Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo to leave the company

Re:Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo to leave the company by daniel-cussen on Monday May 12, 2008 @12:37AM (#187286)

"D’Angelo is well-liked at Facebook, though he has mostly stayed behind the scenes. His departure is doubtless a blow to the organization — and also an opportunity to bring in a seasoned replacement to handle the site’s continuing expansion."

Is there evidence that the "seasoned replacement" is important? I've looked over a few articles at the Harvard Business School library, but I found nothing that conclusively showed "seasoned replacements," especially CEOs, made a positive impact on a startup.

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Re:Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo to leave the company by dfranke on Monday May 12, 2008 @02:28AM (#187336)

Facebook has 500 employees. They haven't been a startup for a long time.

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Re:Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo to leave the company by aston on Monday May 12, 2008 @01:04AM (#187296)

I think there's probably a lot of precedent for "seasoned replacements" making a positive impact when it comes to technical infrastructure. Not that I can point you to any. But my sense is that most big sites on the web owe a good chunk of their scalability to some experienced ops genius(es).

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Re:Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo to leave the company by sah on Monday May 12, 2008 @02:34AM (#187339)

That could be the case at Facebook. I had the opportunity to talk with Jeff Rothschild, Facebook's VP of Technology, last year. He was very obviously both experienced and smart.

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Re:Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo to leave the company by jgrahamc on Monday May 12, 2008 @06:02AM (#187439)

He was at Accel at the same time as me... he is definitely both experienced and smart.

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Re:Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo to leave the company by blader on Monday May 12, 2008 @04:21AM (#187400)

I'd guess yes. Writing great code, and building a great product with a small team is a very different skillset than managing a medium to large company of dozens to hundreds of engineers.

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Re:Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo to leave the company by jfarmer on Monday May 12, 2008 @02:44PM (#187831)

Bingo!

Brad Feld has a good article about this phenomenon: http://tinyurl.com/2rwmty

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Re:Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo to leave the company by xirium on Monday May 12, 2008 @04:33PM (#187942)

Or access http://www.feld.com/blog/archives/2007/10/cto_vs_vp_engin.ht...

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