Dan Rose, a top Facebook executive who oversaw the company’s business development team, is leaving the company.
Dan Rose, one of Facebook’s most important business executives, is leaving
It’s the second big-deal Facebook departure this summer.
Peter Kafka covered media and technology, and their intersection, at Vox. Many of his stories can be found in his Kafka on Media newsletter, and he also hosts the Recode Media podcast.
Rose, who joined Facebook in 2006, says he’s not going to take another full-time job but is leaving to be with his family, which moved to Hawaii from California last year.
Rose, who reported to COO Sheryl Sandberg, has been in charge of the company’s deals with partners like media companies, and distributors like Apple and Google. He also headed up Facebook’s mergers and acquisitions group, shepherding deals like its 2012 acquisition of Instagram — as well as a 2007 investment and commercial deal from Microsoft that valued Facebook at $15 billion. Both of those deals worked out well.
It’s the second major executive departure this summer for Facebook, whose top managers don’t usually leave. Elliot Schrage, the longtime head of Facebook’s public policy and communications group, announced his departure in June.
An obvious question is what role Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal — and the internal and external criticism the company has faced since Donald Trump’s 2016 election — had to do with Rose’s departure. Not surprisingly, he doesn’t make any mention of those things in a Facebook post announcing his move.
“Mark and Sheryl changed my life and my career. I would walk through fire for them, or fly across the ocean on a regular basis. But they deserve someone in my role who is present and fully engaged every day in the many opportunities and challenges that lie ahead,” Rose writes.
Rose says he will stay at Facebook until February, in part to recruit a replacement. But Facebook sources say the company has likely already identified an internal candidate to replace Rose.
If Facebook wanted to promote someone who currently works for Rose, it might look at Ime Archibong or Nick Grudin, who work on product and media deals, respectively. An obvious candidate from outside Rose’s group — but still in Facebook’s org chart — would be Marne Levine, who has been Instagram’s COO for four years.
Here’s Rose speaking at our Code Media conference last year:
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
