This just breaking: Three executives at MySpace are leaving the company to form their own startup, led by COO Amit Kapur (pictured here). He will be joined by senior VP of technology Jim Benedetto and and senior VP of product strategy Steve Pearman. They have internally announced their departures, we have been able to confirm with the company.
MySpace is well into its monetization phase, and is facing increasing competition from Facebook, which is larger worldwide than MySpace and may soon overtake it in the U.S. as well. The growth and the big rewards that go with growth, may now be easier to find elsewhere. Kapur, Benedetto, and Pearman are voting with their feet.
Possible successors to Kapur for the COO post include Adam Bain (a FIM hotshot who heads up the Fox Audience Network), Jeff Berman (head of sales and marketing for MySpace), and Travis Katz (head of MySpace international). External candidates, assuming they’d want the job, might be departing Yahoo Mobile exec Marco Boerries, former Yahoo SVP Brad Garlinghouse, Playlist CEO Owen Van Natta (who at one point was considering the MySpace Music CEO position), or Benchmark’s Entrepreneur-in-Residence Dave Goldberg.
Below is the memo just sent out by MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe:
From: Chris Dewolfe
Sent: Tuesday, March 03
To: FIM MySpace All
Subject: IMPORTANT MESSAGE FROM CHRIS DEWOLFE
Hi everyone,
I want to notify you of some changes occurring to the senior executive team at MySpace.
Amit Kapur, our Chief Operating Officer, will be leaving the company to start a new venture. Many of us who have been lucky enough to work with Amit can attest to his tenacity, passion, and creativity as a leader within MySpace and the larger industry.
Jim Benedetto, SVP of Engineering and Steve Pearman, SVP of Product Strategy will join Amit in this new chapter. Personally, I’m incredibly excited to see what this team creates together and wish them the best of luck as they transition from helping run a company to building a new one. Most importantly, Amit, Jim, and Steve depart as great friends of MySpace and of our senior executive team. They will remain on board for the next few weeks to ensure a smooth transition company-wide.
We recently celebrated the five year anniversary of the launch of MySpace—it’s a major milestone and everyone should be extremely proud of the global business that we have created in such a short amount of time. At its inception, MySpace was a product of the new social Web and in the last few years we’ve developed the most robust and diverse business in the marketplace.
MySpace is a social portal that empowers its global community to interact with people, content, and culture by giving individuals a personal, portable, and secure social experience. Originally, Yahoo gave consumers an organized way of navigating the Internet. Then, Google made searching the Internet extremely easy. Now, MySpace is making it simple for users to organize what’s important to them through a personal and social lens.
Despite what the market tells us, 2009 will be a big year for our business. This year we will mature our existing market leading advertising technologies such as MyAds and HyperTargeting, as well as continue to innovate new ways for companies big and small to best leverage the MySpace platform. We are effectively monetizing the stickiest sections of our site such as Music and Video by coupling the world’s richest content offering with creative ad programming online and off. What will always differentiate MySpace from others in the industry is our commitment to balancing revenue and relevancy.
On the product side, this past year was full of innovation including a site-wide global redesign, the impressive growth of our mobile initiatives, and the beginnings of our Open Platform product suite including MySpaceID. We’re at the tip of the iceberg with the Open Platform and in the coming year we expect major new launches including payments and virtual goods. Also in 2009, MySpace Music will deliver the next round of product development such its international rollout, and new functionality including charts, ticketing, and merchandise. Most important, we will remain committed to executing on our product vision in a manner that engages our users in the process and considers their feedback every step of the way.
Tom and I want to reiterate how passionate we are about MySpace—we love the people, the product, and we believe in the future of the company. MySpace has a dedicated team of senior executives and I’d like to take the opportunity to spotlight some of these individuals. I encourage everyone to get to know our executive team as they are an enormously capable group of professionals from successful media and Internet powerhouses such as eBay, Yahoo!, MTV, and Symantec that will lead our company into its next phase.
MySpace Executive Team:
· Tom Anderson—President and Co-Founder
· Aber Whitcomb—Chief Technology Officer
· Travis Katz—GM and SVP of MySpace International
· Courtney Holt—President of MySpace Music
· Jeff Berman—President of Sales and Marketing
· Lin Cherry—General Counsel
· Tom Andrus—SVP of Product
· Manu Thapar—SVP of Engineering Operations
· Allen Hurff—SVP of Engineering
· Tish Whitcraft—SVP of Customer Care
· Jason Oberfest—SVP of Business Development
· Angela Courtin—SVP of Marketing
· Abe Thomas—VP of Online Marketing
· Dani Dudeck—VP of Global Corporate Communications
In a tough economy, we’re continuing to prove to the industry that we’re a serious business defining a new social portal category for a Web that’s more personal, portable, and collaborative than ever before. Thanks everyone for a record breaking year 2008—the coming year will be even more important for the company and our 130 million global users worldwide.
