via Business Insider
Facebook and CFO Gideon Yu did not part ways because the company needs a CFO with public company experience. A source familiar with Facebook admits that’s just spin.
We don’t know exactly why Facebook and Gideon parted ways, but after talking to several sources inside and outside the company, we believe it basically happened for a reason that contributed to several top executives — specifically including Owen Van Natta and Matt Cohler — quitting the company in the past 13 months.
Mark Zuckerberg no longer tolerates open disagreement or challenging discussion in meetings from his top lieutenants.
“There’s no dissent in meetings,” says a source. “It’s basically like we’re at GM or GE.”
It wasn’t always like that, one of the disgruntled former Facebook employees tells us:
The reason why we were good in the early days was that dissent was allowed and encouraged. That’s the reason you go to a startup. That early team was amazing.
That early team is gone. Many of its members planned to leave eventually, but not as soon as they did. We hear that Matt Cohler, for example, left “several millions” on the table when he quit Facebook to become a Benchmark Capital partner earlier than he planned to.
So what happened? A couple of explanations: Continue reading