Exclusive: Digg Steals A Google Exec As New VP Product
Digg has poached Keval Desai away from Google as their new Vice President of Product, we've confirmed from the company. Desai's last day at Google is today. — Desai is a long time Google employee, first joining the company in 2003.
Context & Ripple Effects
This hire lands mid-turnaround for Digg. Forbes profiled the company's push to rev up the product back in July 2009, and bringing in a Vice President of Product from outside is the clearest staffing move yet in that effort.
Keval Desai spent six years at Google, joining in 2003, so Digg is buying product leadership shaped entirely inside a company whose own 2009 output — HTML5 web apps, Android 2.0's open-sourced code, the second Android Developer Challenge — set the pace for the consumer web. That background is the point of the poach.
First-order effects
- Desai takes ownership of Digg's product organization immediately, with his last day at Google being today, meaning the handover is effective now rather than after a transition window.
- Google loses a senior product manager with institutional knowledge dating to 2003; Digg gains an executive who can credibly re-plan its roadmap against better-resourced rivals.
Second-order effects
- The hire signals to other consumer-web startups that Google's mid-level executive bench is recruitable, raising the competitive price for retaining product talent there.
- Digg's existing product and engineering leads now report into or alongside an outsider with a mandate to change direction, which typically forces internal realignment around whatever redesign or relaunch he prioritizes.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, late-decade consumer web competition shifts from feature velocity to assembling ex-big-company leadership teams — network-effect businesses like Digg trying to buy their way to product credibility.
- Big-platform alumni becoming the default executive class for scaling startups would deepen the talent pipeline running from search giants to social-media challengers.
The trend: Consumer-web startups under pressure are increasingly importing senior product executives from large platforms to drive turnarounds, treating executive talent as the scarce input rather than engineering headcount.