exits

MySQL founder quits Sun

Paul Boutin · 09/04/08 08:10PM

Click to view"Just heard that Monty gave his resignation to Sun today," a tipster we trust writes about Michael Widenius, the Finnish-born main author of open-source database software MySQL. Sun Microsystems had aqcuired Monty's company, also called MySQL, for a cool billion in January. So who's running the show now? Best guess is Brian Aker, another prominent MySQL developer. Aker released a lightweight, Web 2.0-oriented version of MySQL called Drizzle in late July, but he's still at Sun.

Bob Dykes abandons privacy invader NebuAd for books cooker Verifone

Jackson West · 09/03/08 03:00AM

Bob Dykes, the founder and chairman at ad targeting company NebuAd, has left his position as CEO and signed up as the new CFO at Verifone. NebuAd has raised the ire of privacy advocates by offering a service which monitors an individual's Web surfing habits by looking at the content of individual packets of data to better target advertising — a practice which is currently under congressional investigation. Verifone, which provides automated payment technology, recently let go of its old CFO, Barry Zwarenstein, after the publicly traded company wiped out $70 million in profits in restated financials. No rest for the wickedly wealthy, I guess. (Photo by AP/Paul Sakuma)

Splunk soft-fires CEO

Owen Thomas · 09/02/08 04:00PM

When a company outgrows its founder-CEO, the fashionably euphemistic thing to do is to allow him to "step up" and take a job as chairman, or chief product visionary, or Beloved Leader — something that looks good on a business card. No such luck for Michael Baum, the boisterous cofounder of Splunk, who has simply been replaced as the enterprise-search startup's CEO. Godfrey Sullivan, who ran Hyperion, a business-software company acquired by Oracle last year, is displacing him.Baum, a self-described "serial entrepreneur," will continue, awkwardly, as the company's head of strategy and corporate development. Funny, don't those sound like the CEO's job? This should prove entertaining to watch — especially if Baum reverts to loudly drunk form. But if Splunk follows the rest of the script — hire experienced CEO, sell or go public, make founders rich — Baum will have all the more reason to shout. (Full disclosure: Valleywag very special correspondent Paul Boutin is married to Splunk executive Christina Noren, and you're not.)

Vudu layoffs further signal death by a thousand pin pricks

Jackson West · 08/26/08 09:00AM

Movie download service Vudu, which seems to be having trouble convincing customers to first buy a $299 set-top box, is laying off 16 to 18 of the company's 100 employees, and has hired a new CFO, Chris Watts, according to PaidContent. Seems to be a clear case of trying to reduce the company's burn rate as the $21 million from venture investors begins to dry up. And it's another indication that the startup's desperate descent is accelerating.Months ago, the company slashed the price on its hardware. More recently, it began offering porn and shortly thereafter introduced a sale on 99 movie titles for only $0.99 each. All of which makes it sound more and more like Akimbo.(Photo by Juha-Matti Herrala)

Ad exec Todd Teresi out at Yahoo

Owen Thomas · 08/20/08 02:20PM

How swiftly executives fall from management's good graces at Yahoo. Just last year, Todd Teresi was promoted to run all of Yahoo's display-ad "marketplaces" — the electronic systems which gather bids from advertisers and place banners on websites, both on Yahoo and off. In May, he squired Yahoo president Sue Decker to a meeting with Dow Jones executives at the Wall Street Journal's D6 conference in May. But in this spy shot of that meeting, note how Yahoo president Sue Decker is looking away from Teresi. Could she have been planning, even then, for his exit? Teresi's likely replacement: Mike Walrath, who is moving from New York to the Bay Area. Walrath characterized his move to us as a "lifestyle" decision, not a sign of some corporate reshuffling. Having a rival out of the way does make one's life easier, that's for sure.

The gossip-proof gossipmonger

Owen Thomas · 08/19/08 04:40PM

Last month, Alan Citron silently disappeared from TMZ.com, the gossip megasite he helped launch. He has suddenly reappeared at Buzznet, a music-blog startup that's dabbling in celebrity news. "It goes to my reputation of being quiet," he told me. I felt bad for Citron when, as the general manager of TMZ.com, he sat next to me on a panel on gossip at the South by Southwest conference in Austin this spring. Julia Allison, the notorious nobody with a nonstartup, stole the show, literally leaping from the audience onto the moderator's lap.It was utterly unfair: Citron had built TMZ.com, out of nowhere, into the Web's undisputed champ of 24/7 celebrity chatter, with some 10 million visitors a month. Allison had done exactly nothing, except for, unbelievably, further trivializing the very notion of fame. And yet Allison dominated the conversation. How was it that, in a newsroom full of gossips, no one thought to mention the departure of a top executive? Did he not make enough of an impression around the office? Citron's discretion is to his credit. But it's possible there's such a thing as being too quiet.

