David Marcus was a senior executive at PayPal and was poached to lead Messenger. This move showed that Facebook was serious when they meant that Messenger will be a standalone project, with its own features, strategy, etc. and would have a different app, a different social graph than Facebook. He’s among top 30 people you should know if you care about movers and shakers in the Silicon Valley — and probably the most influential French person on that list, with Yann LeCun.

He’s a key player at Facebook and this is a surprising move. I care because I care about the company, but I agree with you that for non-Facebook-Kremlinologists, it’s minor news.

>> This move showed that Facebook was serious when they meant that Messenger will be a standalone project...

except this announcement is about how he's leaving the project - what messages does that send?

Maybe it's time for a "mission accomplished" banner for the messenger team.

Thanks for the explanation. I know a bit of Google Kremlinology, but FB is almost completely opaque to me, even though I’m a shareholder.

There was a big shake-up announced yesterday and this is one of the best cover:

https://www.recode.net/2018/5/8/17330226/facebook-reorg-mark...

Happy to provide some confirmation and context -- but where I think Facebook is remarkable (not unlike Google) is that internal management systems allow such a major change to be mostly painless.

And, yes, I should have included Jérôme Pesenti to the list of influential French people at Facebook: he replaced Yann LeCun as the manager of Facebook AI Research, because Yann is a researcher, happy to manage a dozen post docs, not someone who wants to manage a team of hundreds of researchers.

He was also one of the lead architects of the Genesis Project.

Which was/is?

Don't insult my intelligence Kirk