StumbleUpon co-founder Garrett Camp just announced that he’s stepping down as CEO and becoming chairman of the company’s board.
The change is effective immediately, Camp says. He’ll be leading a search for the company’s new CEO, someone who has more experience with international growth and running a large organization, while the current executive team handles day-to-day operations.
Companies are rarely candid about the reasons for a management change like this one, but for what it’s worth, both Camp and Marc Leibowitz (StumbleUpon’s vice president of business development and marketing) say this was Camp’s choice. After all, he’s been at StumbleUpon for 10 years. Camp argues that it’s time for the company to find a leader who can take it to the next level, plus, “I think it might be good to take a vacation that lasts for more than a week.”
Camp also says he feels comfortable leaving now because of the success of the content discovery service’s redesign and rebranding at the end of last year, the fact that it recently crossed 25 million registered users (a nearly 5x increase from its user base when Camp and his investors bought the company back from eBay three years ago), and the strength of the current management team.
“The platform is in a much stronger place than it was in the past,” he says.
As for his involvement going forward, Camp says that he’s not sure yet. It will definitely be a part-time role, one where he focuses on broader strategy. He won’t be in the office every day, but he’ll probably do more than just show up for board meetings, he says.
In the meantime, given Camp’s involvement in other startups (he’s co-founder at Uber, and an investor and advisor elsewhere), I wouldn’t be surprised to see him start something new soon, too.
StumbleUpon is the easiest way to discover new and interesting things from across the Web. More than 25 million people turn to StumbleUpon to be informed, entertained and surprised by content and information recommended just for them. In addition, more than 80,000 brands, publishers and other marketers have used StumbleUpon’s Paid Discovery platform to tell their stories and promote their products and services. Explore more at http://www.stumbleupon.com.
Garrett is the founding CEO of StumbleUpon.com, guiding its development from inception to over 25M registered members. StumbleUpon is now the largest discovery engine on the web, delivering over 1 Billion personalized recommendations per month. Over 75,000 advertisers have used StumbleUpon to get their content discovered. Garrett also co-founded Uber.com in 2009 with Travis Kalanick, to improve the efficiency of on-demand car service. Uber now provides on-demand car service in 16 cities across North America and Europe. Garrett completed his Masters...
Austin, TX
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
Disrupt Europe: Berlin Hackathon
Berlin, Germany
San Francisco
