In 2007, Facebook was the hot startup where everyone wanted to work, able to steal engineers away from the then-golden Google. Now, in 2009, it's become a company of close to 1,000 employees where more and more, people are eyeing the exits, wondering how they can escape the tyrannical whims of 24-year-old CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his tormented lieutenants. Netanel "Net" Jacobsson is just the latest to make his way out the door.

And he won't be the last: We hear that Charlie Cheever, a Facebook developer who's in Zuckerberg's inner circle, is also planning to leave soon.

Jacobsson was a director of business development at Facebook. Was, as confirmed by his bio on Twitter ("Fmr. Facebook director") and a message on the microblogging service.
Facebook PR is said to be eager to hush up Jacobsson's departure, following a series of exits over the last half-year of vital behind-the-scenes players: the loss of Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz; the contentious firing of platform director Ben Ling; and the deeply hushed-up departure of top designer Katie Geminder, who, it's rumored, was ill-treated by Zuckerberg himself. Moskovitz has a startup, Ling has returned to Google, and Geminder, now works for another Facebook refugee, former COO Owen Van Natta, at his Project Playlist startup.

We hear that Jacobsson's nemesis was his boss, VP Dan Rose, who's already famous for his ill treatment of another underling, Tim Kendall. Our tipster reports:

Lots of wrangling with Dan Rose. The story is very ugly. Dan said lots of inappropriate things to Net and has treated him very poorly, much worse than what he said to Kendall.

Net sent mail to folks today letting people know that he's leaving. Facebook is trying to keep it hush hush given the long series of departures. Wouldn't be surprised if Facebook tries to spin it.

Can't believe the number of enemies Facebook is making!

The problem for Facebook: Like a freshly signed-up user, Facebook is in desperate need of friends. It is constantly redesigning its service in an effort to find some lucrative new way of placing ads in its users' streams of pokes, photos, and Wall posts. And to make friends with businesses, it needs plugged-in glad-handers like Jacobsson.

And it's not like Zuckerberg is doing much to lighten the mood. We hear he threatened to fire his current COO, Sheryl Sandberg, in an argument about the controversial recent revision of Facebook's terms of service. He has a habit of running through confidantes quickly, which may explain Cheever's plans to leave.

It's the ultimate irony of Facebook: The company that aspires to connect the entire world can't keep a handful of key executives linked together.

Can you imagine, kids in their twenties having a good time? This must end! Didn't they get Sequoia's memo? Morin, Facebook's official speaker-to-geeks, turned 28 and rented a downtown art gallery Tuesday night to celebrate. After I tracked down Morin, I gave him a salami I'd picked up at VC firm Alsop Louie's party earlier that night. (It was a heartfelt regifting.) Besides Morin, I identified several other members of Camp Cyprus:

• Brittany Bohnet, Morin's steady Googler girlfriend and the other half of the Internet's cutest couple
• "Professor" Meagan Marks, known on Valleywag for her ancient-history stint as a recruiter (she's now working as a program manager)
• Joe Green, famous for his Causes application, infamous for his squarecut swim trunks
• Jessica Bigarel, a graphic designer at Apple
• Scott Marlette, the coder behind Facebook Photos

With Morin, that's almost a third of Camp Cyprus. (Sadly, Wall Street Journal Jessica Vascellaro wasn't there.) You'd think they'd be enough to bring down the Internet, but no.

I caught a brief glimpse of soon-to-depart Facebook founder Dustin Moskovitz, but didn't get to say hello — he left early, which just confirms his reputation as being not much of a party animal.

Things got a tad more surreal when MC Hammer showed up. When I left the party, the former rap star was chatting up angel investor Ron Conway, who has, yes, invested in the Hammer's inevitable startup.

Digg's Matt Van Horn plots with Keith Rabois, Slide's evil-genius mastermind.

Ron Conway invests in a glass of wine.

Working for Comcast sounds pretty good to Plaxo's Joseph Smarr and John McCrea right now.

Really. MC Hammer was there. At Dave Morin's birthday party.

That's why, for days before it was announced, top executives at Facebook desperately hid technical lead Dustin Moskovitz's plans to leave. They dithered as Mark Zuckerberg tried to persuade his cofounder and college roommate to stay, and others, led by COO Sheryl Sandberg, concocted a plan to spin his departure. That spin has now been dutifully printed in the pages of the Wall Street Journal: Facebook's changes are the "type of evolution you see among young growing companies and specifically young growing companies in Silicon Valley," company flack Larry Yu told the paper.

Sandberg, who closely directs the company's PR, would have us think that the uproar that has taken place at the social network since her arrival is a healthy evolution. It is not. The internal politicking she has introduced to the company is destructive, and has sent many of the company's best and brightest fleeing. The list of the departed includes data guru Jeff Hammerbacher, product VP Matt Cohler, platform director Ben Ling, and most recently, Justin Rosenstein, a top engineer who's leaving with Moskovitz. Operations VP Jonathan Heiliger may be next. The defections all hurt. But most of the blame lies with Zuckerberg himself.

