Facebook Acqhires Former CTO Of Linden Lab Cory Ondrejka And Stealth Startup Walletin

Tuesday, November 16th, 2010

Leena Rao currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... → Learn More

It looks like Facebook has just acqhired Cory Ondrejka, the former CTO of Linden Lab, the developer of virtual world Second Life. Ondrejka was the company’s fourth employee. Update: Facebook has confirmed the hiring and acquisition of the assets of the startup Ondrejka co-founded, Walletin.

Ondrejka left Second Life in 2007 and joined EMI as senior vice-president of digital strategy in 2008. More recently, he co-founded stealth startup Walletin with Bruce Rogers. According to Ondrejka’s blog post, Facebook also hired Rogers as part of the acquisition.

It’s unclear what Ondrejka’s and Roger’s role will be at Facebook. Ondrejka writes that both and Rogers met with Facebook and writes that the social network’s engineers “recognized the disruption we were betting on and saw how far we could run with it at Facebook.” He adds, “the more we learned about Facebook, the more we saw our ideas fitting in. The more we saw an opportunity exciting enough to abandon Walletin Corporate HQ and go into work every day.”

Facebook issued this statement to us:

We can confirm that we recently reached an agreement to acquire the assets of Walletin, and we’re thrilled that Cory Ondrejka and Bruce Rogers will be joining Facebook. They both have stellar track records as entrepreneurs and developers and we’re looking forward to them bringing their talents and ingenuity to Facebook.

Today also brought the news that Facebook hired talent from Zenbe for its newly launched messaging product.

Company: Facebook
Website: facebook.com
Launch Date: February 1, 2004
Funding: $2.34B

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original idea for the term...

Learn more

Tags:

Sponsored Ads

blog comments powered by Disqus

Sponsored Ads

Sponsored Ads

Upcoming Events

SXSW 2012

Austin, Texas

Disrupt NY 2012

New York City

Disrupt SF 2012

San Francisco, CA