netrashetty
Netra Shetty
Facebook (stylized facebook) is a social network service and website launched in February 2004 that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc.[1] As of January 2011, Facebook has more than 600 million active users.[5][6] Users may create a personal profile, add other users as friends and exchange messages, including automatic notifications when they update their profile. Additionally, users may join common interest user groups, organized by workplace, school, or college, or other characteristics. The name of the service stems from the colloquial name for the book given to students at the start of the academic year by university administrations in the US with the intention of helping students to get to know each other better. Facebook allows anyone who declares themselves to be at least 13 years old to become a registered user of the website.
Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes.[7] The website's membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It gradually added support for students at various other universities before opening to high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over.
A January 2009 Compete.com study ranked Facebook as the most used social network service by worldwide monthly active users, followed by MySpace.[8] Entertainment Weekly put it on its end-of-the-decade "best-of" list, saying, "How on earth did we stalk our exes, remember our co-workers' birthdays, bug our friends, and play a rousing game of Scrabulous before Facebook?"[9] Quantcast estimates Facebook has 135.1 million monthly unique U.S. visitors in October 2010.[10] According to Social Media Today as of April 2010, it is estimated that 41.6% of the U.S. population has a Facebook account
CEO
Mark Zuckerberg
Chairman of the Board
Donald Graham
Director
Peter Thiel
Director
Marc Andreessen
Director
Jim Breyer
CFO
David Ebersman
COO
Sheryl Sandberg
Privacy
CK
CTO
BT
Product
CC
Financial Advisor
Peter Currie
Legal
TU
Advertising & Global Operati...
David Fisher
Engineering
MS
Communication & Marketing
ES
Sales
Mike Murphy
Growth, Mobile & Internation...
CP
Technical Operations
JH
estimates that about half of the people who joined prior to that employee’s hire date have left the company. Multiple company insiders said that Kevin Colleran, the company’s first ad sales person, is now the longest-tenured Facebooker after Mark Zuckerberg, with others like Chris Hughes, Dustin Moskovitz and Adam D’Angelo having since founded their own startups (Jumo, Asana and Quora, respectively)
Other recent departures include Aaron Sittig, the company’s first designer, who is credited with creating the concept of tagging Facebook friends in photos. About a month ago came the exit of Chris Putnam, the creator of Facebook Video who joined the company after hacking the site with a worm to make user profiles look like they were on MySpace. And just last week Ruchi Sanghvi, the company’s first female engineer who wrote the blog post announcing the then-radical Facebook news feed back in 2006 (and in doing so became the target of subsequent user outrage), left as well.
Ezra Callahan, who joined in 2004 as the company’s first product manager, left in July. Yishan Wong, who joined in 2005 and was director of engineering, left in March and is now running a startup co-working space. Kate Losse, who joined in 2005 and was product manager for internationalization and localization, is also said to have left, along with many others, on a frequently updated Quora page devoted to the subject. Many of these people are currently traveling and relaxing.
Many Facebook employees started at the company just out of college and have grown up together. Putnam, for instance, a 4-year veteran of the company, is only 24 (he left college to join). Others are getting engaged and married (sometimes to each other) and starting to have kids. They’re far removed from the early days of Facebook Proms and a company-sponsored Tahoe party cabin.
One frustration of early employees is that they’ve had limited upward mobility as Facebook has matured. With the exception of VP of Product Chris Cox, Mark Zuckerberg’s management team consists of outside hires, a good number of them from Google. It should also be noted that two years ago, around the time COO Sheryl Sandberg joined, there was another string of high-level departures, including Owen Van Natta, Matt Cohler, Katie Geminder and Jeff Hammerbacher, but that was more of a changing of the executive guard.
Another factor in the recent exodus could be the fact that Facebook offered employees the ability to cash out up to $1 million worth of stock options with the help of investor Digital Sky Technologies, in part to alleviate pressure toward an IPO. However, insiders said that a million dollars or less is not the kind of thing a young person could retire on, especially compared to what he or she might be able to receive after an IPO, so the buyout was more of a bonus than a reason to leave. I guess we can’t blame the Russians after all.
Oftentimes, it’s the opposite of burnout that’s driving people away: Early employees simply feel like they’re on top of the world, realize it’s a good time to start a company, and are receiving avid investor interest in their new projects. Some leave to found startups that are related to Facebook, but aren’t priorities internally. For instance, Dave Morin’s new startup Path is said to be be built on top of the Facebook Platform, which he managed at Facebook. Whatever Path ends up doing (it’s currently in stealth), Morin will ostensibly have a leg up on the competition in terms of knowing Facebook’s game plan and functionality. (On the other hand, starting a project outside of Facebook’s core competency isn’t necessarily a safe bet; since the time Quora was founded by ex-Facebookers D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever, Facebook launched the remarkably similar Facebook Questions.)
One place early employees do not seem to be flooding to is the competition. There are examples of Facebook employees leaving to work at Google and Twitter (for instance product manager Josh Elman), but they are rare.
