Facebook Cofounder Leaving To Start New Company (NewsFactor)
Patricia Resende, newsfactor.com 1 hour, 4 minutes ago
The Facebook duo is no more. One of Facebook's two cofounders is leaving the popular social-networking site.
Dustin Moskovitz is leaving and forming a new duo by taking engineer Justin Rosenstein with him. Together, the two will launch another company, Rosenstein said on his Facebook page.
Rosenstein, who was recruited from Google by Moskovitz in the early stages of launching the company, said the two have had similar visions on software and what Facebook needs to do to evolve as a company.
"Leaving Facebook makes me sad, but I feel I have to follow my passion on this," Rosenstein said. "I can't say enough about Facebook and the friends I've made here, and I am enormously excited for the company's future success, a destiny I'm confident it will reach regardless of my participation."
Complementary Venture
The two will leave Facebook in about a month, Rosenstein said, and build an "extensible enterprise productivity suite" and a "high-level open-source software development toolkit." The new software will use Facebook Connect as a default option for identity and authentication, according to Rosenstein.
He said the new venture is complementary to Facebook and he hopes the new company's products will be as integral to users' professional work lives as Facebook has become in their social lives.
The decision to leave was a tough one, according to Rosenstein. "As our visions for how productivity software could work came into alignment, we thought about building it inside of Facebook," he said. "It was an attractive option in many ways, and neither of us was eager to exit a company that was in such an exciting phase of its development."
The fog soon lifted and Rosenstein said it became clear that doing so would not be good for Facebook or the duo.
"Facebook needs to continue its mission of making the world more open through social software without distraction, and the new project requires a company built around it from the ground up with the goals of efficiency and group collaboration embedded deeply into its DNA from day one."
Bittersweet
The news comes at a bittersweet time for the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company. Moskovitz and Rosenstein are departing not long after other top-level executives at the company said goodbye, including Owen Van Nata, COO and chief revenue officer; Adam DeAngelo, CTO; and Matt Cohler, vice president of product management.
Facebook, however, has reached major milestones in recent months and has brought in some veteran industry executives, including Sheryl Sandberg, a former Google executive. In September, Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg announced in a blog that the company had reached 100 million unique monthly visitors.
And just one day before Rosenstein's note began circulating the Web, Facebook announced it would make Dublin, Ireland, home to its new international headquarters.
Although some posters are saddened by Rosenstein and Moskovitz leaving, others are expressing good wishes and excitement for the new venture.