Funny stuff coming from the kings of social networking, according to the Washington Post article “Hiring Of New MySpace CEO Settles Many Old Scores”
<<MySpace parent company News Corp. continues to leak, off record, that Owen Van Nattais in the final stages of becoming the new CEO of MySpace. Van Natta certainly has the experience on paper to run the company – he was a business development executive at Amazon, the chief revenue officer at Facebook and most recently the CEO of music startup Playlist.com. If the leaks are correct, he’s in the final stages of contract negotiation and his hiring will be announced shortly.
He knows social networking, music/media and the Internet in general, and will certainly be able to get his hands around MySpace’s business. But his hiring is leaving many scratching their heads nonetheless.
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Van Natta owns a significant percentage of Facebook stock and is of course intimately knowledgeable about their business. At the very least it’s bad form for him to join Facebook’s primary competitor. At worst there may be legal issues since it will be extremely difficult for him to continue to protect confidential Facebook information in his new job. But it’s widely known that Van Natta feels betrayed by Facebook for not making him the CEO and has a deep dislike of Mark Zuckerberg. The revenge factor in taking the top job at Facebook’s biggest competitor must be making him feel somewhat vindicated…..>>
Good stuff!!! Do you think Mark Z. like to have Van Natta as direct competitor??
The Washington Post article questioned Van Natta ethics for taking this new job due to the potential conflicts of interests and confidentiality with Facebook and Playlist.
In my opinion and to Van Natta defense I should said that Van Natta left Facebook after securing a really big funding from Microsoft that value Facebook at $15B. Do you think Microsoft would pay so much if Van Natta was not behind the deal? Don’t think so….Van Natta worked, contributed and learnt from the best company in internet: Amazon.com, he got a great funding deal for Facebook and Mark Z. didn’t value him enough so he left. This is what brought Van Natta to the current situation, there is no ethics dilemma here. Other question is Playlist but I will not be surprise if he brings Playlist as part of deal and it will be acquired by Myspace (let’s see…)
Van Natta is going to be a great asset for MySpace and I can’t wait to see how these big social titans will play their next hand.
My final point, I ‘m still amaze how naive big companies are regarding their big executives. Why the spend so much money in lawyers?? Just a couple of years ago, the biggest Marketing exec from Toyota US Jim Farley left Toyota to join Ford. No noncompete agreement was signed with Toyota and he left will all the new car development plans for the next 5-10 years in his head. Can you believe it? Sure, it’s happening again…
Funny, Funny, Funny…
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