Facebook has chosen a distinctive method of regenerating the young startup mojo that it may be losing in this early employee exodus: buying young startups. The company has acquired some eight small companies, most of them in the last six months, and actively promoted their founders: FriendFeed founder Bret Taylor is now CTO and Parakey founder Blake Ross is now director of product. Using cash to buy their companies may cost Facebook more than the average hire, but it refreshes the company’s stable of 4-year stock option vesting cycles, along with delivering a fresh dose of entrepreneurial chutzpah.
Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes.[7] The website's membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It gradually added support for students at various other universities before opening to high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over.
A January 2009 Compete.com study ranked Facebook as the most used social network service by worldwide monthly active users, followed by MySpace.[8] Entertainment Weekly put it on its end-of-the-decade "best-of" list, saying, "How on earth did we stalk our exes, remember our co-workers' birthdays, bug our friends, and play a rousing game of Scrabulous before Facebook?"[9] Quantcast estimates Facebook has 135.1 million monthly unique U.S. visitors in October 2010.[10] According to Social Media Today as of April 2010, it is estimated that 41.6% of the U.S. population has a Facebook account
CEO
Mark Zuckerberg
Chairman of the Board
Donald Graham
Director
Peter Thiel
Director
Marc Andreessen
Director
Jim Breyer
CFO
David Ebersman
COO
Sheryl Sandberg
Privacy
CK
CTO
BT
Product
CC
Financial Advisor
Peter Currie
Legal
TU
Advertising & Global Operati...
David Fisher
Engineering
MS
Communication & Marketing
ES
Sales
Mike Murphy
Growth, Mobile & Internation...
CP
Technical Operations
JH
estimates that about half of the people who joined prior to that employee’s hire date have left the company. Multiple company insiders said that Kevin Colleran, the company’s first ad sales person, is now the longest-tenured Facebooker after Mark Zuckerberg, with others like Chris Hughes, Dustin Moskovitz and Adam D’Angelo having since founded their own startups (Jumo, Asana and Quora, respectively)
Other recent departures include Aaron Sittig, the company’s first designer, who is credited with creating the concept of tagging Facebook friends in photos. About a month ago came the exit of Chris Putnam, the creator of Facebook Video who joined the company after hacking the site with a worm to make user profiles look like they were on MySpace. And just last week Ruchi Sanghvi, the company’s first female engineer who wrote the blog post announcing the then-radical Facebook news feed back in 2006 (and in doing so became the target of subsequent user outrage), left as well.
Ezra Callahan, who joined in 2004 as the company’s first product manager, left in July. Yishan Wong, who joined in 2005 and was director of engineering, left in March and is now running a startup co-working space. Kate Losse, who joined in 2005 and was product manager for internationalization and localization, is also said to have left, along with many others, on a frequently updated Quora page devoted to the subject. Many of these people are currently traveling and relaxing.
Many Facebook employees started at the company just out of college and have grown up together. Putnam, for instance, a 4-year veteran of the company, is only 24 (he left college to join). Others are getting engaged and married (sometimes to each other) and starting to have kids. They’re far removed from the early days of Facebook Proms and a company-sponsored Tahoe party cabin.
One frustration of early employees is that they’ve had limited upward mobility as Facebook has matured. With the exception of VP of Product Chris Cox, Mark Zuckerberg’s management team consists of outside hires, a good number of them from Google. It should also be noted that two years ago, around the time COO Sheryl Sandberg joined, there was another string of high-level departures, including Owen Van Natta, Matt Cohler, Katie Geminder and Jeff Hammerbacher, but that was more of a changing of the executive guard.
Another factor in the recent exodus could be the fact that Facebook offered employees the ability to cash out up to $1 million worth of stock options with the help of investor Digital Sky Technologies, in part to alleviate pressure toward an IPO. However, insiders said that a million dollars or less is not the kind of thing a young person could retire on, especially compared to what he or she might be able to receive after an IPO, so the buyout was more of a bonus than a reason to leave. I guess we can’t blame the Russians after all.
Oftentimes, it’s the opposite of burnout that’s driving people away: Early employees simply feel like they’re on top of the world, realize it’s a good time to start a company, and are receiving avid investor interest in their new projects. Some leave to found startups that are related to Facebook, but aren’t priorities internally. For instance, Dave Morin’s new startup Path is said to be be built on top of the Facebook Platform, which he managed at Facebook. Whatever Path ends up doing (it’s currently in stealth), Morin will ostensibly have a leg up on the competition in terms of knowing Facebook’s game plan and functionality. (On the other hand, starting a project outside of Facebook’s core competency isn’t necessarily a safe bet; since the time Quora was founded by ex-Facebookers D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever, Facebook launched the remarkably similar Facebook Questions.)
One place early employees do not seem to be flooding to is the competition. There are examples of Facebook employees leaving to work at Google and Twitter (for instance product manager Josh Elman), but they are rare.
Facebook has chosen a distinctive method of regenerating the young startup mojo that it may be losing in this early employee exodus: buying young startups. The company has acquired some eight small companies, most of them in the last six months, and actively promoted their founders: FriendFeed founder Bret Taylor is now CTO and Parakey founder Blake Ross is now director of product. Using cash to buy their companies may cost Facebook more than the average hire, but it refreshes the company’s stable of 4-year stock option vesting cycles, along with delivering a fresh dose of entrepreneurial chutzpah.