Liar, liar

Owen Thomas · 08/15/08 09:00AM

It seemed like such a simple proposition. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg wanted Ben Ling to lie for her, and get rich doing it. Ling is — was — the director of Facebook's applications platform, which had garnered the social network much of its buzz over the past year. But he'd been supplanted by Elliot Schrage, Sandberg's PR guy, as head of the platform, and had gotten a job offer to return to Google. For the search engine, Ling's return was an invaluable PR victory, after a string of defections — including Sandberg herself. It was likewise a blow to Facebook's image; the company has lost a string of technical leaders since Sandberg started her reign of terror.So Sandberg asked Ling to lie. The fib she demanded: That he was taking a two-month vacation, not returning to Google. In exchange, she'd let him vest his shares in Facebook — a small fortune for less than a year's work. Ling, it seems, declined. His integrity was worth more than whatever Sandberg had to offer. Technically, Facebook doesn't owe Ling anything. His shares wouldn't vest until he reached his one-year anniversary. But the reality is that Sandberg, by promoting Schrage above Ling, effectively squeezed him out. And Silicon Valley companies often let departing employees keep some of their shares, even if they've been at a company under one year, to keep good relations (and sometimes, buy silence). Facebook has routinely accelerated departing executives' vesting, a maneuver which lets them keep more shares than the calendar would say they've earned. Sandberg's high-pressure tactic was a foolish overreach. She was trying to manage perceptions, and combat the idea that her version of Facebook is an inhospitable place for brilliant technical talent like Ling. Instead, she's created an even worse perception — no, rather, a reality. Joining Facebook, always a chancy venture, is more dangerous than ever. Those who take a job there now bear the risk that the manipulations of a power-grasping executive will make all their work worthless. (Poor Mike Schroepfer, who just joined the company as VP of engineering; did he have any idea what he was getting himself into?) There's another perception that now exists, as a result of Sandberg's actions: That the COO herself is a glib liar, who expects those around her to glibly lie, too. Less than a month on the job, she had underlings fibbing to Fortune for a puff-piece profile. It seems obvious in retrospect that the paeans that executives like Matt Cohler and Adam D'Angelo offered on the way out must have been fictional, too, bought by Sandberg with Facebook shares. Sandberg's explanation, tossed off with Clintonian brio: "There is no specific underlying story behind the few execs leaving our company." The key word in that sentence is "underlying," minus the "under." Silicon Valley's corps of engineers have little tolerance for dishonesty. The implicit bargain they strike with the MBAs who turn their work into money: Keep the lies over on your side. Lie to investors, partners, reporters; just don't lie to us. There's no room for lies in the world of code; software works, or it doesn't. That may be a Pollyannaish belief, but it's a common one in the idealism-choked cubicle farms which sprawl along 101. Sandberg, with her clumsy cajoling, has broken the pact. She tried to turn one of the geeks into a smiling fake, just like her. He didn't bite. One would think that with Sandberg's political training, she'd at least bring the talents of a skilled prevaricator to the Valley. Instead, the Ling affair has revealed her as the worst of both worlds: a clumsy liar.

Who's the next Facebooker to go?

Owen Thomas · 08/13/08 10:40AM

The departure of star Facebook director Ben Ling has been roiling Facebook since word first spread at the social network's Palo Alto headquarters yesterday. One inevitable question some Facebookers are asking: What does this mean for the price of our stock? If Facebook were publicly traded, it's unlikely one employee's exit would cause a blip. But private tech companies like Facebooks are the ultimate growth plays, and momentum matters. If Facebook becomes known as a place top talent flees instead of gathers, it could tank Facebook's perceived value. What will be telling: Who leaves next, and how fast. One likely candidate: Chamath Palihapitiya.Palihapitiya, like Ling, has not fared well under the reign of COO Sheryl Sandberg and her right-hand man, Elliot Schrage. Schrage, as a reward for the puff pieces Sandberg's continued to garner from a mostly pliant press corps, has gotten handed most of Facebook's marketing functions. Palihapitiya has been left with a vague "growth" portfolio. How frustrating this must be for Palihapitiya, who once complained on film about white-male privilege. His employer at the time, the Mayfield Fund, hastened to clarify that his comments were about the world at large, not meritocratic Silicon Valley. But Elliot Schrage, with his two Harvard degrees, is a creature of New York and Washington, D.C., not the Valley. And he has blocked Palihapitiya's rise at Facebook, despite the latter's vastly more impressive tech résumé. Will Palihapitya rest and vest his Facebook shares in silence? Or will he leave, like Ling?

Ben "Bling" Ling to leave Facebook

Paul Boutin · 08/12/08 06:20PM

Ben Ling, Facebook's high-profile director of platform product marketing, considered a star poach from Google, is now rumored to be moving on from Facebook. Kara Swisher has further details. We think we know the story: Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, in a widely derided move, put a nontechnical guy, her aide-de-camp and chief flack Elliot Schrage, in charge of Facebook's applications platform. Photo above: Ben shaking it at Club Asia in 2006, in a now-unpublished YouTube video.

