by Jason Wilk on June 29, 2009
- Facebook quietly chose a new CFO today, months after getting rid of Gideon Yu, for not having enough ‘public company experience’. Former Genentech CFO David Ebersman was officially announced today as the man taking on the task of raising more money for the company and getting it ready to go public in the next 2-3 years. Ebersman has been at the biotech firm for almost 15 years and was relieved of his duties after Hoffman-La Roche acquired Genentech [they had their own CFO]
- Until now, former Netscape exec and VC Peter Currie has served as a stand-in for Yu since he left, although has not been an active financial exec. [Kara, AllThingsD]. Here is the full press release.
PALO ALTO, Calif.–June 29, 2009–Facebook today announced that David Ebersman, the former executive vice president and chief financial officer (CFO) of Genentech, the pioneering biotechnology firm recently acquired by Roche, will become the company’s chief financial officer.
Ebersman will report to Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and Founder Mark Zuckerberg. He will oversee Facebook’s finance, accounting, investor relations, and real estate functions. He also becomes a part of the company’s executive management team, which directs all aspects of company strategy, planning and operations. Ebersman will formally start in September 2009.
“We received a lot of interest in the CFO position and had the opportunity to meet with many impressive candidates,” said Mark Zuckerberg. “We quickly recognized that David was the right person for Facebook. He was Genentech’s CFO while revenue tripled, and his success in scaling the finance organization of a fast growing company will be important to Facebook.”
“After meeting with Mark and the rest of the team, I was thoroughly impressed with everyone’s drive and sense of purpose to help people connect and share,“ noted Ebersman. “Mark is constantly pushing the company forward and he’s assembled a world-class team that is achieving remarkable results both for its users and as a business. I’m excited to join this effort and this new industry.”
Ebersman worked at Genentech for nearly 15 years. He served as the firm’s executive vice president and CFO from 2006 through April 2009, when Roche Group acquired the company. Prior to joining the company’s finance organization, he was senior vice president of Product Operations. He joined Genentech as a business development analyst. Previously, he was a research analyst at Oppenheimer & Company Inc.
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by Jason Wilk on March 17, 2009
- Research in Motion, maker of the popular Blackberry line of handsets, will apparently recruit an extra 3,000 staff in 2009. This will bring the total number of people on payroll to 15,000. With thousands of layoffs in the mobile industry including companies like Motorola in the last year, talent is plentiful and a good investment for a cash rich company like RIM (NASDAQ: RIMM).
- RIM is one of the few tech companies bullish on the down market right now, as they have already hired more than 7,000 new employees over the last 18 months. Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis says “this is the exact time to invest – if you can – because not only is there opportunity, but there are lots of resources out there.” If I were Lazardis, I would be putting my money in improving my design team. A major factor in the success of the iPhone is their design teams ability to understand the logisicts of how a phone can translate from paper to a solid user experience once it comes off the production line. In RIM’s case, the Blackberry Storm may have been a good idea conceptually, but when put into motion, was a giant failure. First on my agenda would be to fire whoever decided that when trying to attract third-party developers with a standardized platform, creating a touch screen phone that requires a user to ‘push’ the screen down would be a good idea.
by Jason Wilk on December 19, 2008
- Samsung will release its version of the Google phone in the second quarter of 09′. The company is interested in testing out different open source platforms over the next few years and first on its list is Android.
- Samsung is currently in the development process of its new Google phone. To speed up the process, they have hired 30 additional Linux and Java experts to customize the Android platform in order to function well with the sleek touch screen. The team now contains 80 members.
- This will be a big test for Google. As Symbian prepares to roll out their latest open source platform, users heavily adopting the latest Samsung/Android offering may enable Google to get its foot in the door. Although sales have been strong with HTC’s G1, it still was not enough to win the support of companies like AT&T.
- The phone will be available through Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile USA in North America. Sprint is a surprising addition considering their CEO Dan Hesse recently said that the Android platform is not ready yet.
by Jason Wilk on December 8, 2008
- More bad news for the big newspaper publishers this week, as The New York Times and Tribune, Inc look for ways to stay afloat. Their businesses are being hit hard by diminishing advertising sales as well as competing online papers and professional blogs.
- The Tribune owns eight major daily newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and Baltimore Sun, plus a string of local TV stations. Many papers will need to fold in coming months, but for both the NYT and Tribune, some internal cash infusions are possible.
- The NYT is looking to borrow against its new Manhattan headquarters. It has hired a real estate firm to raise up to $225 million using the value of the building as collateral. The company owns 58% of the headquarters which is valued at somewhere between $900 million and $1 billion. Pulling money out of commercial real-estate is a good option for property owners looking for a tax free way to raise capital if they are to throw the money back into another investment.
- The Tribune too has their share of investments that it can salvage some money. A sale of its Chicago Cubs baseball team is under way, which will help the company in it’s effort to pay soon to be owed debts.
- Both the NYT and Tribune are under more heat than usual as they both have loans in the hundreds of millions that need to be paid back in 2009. The NYT needs to ante up $400 million by May in debts (ATD) and Tribune owes $512 million come June. Unofrtunatelly selling their paper assets are most likely not possible as the buyers market for old media is getting thin. The amount of money they are both able to pull from their other assets are limited and neither business will be able to withstand the ever-growing transition to new media outlets.
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