Facebook hires CollegeHumor's Ricky Van Veen as head of global creative strategy
Goodbye, Barry Diller. Hello, Mark Zuckerberg. — Last year, Ricky Van Veen argued that Mark Zuckerberg is the most powerful person in the world. — Now he's going to work for him.
Context & Ripple Effects
Ricky Van Veen built CollegeHumor inside Barry Diller's IAC empire, and just last year he was publicly arguing that Mark Zuckerberg is the most powerful person in the world — now he reports to him. The move lands midway through the arc laid out in Zuckerberg's plan for Facebook's future, where video and creator relationships were becoming central to the product.
It also fits a longer Facebook habit of importing outside credibility rather than growing it internally: an engineering director had already decamped to the White House the year before, and the company would later keep staffing this lane with hires like Zvika Krieger's responsible-innovation role and Nick Clegg's global-affairs post.
First-order effects
- CollegeHumor loses its co-founder and public face, leaving Diller's IAC to backfill creative leadership for a brand whose value was largely Van Veen's comedic sensibility.
- Facebook gains an entertainment-native executive at head-of-function level, giving media partners and creators a dedicated creative-strategy counterpart inside the company.
Second-order effects
- Traditional media companies and rival platforms now bid against Facebook for comedy and video talent, pushing up the price of executives who bridge internet-native entertainment and mainstream media.
- A senior creative voice inside Facebook shifts internal weight toward video and personality-driven content, pressuring product teams to build for creators rather than only for feed engagement.
Third-order effects
- The hire is an early data point in a structural pattern the corpus keeps showing: Facebook systematically converting external reputation into internal executive functions — creative, policy, image — culminating in moves like Zuckerberg's image-repair campaign and the later Reality Labs creative studio.
- If the pattern holds, platform companies stop treating media and government relations as ad hoc outreach and institutionalize them as standing C-suite disciplines, with people like Van Veen and Clegg as the template.
The trend: Social platforms are absorbing entertainment-industry creative leadership in-house, turning what used to be partnership outreach into a permanent executive function.