been working on a side project while running the websites of Fast Company and Inc. magazines for Mansueto Ventures. His job was one of 20 eliminated in the cutbacks, which primarily hit the company's online and events divisions. He tells Mediabistro that he and his partners have "put some 4,000 hours into the project" — an effort to commercialize Drupal, an open-source blog software program. Gosh, do you think his boss would have waited until October to lay off Sussman if he had known how much free time his employee had on his hands?

A quartet of Valley veterans has started Cloudera. They're pitching it as "Red Hat for Hadoop." Hadoop is an open-source implementation of Google's MapReduce infrastructure software, supposedly useful for Internet-computing projects. Cloudera plans to offer technical support for Hadoop. And yet here I thought the whole point of cloud computing was that someone else ran Hadoop so you didn't have to. Whatever! I'm confident that the founders of Cloudera will make tons of money, if only for this reason: Its data guru, Jeff Hammerbacher, worked on credit derivatives at Bear Stearns before he left and joined Facebook. He joined the social network in time for its notional value to soar to $15 billion. Cloudera's business looks questionable, but I trust Hammerbacher's ability to convince someone else that he's built something so vast and complicated that they buy it before they figure out what it's really worth. (Photo by jakob)

The only thing more foolish than joining a startup right now is staying at a print magazine. Portfolio's San Francisco-based deputy editor, Blaise Zerega, has left the Condé Nast business magazine. He's now the president and COO of Fora.tv, an online-video startup which collects clips of those boring public-affairs speeches we all dread attending, but go for the mingling and cocktails that follow. Not clear how Fora.tv will reproduce mingling and cocktails online. One other thing notable about Fora.tv: Its address, 1550 Bryant Street. That's the same building where Zerega and I worked at the old Red Herring, back when it was a respectable chronicler of the technology business.

First it was Monty Widenius who quit, or didn't, or was thinking about resignation as an option or something. Now David Axmark has officially resigned from Sun Microsystems, which bought MySQL the company — not to be confused with MySQL the open-source software — for a billion dollars in January. Like Monty before him, Axmark isn't completely quitting. He's going to "work with MySQL and Sun on a less formal basis" because, he says in a resignation letter, "I HATE all the rules that I need to follow, and I also HATE breaking them." Dude, it's called middle age. Here's the official blurb from MySQL spokesblogger Kaj Arnö:

At CNET, the heads keep rolling, nearly a year after Gamespot editorial director Jeff Gerstmann was sacked. Stephen Colvin, an executive who oversaw Gamespot, is out of the company, a tipster tells us. Gerstmann's firing came after a negative review of an advertiser's game, which made him a cause célèbre among gamers. What Gerstmann's fans will say: That Colvin and other suits are getting what they deserved for ruining the CNET-owned gaming site's editorial credibility. Josh Larson left CNET, now owned by CBS, in April. Colvin, a former magazine executive who was Larson's boss, joined CNET a year ago, shortly before the Gerstmann incident. His exit comes as CBS rejiggers CNET's generous benefits, our tipster says: