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Posts Tagged ‘departure’

[France] Music search and discovering service Deezer is currently caught up in a storm of controversy: its co-founder and CEO Jonathan Benassaya has effectively been forced out by his investors. After Deezer faced mounting competition from services like Spotify, it’s emerged that investors ousted the founder in order to put in place a more experienced business manager to both reorganize and perhaps prepare some kind of exit. They’ve been disappointed with Deezer’s performance towards a premium service and low advertising revenues.

The rumour that this was about to happen began last week grew a head of steam over the weekend, as reported by music expert Philippe Astor on French site Electronlibre (Google translation). Midem, the annual conference for the music industry, is currently taking place in Cannes, France and the departure of Jonathan Bessaya from Deezer was one of the buzzing topics during the weekend. One of the things that confirmed this rumour was that the CEO was due to participate on a panel on Saturday during Midemnet (the part of Midem focused on the online music industry) but he conspicuously did not show up. His name was even up on screen during the panel he was supposed to attend. On this panel was also Paul Brown, SVP of Spotify, that is widely regarded as a Deezer killer.

Genentech chairman Arthur D. Levinson is resigning from Google’s Board of Directors, the Mountain View company announced earlier this morning. His departure comes shortly after Google Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt resigned from the board of Apple, where Levinson is also a director.

No reason for the departure was given in the statement, but this is likely a result of the growing tension between Google and Apple, which is being closely monitored by the FTC.

In the statement, Schmidt describes Levinson as a good friend and valued colleague:

“Art has been a key part of Google’s success these past five years, offering unvarnished advice and vital counsel on every big issue and opportunity Google has faced,” Schmidt said. “Though he leaves as a member of our Board, Art will always have a special place at Google.”

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Last month, we were first to report that Google Engineering Director Mark Lucovsky was leaving the company to join VMware. Lucovsky was with the company for nearly 5 years and was very instrumental in its APIs. And now they’re losing another long-time employee who worked in a similar capacity — and yes, he’s also going to VMware.

Derek Collison has been with Google since 2004, most recently serving as a Technical Director working on its search APIs (specifically the AJAX ones) much like Lucovsky. Now he’s joining his once and future colleague at VMware, where he’ll apparently be working directly with him again.

Collison tweeted out the news of his departure today, and engaged some of his former co-workers on FriendFeed as to what his role will be with VMware. “Joining up with Vadim and Mark Lucovsky for a bit at VMWare to do some cloud computing stuff,” he wrote. “Vadim” is Vadim Spivak, who formerly worked at Google as a Gmail engineer before, yes, leaving to go to VMware.

Certainly, three people out of thousands is not a pattern, but it is interesting that all these of these guys left Google, where they had been for a long time, around the same time, to go work together at an already established company. Plenty of Googlers leave to go to startups, places like Twitter and FriendFeed, no doubt dreaming of riches and more control, but VMware IPOed in 2007.

Well, at least Google got its CEO back full-time again today.

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Remember when MySpace lost three key execs before the whole chaotic reorganization? They announced their departure in March. And we’ve now confirmed that they are closing a substantial round of funding, even before they’ve picked a final name for the company.

The company, whatever it will be called, was founded by Amit Kapur (MySpace COO), Steve Pearman (MySpace SVP Product Strategy) and Jim Benedetto (MySpace VP Technology). The company is now backed by August Capital and Redpoint Ventures, who jointly funded a roughly $10 million venture round. David Hornik from August and Geoff Yang from Redpoint have joined the board of directors.

What do we know so far about the company? Not a whole lot except that Redpoint and August are rumored to be “very excited” about it. The company is supposedly targeting the message board/Internet forum space with technology that aggregates content and serves advertising against it. Real time search (bingo! fundable!) may be part of the business plan as well.

Whatever this thing is called, and whatever it does, I know one thing - I like the team. These were three of the most respected and creative execs at MySpace. Keep an eye on them.

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