Former Ning exec Jay Parikh left that company in October 2009 after two years as SVP Engineering and Operations. By November he was working at Facebook.
Facebook confirms his employment, saying “We’re pleased that Jay Parikh has joined Facebook. Jay joined us in November, and will play an integral role in our engineering efforts.” What Facebook won’t say is what his title is, what he’s working on, or who he’s working for. Which is somewhat odd for such a senior executive. Parikh has yet to update his LinkedIn profile with any Facebook information either.
The giant sucking sound everyone hears in Palo Alto is Facebook hiring every competent engineer they can get their hands on, so it’s no wonder that Jay ended up at the fast growing company. What’s more interesting is why he left Ning. A few other high profile employees have moved on from Ning in recent months as well. But from what we hear they are being replaced by others, and total headcount is still growing.
Ning’s product continues to evolve, and it isn’t always smooth sailing. In November the company stripped out a cross-Ning Network activity feed for users because the product wasn’t being used. That project took up most of the dev team’s time for a nine month period, a former employee tells us. So it was a costly misstep.
Comscore shows worldwide unique visitors at Ning at nearly 19 million, roughly double the number of visitors from a year earlier. The site continues to grow. It’s just not clear that the users, or even Ning’s management, quite know what it will be when it grows up.
Update: Facebook says “Jay is a Director of Engineering working within Mike Schroepfer’s organization.”