Category:Former Facebook Employees
Facebook was started in a Harvard dormitory in 2004 and renamed Meta Platforms in 2021. This category covers the Facebook years specifically, and its shape reflects how short those years were for most of the people in it. Almost nobody here made a career at the company. The founding group broke up within four years of the launch, the executives hired between 2005 and 2011 left for venture capital within a similar window, and a third group arrived only through acquisition. What holds the roster together is not tenure but the speed of the exits.
The founding group
Dustin Moskovitz co-founded the service alongside Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum and Chris Hughes while a student at Harvard, served as its first chief technology officer and then vice president of engineering, and left in 2008 to co-found Asana with a former colleague. In 2011 he was identified as the youngest self-made billionaire in the world on the basis of a 2.34 percent stake.
Saverin provided the initial capital and served as the company's first chief financial officer. His dispute with Zuckerberg over his stake became the plot of a feature film in 2010, which is a form of notability none of the other members share.
The 2005 to 2011 executive layer
Three of the senior hires from the company's private years left for the investment side, and their Facebook tenure is the credential the rest of their careers were built on. Matt Cohler joined in 2005, rose to vice president of product management as the network moved past colleges, and left in June 2008 to become a general partner at Benchmark, where he backed Instagram, Uber, Snapchat, Quora and Asana. Chamath Palihapitiya was a senior executive from 2007 to 2011 with responsibility for user growth, and founded Social Capital in 2011. Gideon Yu was recruited as chief financial officer in 2007, when the company was still private and building out an executive team ahead of its expansion, having held the same title at YouTube.
Acquisitions and the board
Two members arrived by purchase rather than by hiring. Jan Koum co-founded WhatsApp after he and his co-founder had both been rejected for engineering jobs at Facebook; the company acquired WhatsApp in February 2014 for approximately 19.3 billion dollars, and Koum sat on its board until departing in 2018 over data privacy disagreements. Palmer Luckey built his first virtual reality headset prototype as a teenager, ran a Kickstarter campaign in 2012, sold Oculus VR in 2014 for roughly 2 billion dollars, left in 2017 and founded the defense company Anduril Industries.
The outside directors form the last group. Erskine Bowles joined the board in September 2011 as the company prepared for its public offering, having previously served as White House Chief of Staff. Jeff Zients served on the board from 2018 to 2020 and left it before joining the Biden administration.
See also
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