Cash-Crunched Facebook Loses Its CFO

One by one, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has driven away his cofounders and close confidants. The latest to go: chief financial officer Gideon Yu. More »

Why Facebook is foundering

The great hope of the Valley, the startup everyone thought was the next Google, the company whose IPO might restart the stock-market gold rush for everyone, is not well. Why? Look to its founder. Mark Zuckerberg is mismanaging his creation's transition to greatness. In Facebook's own parlance, the company's plight is "complicated." It will take in $300 million to $350 million in revenue this year, thanks in part to a lucrative ad deal with Microsoft. But its $15 billion valuation is premised on a far brighter future — a future that may never materialize. The biggest symptom of Facebook's ailment is the flight of technical talent. In the Valley, success attracts smart people, who attract other smart people. Yes, they're after money, too, but having brilliant coworkers counts for a lot. These great minds bond and form, yes, a sort of social network of their own. When they leave, the network frays, weakening the company's ability to attract new talent. More »

Jonathan Heiliger, top Facebook exec, may leave

Will the last tech executive to leave Facebook please turn off the lights at the datacenter? We hear Jonathan Heiliger, Facebook's operations VP charged with running the social network's expansive server network, has been interviewing for other jobs. He just completed a year at the company, which is usually when employees' stock-and-options packages begin to vest. Odd: We thought Heiliger might be happier at the company with the appointment of Marc Andreessen to Facebook's board. More »

Leave Sheryl Sandberg alone!

The best thing Valleywag ever did for Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg was to call her a liar. That's just not done in the genteel office parks of Silicon Valley. It garnered the embattled executive a much-needed wave of sympathy within her company, on which she's now planning to capitalize. More »

How Facebook servers survive 50,000 new users a day

In the clip embedded below, News.com's Dan Farber asks Facebook's VP of technical operations Jonathan Heiliger how Facebook manages to keep up with adding 50,000 new users per day. Heilliger responds: "We're adding a lot of infrastructure and we're adding a lot of servers." That much we understood. But then Farber probes further, asking Heilliger "what's the basic architecture for delivering information at low latency?" And Heilliger answered, losing us for good: More »

Meet the guy spending Facebook's $200 million

Facebook, CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently told employees, will spend $200 million on capital expenditures this year. But fear not! That oversized budget, funded by Microsoft's $240 million investment, will not rest in the hands of a 23-year-old college dropout. No, even better! It's up to a 31-year-old graduate of Palo Alto High School to spend Ballmer's bucks. Despite his lack of higher education, Jonathan Heiliger has a lengthy resume and more experience than most racking up servers in datacenters. But the scale of his current project is daunting. More »

Facebook hires veteran of overvalued startups

How leaky is Facebook? So leaky that new hires sometimes out themselves right on the company's own website, as tech expert Jonathan Heiliger has done. Heiliger, you see, revealed his new employer by joining the company's private group for Facebook employees, a move that's visible on the site. Heiliger, who, back in the '90s, used to be a 20something rock-star Internet executive like new boss Mark Zuckerberg, will be the company's vice president of technical operations, charged with, oh, say, making sure the site doesn't crash, spew private data, or leak code. By my count, that makes Heiliger the fourth vice president with "operations" in his title. But I think Heiliger, a veteran of bubble-era companies like GlobalCenter and LoudCloud, will spend more time regaling Zuck with war stories about what it was like to run a ridiculously overvalued Internet company. And he'll thereby get to relive his fading youth. What a job!