Best,
Chris
Wow…
these guys were the Original 3 Horsemen when MySpace was 50 strong in Santa Monica. This does not bode well for the Tom Empire – nothing new is going to be created now that these guys are gone.
I wish them all the luck on their new venture…or tell all book.
This has not been the Tom Empire for sometime. Since he sold out his heart hasn’t been in it and the puppets behind the curtain put a huge strain on myspace and in time it will fall to FB and I kinda hate FB. oh well.
I remember when Jim was the lead DB guy back in 2004. I got a chance to work with him on a project or two back when I was working for them and he really knows his stuff. Good luck to them all.
jim’s a smart guy. of all the guys at the top, he’s actually competent.
from day one, tom, chris, and intermix ran that company to make cash for themselves, and themselves only. the developers made NOTHING when the company sold to fox, which was a rushed deal anyway. however, i think pearman made some cash…
i hope these guys cash out at their next gig in a big way, and actually take care of their developers, unlike tom and chris. jerks.
Bitter party of one.
nothing new can be created. FB and MS playtime social is played out and dont pay the bills for users. people are out growing the sites and will demand something better. the greatest social op is in small business and mobile location based advertising. zuck and mspac dont have a clue about how to attract and master small business social advertising. 20 million small businesses just waiting for a master location network to rise up and dominate internet and mobile social marketing.
AdvertisingLocator.com – pimp yourself
Amit, Steve, and Jim are absolutely the A plus team at MySpace. Getting to know them post acquisition and even working out of the Beverly Hills Myspace office for 9 months I can tell you they are the rockstars there.
Good luck guys! I know you are going to crush it..
Best luck on the new adventure guys.
I saw Jim speak at Startonomics and he seems like he knows his infrastructure shizzle very well.
Myspace definitely learned how to scale so I am sure their new venture won’t have any tech issues with scaling and will be more efficient.
Good luck guys and wish you all the best!
always good to lead your own startup
Wow. This is sad and exciting at the same time. I’m sure TC will be following these guys closely to see what’s next. Congrats to them. As for MySpace, it’s a setback but MySpace has a lot of talent behind their doors.
Good for them! Myspace is dying, other than music people really don’t like it. It was clearly groundbreaking (I remember putting my first indie garage band on there in 2003) but the reality is that Facebook has killed them. I am personally getting sick of Facebook, but Twitter doesn’t really have the rich multimedia features I need for what I do. I want something new, and maybe they can create it.
As an aside, I wonder what it’s like to work at Myspace these days?
it’s a lot like working at countrywide, only without the mandatory overtime. there are 20 C-grade developers for every A-grade one, and the A-grades have either bailed, or want to. there’s a huge salary discrepancy between the guys that’ve been there the longest, and the guys that started more recently, with the more recent hires (particularly in the bay area) making 30-50% more than the so cal guys.
and the politics is nothing short of atrocious. promotions are doled out based on who parties with whom (with some notable exceptions), and fox occasionally comes in and screws stuff up, when some suit wants to try and impress rupert.
new features are developed only to keep up with competitors, and after the design team bailed, the new designers only work on creating ads.
that said, they make (or at least made) a ton of money, but myspace profits are diluted by the other (losing) fim properties, which are sacred cows. in fact, the fim folk are quite well taken care of, particularly compared to myspace.
compare this with facebook, where extremely sharp developers have a high degree of autonomy, stock that’s actually worth something, three weeks vacation, and all sorts of other perks. it really only was a matter of time; myspace can win the ad battles, but they’ll ultimately lose the war, since it’s not fought with ads, but with creativity and talent, for the hearts and minds of the users.
whatever anonymous. i’ve never worked with more brilliant individuals in my life, and i enjoy coming in to work because of this. there have been a bunch that have moved on and of course not every dev is a winner, but your take on the atmosphere is as if you worked in a different company.
i hope that you found a place where your creativity was welcome and you’re in the company of great engineers. I found that here.
three words: drank the koolaid.
robbie: why are you logged in using FB Connect then?
Are you kidding? MySpace has the most incompetent engineers I have ever had the displeasure to regularly deal with.
“Anonymous” and “Nick”: you’re hereby being called out by a MySpace engineer who a) is proud of having worked with a great team to build one of the largest sites on the web, b) wakes up excited in the morning because of the hugely talented people he has the honor of whiteboarding with every day, and c) is not afraid to use his real name.
the idea that because i actually use Facebook discredits my thoughts on the quality of my peers here at MySpace is laughable. I use the Facebook connect to identify my self with “a” profile and since TechCrunch only supports FacebookConnect as opposed to generic OpenId, that’s all i’ve got.
btw… Chris Bissell is one of the people keeps me wanting to come in each day.
