Exclusive: Facebook CTO Bret Taylor Departs (For Start-Ups Unknown)
Facebook's high-profile CTO Bret Taylor is leaving the Silicon Valley social networking giant later this summer, with future plans to work on an undetermined start-up. — The move is likely to be of concern …
Context & Ripple Effects
Bret Taylor's exit is confirmed by the man himself in a farewell note on Facebook, and it traveled fast — CNET, the Los Angeles Times, The Register, ReadWriteWeb and others all picked up the news the same day, a measure of how closely the CTO role was watched. He plans to leave later this summer for an undetermined start-up.
The timing is awkward: Facebook is still digesting a botched May IPO, with a motion reportedly in the works to consolidate the resulting shareholder lawsuits and address Nasdaq's role. The same week, the company was publicly fighting for engagement on video chat — testing a Call button against Google+ Hangouts and Airtime despite reportedly low usage of its earlier Skype partnership — so losing its most visible engineering executive lands amid broader questions about momentum.
First-order effects
- Facebook must now name a successor for a CTO who served as the public face of its platform and product strategy, a search that begins while the company manages post-IPO legal and market pressure.
- Taylor departs later this summer to found an undetermined start-up, removing one of Silicon Valley's highest-profile engineering leaders from Facebook's ranks.
Second-order effects
- With the stock under strain and shareholder litigation reportedly heading toward consolidation, retaining other pre-IPO executives through vesting milestones becomes the immediate test of Facebook's management.
- Rivals already contesting Facebook's attention — Google+ Hangouts and Airtime, the explicit targets of the Call button tests — get a window to press their video-chat push if product cadence slows during the transition.
Third-order effects
- If early executive departures prove routine at freshly public consumer-web companies, the post-IPO vesting calendar hardens into a recurring start-up formation cycle, with vested stock seeding the next generation of founders.
- Boards weighing IPO timing may increasingly price in founder-era CTO flight risk as a structural cost of going public.
The trend: Newly public social-web companies are entering a phase where post-IPO departures of founding-era technologists feed a self-renewing cycle of start-up formation.