More Talent Walks Out The Door At MySpace: Three Key Employees Go To Gravity

Tuesday, March 9th, 2010

J. Michael Arrington (born March 13, 1970 in Huntington Beach, California) is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of TechCrunch, a blog covering startups and technology news. Arrington attended Claremont McKenna College (BA Economics, 1992) and Stanford Law School (JD, 1995), and practiced as a corporate and securities lawyer at two law firms: O’Melveny & Myers and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich... → Learn More

More bad news for an already bullet-riddled MySpace: three key employees have left the company to join Gravity, a cross-town startup founded by former MySpace COO Amit Kapur, SVP Steve Pearman and SVP Jim Benedetto.

We covered Gravity’s launch in December 2009.

The three MySpacer’s are Chief Software Architect Chris Bissell (we previously reported Bissell’s resignation), Chief Systems Architect Dan Farino and Development Manager Robbie Coleman.

All of these employees approached Gravity on their own, says our source. But MySpace’s somewhat zealous legal department isn’t shy about engaging in the occasionally ridiculous turf war. We’ve also heard that the best MySpace employees continue to head for the door, and companies that know which employees actually get things done aren’t going to turn away good people.

MySpace declined to comment on this story, other than to confirm that the three employees are no longer with the company. Gravity also declined to comment.

Company: MySpace
Website: myspace.com
Launch Date: January 8, 2003

MySpace is one of the world’s largest social networks, with about 125 million users. Originally inspired by Friendster, MySpace quickly grew to become the world’s largest social network, before being overtaken by Facebook. User pages are highly customizable and support integration with widgets such as Slide or YouTube. MySpace provides users with a way to connect around content and culture. MySpace was started as a side project of the internet marketing company eUniverse (now called Intermix Media) in August...

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Company: Gravity
Website: gravity.com
Funding: $10M

Gravity is a technology startup founded by three early MySpace execs in 2009. Their mission is to build the internet’s Interest Graph and enable amazing, personalized experiences anywhere on the web.

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