This stuff is actually true. I sincerely hope that our remaining mgmt undertsnads this and pays attention!
Well, an era is ending, as it always does. I suspect the fun part of MySpace was over for them, and this is a good time to get talent to start a company. There are a lot of great people out there at #laidoffcamp.
What struck me: Yahoo, Google and MySpace in the same sentence according to DeWolfe. Maybe take-out MySpace and replace with, Facebook.
Chris DeWolfe may have to stop being a celebrity and actually work for a living again. These three actually helped make this place run. Not sure how will make the trains run on time now. Does Tom still work there?
meh time for a change in myspace anyways it was too commerical only teens and or bands were using it
EVERYBODY was using it. myspace was hot. and what did fox do? they were making money off of ads. ads are the golden egg, and myspace is the goose. but, they wanted MORE money, which meant either a) target those ads, and target them well (difficult), or b) add MORE ADS (easy). guess what they chose?
so, the goose was laying eggs like crazy, but the eggs weren’t that valuable. so, the solution? (see above) add MORE ads, to make MORE money!
only, users get annoyed by ads. and you know what annoys them even MORE? spam. porn spam. band spam. comedian spam.
in los angeles, it seems like a GREAT idea to have every washed-up, untalented comedian, actress, and no-name band whore themselves out to the masses. that way they can go to record labels and comedy clubs and the like and tell them just how many friends they have, and how far their reach is.
but people hate this. they want to see what their friends and family are up to. and, perhaps more importantly, they DON’T want their friends and family seeing what they’re up to.
facebook figured out that profile granularity was important. when employers went to check out someone’s profile, and discovered that their prospective employee posted pics from their weekend spree, folk only had one option with their profile: go private.
yet, even with a private profile, friends and family could STILL see the evidence of yester-weekend’s battles. so, the option then was to create multiple profiles.
hey, even tom has multiple profiles. there’s the one that’s exposed to the masses, and the one that friends and family are on.
i think that myspace jumped the shark about the time they were showing “cool new people” like john mccain…. wait, john mccain??? huh? yes, john mccain was a “cool new person”.
yeah, no. john mccain is NOT a “cool new person”. neither was hillary, or anyone else.
all the speculation is expected from this crowd. i wish them luck with their endeavors and still look forward to more great things from MySpace.
for those about to flame away at me about being a fan boy, please save it. i honestly like more than one social networking site and see great value in a handful of them. i respect your opinions and only ask you to not flame mine.
put your flame suit on Robbie!
i only put that on on thursday nights silly.
FAN BOY!
thanks mr. at-least-two-myspace-profiles.
Therein lies the humor!
You bunch of facebookers….
No one made them sign non-compete clauses or IP clauses? Or have they never thought of their new venture on company time, like ever.
Here is some useful information that I have found from research. In the last 120 days social networking sites have seen steady decrease in traffic where polls have shown that its mainly because of harassing advertisements. The numbers are staggering where there is an average traffic decrease over 30% between all social networking sites.
Now I need some information. I have spent four years and over a million dollars of personal funds and in sweat equity developing a site that I plan to launch this year. I am raising venture capital to launch and have raised another $1.5m out of the $6m goal I plan to reach prior to launching.
The site is a massive “Interactive Entertainmant & Information Search Portal With Social & Commercial Networking Integration”. The process to raise capital in Tampa has been rough and long and I am looking for any resources that can help speed the process up.
My prototype has been strong enough to recieve endorsements from Mike Alstott AKA A-Train (retired Bucs FB), George Wendt (my 3rd cousin, Norm from Cheers)and several political figures, which have all contributed to current Angel Equity.
I am redoing my corporate site as we speak and that will be posted by the end of March, which is located at eeihq.com.
The new search portal domain is YourNight.com
Any information and/or guidance is appreciated.
Regards,
RJ Garbowicz
President/CEO
Extreme Enterprises, Inc.
My advice would be enjoy bankrupcy.
What’s the source of your data? I’d love to see the info on “harassing advertisements” – that’s a pretty significant thing we should ALL pay attention to.
If it’s true.
On a happier note – best of luck to Amit, Steve and Jim!! Can’t wait to see what they’re up to.
RJ – I must ask exactly what is going on with your project. It seems you are attempting to gain quite a bit of hype, is this is all just a test to see how big of a following you can get for yourself based purely on speculation and promises? You have been “accepting” beta invites for quite some time now?