Ex-Twitterer Blaine Cook soon out of Yahoo

Owen Thomas · 08/12/08 11:40AM

Does Twitter miss former architect Blaine Cook, the technician who was simultaneously blamed for the site's outages and hailed for keeping it alive? We're guessing so, if only because Cook's long-haired mug still — still!gazes from Twitter's jobs page. Cook recently took a job at Yahoo's Brickhouse incubator. He was chummy enough with his coworkers to show up at a going-away party for departing Brickhouse chief Chad Dickerson. But Cook is apparently a short-timer there. A source reports Cook saying he couldn't wait for his contract to expire so he can leave around the end of next month. That's a brief stint, even for Yahoo.

Yahoo recount could threaten Yang, Bostock board seats

Owen Thomas · 08/05/08 04:40PM

Unbelievably, the firm which counted shareholder votes for Yahoo omitted tens of millions of shares voted by dissident shareholder Capital Research & Management — and badly skewed the result. Yahoo calls it a "tabulation error." If you can call shifting 200 million votes from the "no" column to the "yes column", then sure. Call it whatever — it's actually Jerry Yang's death knell. The corrected total more than doubles the percentage of shareholders who withheld their votes from Yang, from 14.6 percent to 33.7 percent. Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock went from 20.5 percent withheld to 39.5 percent. At those levels of withheld votes, there is ample precedent for them to step down.Michael Eisner stepped down as Disney's chairman after having 43 percent of the votes withheld; Steve Case left Time Warner's board amid a shareholder revolt, and still drew a 22 percent protest. With the correct numbers in, Yang and Bostock's position has changed from comfortable to perilous — showing that votes count in business as well as in politics.

Adaptive Path announces Aurora browser, but not COO departure

Jackson West · 08/05/08 10:20AM

Noted neologician Jesse James Garrett, the man who dubbed a set of popular Web 2.0 technologies "Ajax," has announced another project from Adaptive Path, the Web consultancy he cofounded. It's Aurora, an interesting visualization of what a next-generate Web browser might look like. It's user-interface porn of the highest order, with a special bonus if you have a farmer fetish. What the company hasn't announced? The recent departure of COO Bryan Mason, pictured here, who Twittered his resignation on Friday, though he hasn't been filed under "emeritus" on the company roster quite yet. Whoever is named the new COO had better make sure the free-taco truck tradition at the annual company party continues, or there will be hungry-hipster hell to pay. The Aurora browser:

Yahoo sending out Superstar Award nominations — but who's left to win?

Owen Thomas · 07/29/08 06:20PM

Yahoo employes received calls to nominate colleagues for the company's annual Superstar Awards. What a depressing exercise to force on workers: Will they not, inevitably, think of all of the people they'd like to put forward for the prize — but aren't eligible because they've left Yahoo? Past winners have received cash prizes of as much as $75,000; recently, Yahoo switched to stock-option grants instead, which seem less appealing. The program was the brainchild of departed HR chief Libby Sartain. Since it can only highlight the company's paucity of talent, one wonders how much it will outlast her.

Alcatel-Lucent's chairman and CEO both out

Paul Boutin · 07/29/08 10:00AM

Telecommunications equipment maker Alcatel-Lucent, a French-American company created through acquisition in 2006, announced a loss of $1.73 billion, its biggest quarterly loss yet and its sixth in a row. The architects of the Alcatel-Lucent merger, chairman Serge Tchuruk and CEO Patricia Russo, will each leave the company over the next few months — Tchuruk in October, Russo after her successor is hired. (Photo by AP/Christophe Ena)

Microsoft's Windows dilemma

Owen Thomas · 07/23/08 07:00PM

Here are all the talking points you'll hear about Kevin Johnson's departure as the chief of Microsoft's sprawling Platform and Services Division — and what to say about them. The failed Yahoo bid killed his prospects of becoming Microsoft's CEO. Perhaps, but Steve Ballmer, who is more to blame for the Yahoo debacle, wasn't going anywhere, and Johnson may not have been prepared to wait. Johnson was charged with competing with Google in search and advertising, and he failed. And you would have done any better? Facebook took Microsoft for everything it's worth in striking its deal for Microsoft to invest and sell ads on the social network — and that's Johnson's fault. True enough, but Microsoft's $240 million investment is pocket change for the software giant. Enough with the cocktail-party chatter. Here's why I think Johnson really left.

Microsoft exec who led Facebook investment, Yahoo bid departs for Juniper

Paul Boutin · 07/23/08 06:20PM

"The departure of Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft's Platforms and Services Division, will be combined with a reorganization of the business unit, which houses both the online services business and Windows software for personal computers," reports the Wall Street Journal. Johnson was a rarity in Microsoft's top ranks — a business guy who rose up through Microsoft's sales organization, not a technical whiz kid who served as a special assistant to Bill Gates. He was seen as a possible successor to CEO Steve Ballmer. Instead, he's joining Juniper Networks, a telecom equipment maker. (Photo by AP/Elaine Thompson)

AMD CEO Hector Ruiz out

Owen Thomas · 07/17/08 06:40PM

The CEO who, for a moment, turned the tide in AMD's long struggle with rival chipmaker Intel, is out, replaced by COO Dirk Meyer. The company recently posted a $1.2 billion loss. [San Jose Mercury News]