The high-level executive exits just keep coming for Zynga.
Today’s departure is Mike Gupta, the financial executive who has served as Zynga’s Treasurer since last year. He’ll be taking on a new role at Twitter as its vice president of corporate finance and treasurer. The news was first reported by Bloomberg’s Doug MacMillan. Gupta’s LinkedIn page also has been updated with his new role.
This is the second senior financial executive to leave Zynga this week for another major social web company. On Tuesday, Dave Wehner, the former investment banker who had served as Zynga’s CFO since July 2010, left Zynga to take a job at Facebook.
Executive and C-level exits are nothing new for Zynga, which has seen significant top-level changes in recent months as its performance on the stock market has struggled. Since late summer, Zynga has fielded resignations from COO John Schappert, infrastructure CTO Allan Leiwand, chief creative officer Mike Verdu, chief marketing and revenue officer Jeff Karp, chief security officer Nils Puhlmann, among others.
However, Zynga seems to be working hard at the moment to fight back against the brain drain. This week the social gaming company announced a slate of new executive appointments to fill the recently vacated roles: Mark Vranesh retook the CFO spot (a role he filled a couple years back), David Ko took the role of COO, Barry Cottle took over as Chief Revenue Officer, and Steven Chiang was named President of Games. Notably, all of these people had already been working at Zynga — so perhaps, promoting from within will allow Zynga to refocus and regain some much-needed stability.
Zynga was founded in July 2007 by Mark Pincus and is named for his late American Bulldog, Zinga. Loyal and spirited, Zinga’s name is a nod to a legendary African warrior queen. The early supporting founding team included Eric Schiermeyer, Michael Luxton, Justin Waldron, Kyle Stewart, Scott Dale, John Doerr, Steve Schoettler, Kevin Hagan, and Andrew Trader. Zynga’s mission is connecting the world through games. Everyday millions of people interact with their friends and express their unique personalities through our...
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