This is no hype Brad. For a sneak peak of whats to come, see http://www.fait...e.com/yournight
here goes myspace… so what… here comes YourNight.com
I beg to differ Brad and Annonymous. This is no hype. For a sneak peak of our March 2009 launch, see http://www.fait...e.com/yournight
are you kidding me? this is a rehash of myspace/friendster/all the others. unless you want to tout 1994 technology: IT ACTUALLY HAS A HIT COUNTER!
sell it, and sell it quick, to whoever’s foolish enough to buy it. you’re not going to make any money; there’s nothing novel about what you’re doing.
In the last 120 days social networking sites have seen steady decrease in traffic
6mos ago there was a big growth spurt. It’s totally normal for usage to slow down as users get more familiar with their networks.
where polls have shown that its mainly because of harassing advertisements.
[citation needed]
This might be Facebook’s opportunity to take the number one spot away.
______________________
stHrt.com
Change Your Home Page
http://sthrt.com
all fb has to do is sit back and let myspace go yahoo. let myspace add more vp’s, more management, more beaurocracy. let management dictate from the top. it works great in media, but not so well with tech companies. and they’ll do it to themselves. they underpay their rank and file, and disproportionately reward management, forcing people into management spots for money. the politically adept move up very quickly, and help the bad management process move right along.
myspace will never disappear, but it will become increasingly irrelevant. and, whoever buys twitter, or the next twitter, and the next next twitter, wins.
The leaked memo reveals a CEO admirably and diplomatically navigating a difficult situation. I’m impressed.
lol. just wait. my hunch is, s___ is gonna hit the fan in a BIG way over them leaving. the more flowery the corporatespeak, the nastier it is behind closed doors.
I think that they will promote Kevin Freund to be the next Vice President of Technology
why? that guy was sidelined a looong time ago.
I bet they take a second look… he has been there from the beginning, a solid company guy, knows his stuff. He is already the VP of Media and Entertainment… and guess where MySpace is located…. L.A. I bet he has fat connections to the studios. Plus that department is one of the only reasons people even still use MySpace.
We’ll see what Tommy does.
Those guys are solid and brilliant. I can’t wait to see what it is they’ve got brewing behind closed doors. They will be sorely missed!!
fanboy.
Amit lookin good on that pic. haha!
While I think Dave Goldberg would be an outstanding COO for MySpace (as would be Brad Garlinghouse for that matter), doesn’t anyone recognize that Dave is married to Sheryl Sandberg, COO at Facebook?
(http://query.ny...757C0A9629C8B63)
Now that would make for some very interesting dinner table conversation!
get real.
notmyspaceanymore
where are they off to? what’s the new project?
Is this a sign of the crew jumping from a sinking ship?
There goes MySpace as we know it!
RT
http://www.priv...y-center.pro.tc
Maybe it is time for “Getting Real” for MySpace, FaceBook, Digg, Twitter etc.
People on social websites don’t want advertising and ignore advertising.
People want entertainment and getting connected easily.
In case of too much advertising, then people move on.
Getting real, huh?
You got any other brilliant way to generate revenue for providing such a service to its users for free? I’m all ears.
It seems like folks often forget what it takes behind the scenes to run sites like these.
and here comes YourNight.com watchout folks
It is good. I think they can provide use some new product.
Rajib Roy
http://www.seo-mama.com
http://www.wvss.net
Amit is useless. Steve is useless. Jim knows some technology, but is not a rockstar, yet has the ego of one.
I will be very surprised to see anything significant from these three
For a sneak peak at myspace’s replacement, see http://www.fait...e.com/yournight
They will definitely be missed, but they are far from being the only competent people at MySpace. There will have to be quite a few more memo’s like this one before all the powder is out. The company has its problems, but you’d be surprised how much great development is going on both on the tech and product side. If there is a slide down, it will not be quick, and it will be shared with Facebook.
You can now return to your regularly scheduled random start up shilling..
I think Eric Christensen will succeed Amit Kapur as the COO since Eric already does a lot of operational stuff related to the Google deal (a big piece of MySpace’s revenues). Christensen’s also been a COO before in his career, so he will be a natural pick.
I think Richard Buckingham will succeed Jim Benedetto since he’s already managing most of that department’s budget, and is an astute technologist.
I think Tom Andrus is already awesome as the Head of Product, and there won’t be a need to backfill for Steve Pearman.
The truth is that they left because FIM took away the meal reimbursement. Bring back our free lunch!
Ever notice companies like Facebook and Google arent poaching MySpace employees the way MySpace is with Yahoo/MTV? That’s because the talent just isnt there. Low rent all the way. Still Amit at least had some presence. It’s embarrassing watching “VPs” like sleazy Jason Kirk and formerly Josh Brooks represent this company.