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.
Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1 billion monthly active 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, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...
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