Suddenly, Top Facebook Employees Are Quitting Again
Facebook director of business development Jim Midgal has quit the company. — On LinkedIn, he lists his current job as “baggage handler” and his company as “traveling.” — Gone too is Marcel Laverdet, one of the three Facebook's employees …
Context & Ripple Effects
The 'again' in the headline points back to November 2010, when engineering director Aditya Agarwal walked out the door — Aditya Agarwal's departure was the first high-profile signal that Facebook's founding-era bench was thinning. Now business development director Jim Midgal has quit, marking his exit on LinkedIn with a deadpan 'baggage handler' at 'traveling,' alongside Marcel Laverdet, one of the company's three earliest employees.
The timing matters because the exits land inside a turbulent fortnight: Facebook dismissed corporate development executive Mike Brown on May 2 for buying company stock on secondary markets, and people who have seen its financials say business is growing faster than forecast — fueling rumors, still unconfirmed, of an IPO as early as spring 2012. A company racing toward a listing is losing the executives who run deals and early infrastructure.
First-order effects
- Facebook's business-facing teams are suddenly thinner exactly when they matter most: Midgal's departure follows the late-April launches of Groups and the Groupon-and-LivingSocial-challenging Deals product, both of which depend on partnership and BD capacity.
- The Mike Brown firing over secondary-market share purchases leaves corporate development without two senior figures within days, forcing founder-led coverage of deal work mid-hypergrowth.
Second-order effects
- Secondary markets give Facebook staff liquidity years before any lockup expires, which cuts both ways: it enriches employees but shrinks the deferred windfall that traditionally pins talent to a pre-IPO company — and, per the Brown case, creates compliance exposure the company polices by termination.
- Rivals and well-funded startups get a recruiting window: proven Facebook operators whose equity is already tradable are cheaper to lure than ever, and each publicized exit advertises that the door is open.
Third-order effects
- If departures keep clustering in the run-up to a listing, pre-IPO companies will face structural pressure toward earlier employee liquidity programs and stricter insider-trading rules — the IPO timeline itself becoming a governance problem rather than just a financing event.
- Executive churn at hypergrowth companies risks hardening into a standing beat in tech coverage, where each named exit is read as a referendum on whether scale or mission retains the earliest believers.
The trend: As Facebook scales toward a rumored 2012 IPO, executive departures are turning into a running barometer of how hypergrowth, secondary-market liquidity, and pre-listing lockup economics strain talent retention.