Zuckerberg has always styled himself as the company's "founder," relegating the likes of Moskovitz and Chris Hughes, now Barack Obama's Web campaign director, to "cofounder" status. Never mind that this distinction doesn't exist in English; those who start a company are all equally founders.

Zuckerberg clearly considers himself first among equals; he once referred to Moskovitz as "disposable" and a "soldier." The former Harvard roommates patched over those insults, and Zuckerberg said he will rely on Moskovitz's counsel even after his departure.

If Moskovitz really thought he could guide Facebook's evolution, he would have stayed at the company, right? Zuckerberg has a history of churning through confidants. Napster cofounder Sean Parker helped establish Facebook in Silicon Valley as its president, only to be disappeared from the company. Former COO Owen Van Natta was in favor, then out. Sandberg had his ear for a while, but may be losing it. Lately, I hear he favors Christopher Cox, the twentysomething recent Stanford grad he recently tapped as the company's director of product. We'll see how long he stays by Zuckerberg's side.

This fickleness may be predictable from a 24-year-old. But it's fundamentally bad for the company. Yahoo thrived, in its early days, on the partnership between CEO Tim Koogle and founders Jerry Yang and Dave Filo. Google's triumvirate of its cofounders and CEO Eric Schmidt improved on that management form; the troika lends the company some stability by making sure decisions at the top are never unilateral.

Zuckerberg's insistence on the "founder" title suggests that he always planned to rule the company alone. It's a bad plan. His instincts on what kind of website will attract a 100 million users have been spot-on. But he has no business sense. At one point during the Facebook redesign process, he suggested getting rid of advertising altogether, having grown disillusioned with both old-style banner ads and the company's experiments with targeting ads to users' behavior.

Will Zuck ever find an equal partner, a sounding board who can help him turn Facebook into the large, ongoing concern he envisions? Dustin Moskovitz may not have been the right person. Nor, it seems, is Sheryl Sandberg.

Yet to staunch the bleeding of Facebook's technical talent, Zuckerberg will have to find someone to ground him — someone for whom he has enduring respect, who can moderate his worst impulses. Without it, there will be one word describing what's going to happen to Facebook: "founder."

At various times in our progress, people have come up to me to deliver a now familiar question: "did you ever imagine Facebook would be this big?" And I give a familiar answer: "well... yea, actually". Frankly, Mark and I knew even at the beginning this was something the world needed. We went into the college market as a stepping stone - identifying dense nests in the graph that would lead us to the rest of the world. We could see far enough in the future to know there would be an impact, we just didn't know exactly what it would be. Now I can look back on our progress and see the ways the world has changed, the ways we have changed it. We've altered the future in a score of ways, from making it easier to look up phone numbers and email addresses to making it more difficult for terrorists to isolate impressionistic youth in the middle east. At the same time we've built a competent and vibrant organization, driven by a passion to push the world more open.

In the process of helping to build a company, I found I had another passion: making companies themselves run better. It's easy to confuse this with a desire to manage, but even when I tried to do that I found myself drawn back to code for the solutions to my problems; I didn't want to construct efficiencies, I wanted to engineer them. Communication is the key to scale in any size organization and technology is the key to communication. I've seen us unblock ourselves time and again with new tools to increase transparency and passive information flow and many times it was the fruit of my own labors. While working on improving Facebook's tools, however, I came to a very difficult conclusion: doing this for all the companies of the world was not the same project as doing it for one of them. This idea is one that needs an organization that was built to do it, with every fiber of its DNA engineered in a way that producing an extensible enterprise platform becomes little more than the logical consequence of an organism executing its own nature. Further, the things we've scoped for Facebook's product team to do are the right things to be doing and I wouldn't have agreed with asking the company to divert significant resources to approach a project so different and so boundless in scope. Every time we introduce something new, we do it at an opportunity cost and this is too large a detour to take when we are already moving swiftly in the right direction.

And Facebook is moving in the right direction. When Facebook has a billion members (and 800 employees? maybe 900?) and someone leans over to ask me if I ever imagined it would get that big, my answer is going to be "you're damn right I did. how come it only has 20% of the market?". To know that this is Facebook's future and decide not be a part of it is the hardest thing I've ever had to do, but it's allowed me to have a broader perspective for the future. Like you, I've worried about the people leaving the company but it took becoming one of them to understand that this is just another part of the ecosystem (you should just take my word for it though). I'm not leaving the movement - I'm becoming a new part of it. The inevitable flux of the men and women behind these organizations is what moves the industry forward in the same direction in a way that cross-company collaboration alone never will. As the world moves to modular stacks and applications built up from a smorgasbord of platforms instead of single toolkits, then the companies that build the parts will need to act more and more like cooperative teams in a single larger organization. As Justin would undoubtedly say, I am simply viewing the industry from a different level of abstraction. These changes are difficult and sad, and that's certainly an understatement for me... but change brings new things and this particular change will bring a new ally to our mission - I think we can all be pretty pumped about that.

