Owen Van Natta to Leave Facebook
One of the earliest executives at Facebook, Owen Van Natta (pictured here), will be transitioning out of the social-networking company in the next few weeks. — Van Natta played a key role in important negotiations related to Facebook's early lucrative ad deal …
Context & Ripple Effects
Owen Van Natta joined Facebook when it was a startup and, per BoomTown, was central to the negotiations behind its first lucrative advertising deals — the revenue groundwork beneath what has since become a 68-million-active-user machine. His exit lands just weeks after Facebook pushed its platform beyond its own walls, opening applications to run on developers' own websites.
The departure also arrives mid-scrimmage for talent: reporting in January 2008 confirmed that the hiring fight between Facebook and Google over computer science graduates was already pushing starting salaries sharply higher, so the open seat is not a cheap one to fill.
First-order effects
- Facebook must backfill a senior operator who built its earliest ad partnerships at the exact moment monetization of its fast-growing audience becomes the company's defining challenge.
- Van Natta himself exits with insider knowledge of Facebook's ad contracts and negotiation history — an asset any competitor or investor he joins next gains.
Second-order effects
- With the Google–Facebook graduate hiring war already inflating pay, Facebook's replacement cost for proven business-side executives rises too, tightening the market for senior operators across both companies.
- Rival networks watching Facebook extend its platform off-site now face a leadership-transition window in which its commercial strategy may pause or shift.
Third-order effects
- If early-executive departures recur as founder-led startups scale into large platforms, the pattern points toward a standing market for ex-hypergrowth operators whose value lies in the dealmaking playbooks they carry with them.
The trend: As social platforms convert user growth into advertising revenue, their earliest business-builders are becoming the industry's most contested and most mobile executive class.