• Path Lands Another Ex-Facebooker To Run Ops

    Tuesday, May 31st, 2011

    MG Siegler is a general partner at CrunchFund and a columnist for TechCrunch, where he has been writing since 2009. His focus is on Apple. Prior to TechCrunch, MG covered various technology beats for VentureBeat. Originally from Ohio, MG attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI. He’s previously lived in Los Angeles where he worked in Hollywood and in... → Learn More

    It’s something that Dave Morin isn’t too quick to talk about, but it’s impossible to ignore: his new startup, Path, is becoming quite the gathering ground for ex-Facebook employees. Of course, Morin’s reluctance to establish the connection probably has to do with the fact that he used to be the head of Platform there, and still has close ties to the company. But the small startup just hired its fourth ex-Facebooker today. And the latest is a pretty big one, considering he had been at Facebook over four years.

    Matthew Welty will be Path’s new Head of Operations, Morin tells us. Welty had been an operations engineer at Facebook for the past four-plus years. For some perspective on how long he had been there, when he joined in April 2007, Facebook had 20 million active users. Today, they’re about to hit 700 million active users.

    And when Welty joined Facebook, Morin was just gearing up to launch Platform. Now Morin will be Welty’s boss in this new venture. Welty decided to leave Facebook a few weeks ago, and approached Path about an opportunity.

    “Welty is a world class leader in technical operations, we are excited he chose to join Path as his next step. He will be key in ensuring that Path is always available to our quickly growing user base and that our infrastructure continues to scale with quality in mind,” Morin says.

    Welty follows Nathan Folkman, who joined Path from Facebook a couple weeks ago. Interestingly enough, Folkman used to be Head of Operations at Foursquare (and is the only employee to leave Foursquare so far).

    The team that Google has already offered $100 million+ for is getting stronger.

    Company: Path
    Website: path.com
    Funding: $41.2M

    Path is the simple and private way to share life with close friends & family. Founded by Dave Morin, previously Co-Inventor of Platform and Connect at Facebook with Shawn Fanning, creator of Napster, and Dustin Mierau co-creator of Macster.

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    Company: Facebook
    Website: facebook.com
    Launch Date: February 1, 2004
    IPO: NASDAQ:FB

    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, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original idea for...

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