Whether I work here or not, I'll forever bleed Facebook blue. Facebook has been my passion and my purpose for the past 5 years. Our new project is not a replacement for what we build here, but instead both a complement and a compliment, and we have every intention of making it feel like a natural extension of Facebook's product and purpose. Similarly, my timing in leaving is not an indication that I have lost faith in our ability to succeed, but an affirmation in my confidence in the company's enduring success irrespective of changing faces.

Justin and I going to be around for at least another month and I am really looking forward to going deeper on this idea with everyone and how we can continue to work closely with Facebook. I'll always be really proud of the work we've done and grateful for the opportunity to work with such a uniquely remarkable team. We'll also be at the Q&A later to help continue the conversation right away.

Dustin

A couple of months ago, after three years as a Google product manager, I decided to leave for Facebook. I am writing this note to spread Good News to all the friends I haven't already overwhelmed with my enthusiasm: Facebook really is That company.
Which company? That one. That company that shows up once in a very long while — the Google of yesterday, the Microsoft of long ago. That company where large numbers of stunningly-brilliant people congregate and feed off each other's genius. That company that's doing with 60 engineers what teams of 600 can't pull off. That company that's on the cusp of Changing The World, that's still small enough where each employee has a huge impact on the organization, where you think about working now and again, and where you know you'll kick yourself in three years if you don't jump on the bandwagon now, even after someone had told you that it was rolling toward the promised land. That company where everyone seems to be having the time of their life.

I'm serious. I have drunk from the kool-aid, and it is delicious. Facebook is hiring ambitiously across the organization. If you're an engineer, UI designer, product manager, statistician, bizdev god, general entrepreneurial badass, whatever, and you would even consider considering Facebook as your new place for hat-hanging, please send me a Facebook message. We can have lunch, or I can give you a tour, or we can go kick it with Mark Zuckerberg — whatever it takes.

If you need the joke explained, Moskovitz is making fun of a common tactic used by hackers: Sending fake messages which appear to come from an authority, in an effort to get people to give up their passwords. But he's got a backhanded point. If Facebook insists on using its own software to make major announcements, a fake Mark Zuckerberg has a decent chance of fooling a lot of the people, a lot of the time.

Cofounder Chris Hughes left a while ago to work on Barack Obama's presidential campaign. Another cofounder, Dustin Moskovitz, has been rumored to be on the outs with Zuckerberg, though Moskovitz attributes any disputes to normal friction between founders. And now D'Angelo — though not a founder, one of the small group who helped Facebook relocate from Zuckerberg's dorm room to Palo Alto — is gone, too. He may be leaving for his own reasons, but his departure is a sign that the company is fitfully growing up.

Click to expand the images.

Zuckerberg and Moskovitz are both known to be stubborn and to argue vociferiously for their ideas. It's hard to imagine a disagreement that would cause a permanent rift.

This split appears to have something to do with the pair's Harvard history. A clue lies in a 2005 Denver University newspaper article about Facebook. In it, Moskovitz's title is given as "No Longer Expendable Programmer." Clearly an inside joke, but where did it come from? We hear that Zuckerberg referred to Moskovitz as "expendable" and "a soldier" in IM conversations turned up during Facebook's long-running lawsuit with the founders of rival social network ConnectU.

That lawsuit was reportedly settled earlier this month. Moskovitz was clearly familiar with the "expendable" remark. The feud is, insiders tell me, only goes back a month. How to explain these facts? Here's a theory: Back in 2005, Zuckerberg must have convinced Moskovitz to laugh off the slight. Could the final stages of the legal process turned up evidence that persuaded Moskovitz Zuckerberg wasn't joking?

If so, Zuckerberg may face a lonely future. Chris Hughes, the only other person Zuckerberg acknowledges as a cofounder, left Facebook to work on Barack Obama's campaign. Andrew McCollum and Eduardo Saverin, two Harvard classmates sometimes identified as cofounders, have long been out of hte picture. Moskovitz is the only person who has been with Zuckerberg since the beginning, the only comrade who remembers Facebook's long march out of collegiate obscurity.

Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin made a pact to work with each other for 20 years. In two decades, who will Zuckerberg have in his trusted inner circle? Or does he view everyone around him, as he once labeled Moskovitz, as "expendable"?

Chamath Palihapitiya, the former AOL executive, now heads up marketing; having criticized Silicon Valley's white-male old boys' club, Palihapitiya must surely be pleased with Van Natta's comeuppance. Matt Cohler, the early LinkedIn employee cofounderwho jumped to Facebook some time ago, is now in charge of "business operations" and strategy. Gideon Yu, the recently hired CFO, is now free to fib about Facebook's finances, as he did as YouTube's CFO after that company was acquired by Google. And close Zuckerberg associates Dustin Moskovitz and Adam D'Angelo now have tighter reins on the company's products and technology.

But Zuckerberg could be setting himself up for a fall. By elevating Van Natta's rivals, he's going to find himself spending time on personality conflicts, infighting, and turf warfare instead of tending to the needs of his beloved users. Palihapitiya, Cohler, and Van Natta, for example, are, by their titles, charged with Facebook's "operations." The more Zuckerberg's executives spar over fields of authority, the less attention they'll pay to business. Zuckerberg has asserted his power — at the cost, potentially, of his abiity to get things done.