One of the key figures in Facebook is leaving. Samuel Lessin, VP for product development, announced Thursday on his Facebook page that he is bidding farewell to the company.
Lessin joined Facebook in 2010 but he and CEO Mark Zuckerberg knew each other from Harvard. When Facebook acquired Drop.io, Lessin's file-sharing startup, in an all-stock deal, he became product manager for the social network. He went on to contribute to the development of many of the site's features like Timeline.
While it looks like Facebook was Lessin's big break, it may be actually the other way around. According to The Facebook Effect, a book by David Kirkpatrick, Lessin's father was a well-known investor who helped Zuckerberg get started by taking the Facebook CEO around New York to talk to venture capitalists in spring 2004.
What's next for Lessin? It's not definite..
"My immediate plan is to take some time for kite-surfing, skiing, and general adventuring / possibly some trouble making. This is the first time I can think of since middle school where I didn't have a very concrete next step to take in life, and I intend to not squander the opportunity," he wrote on his Facebook announcement. He's also planning on helping out at The Information, a tech news site his wife Jessica started, if needed.
Lessin has never had a problem with coming up with ideas so it's not impossible to assume that he'd be on his next venture soon enough. But while he has no concrete plans at the moment, he promises everyone that whatever he'll do next will not be boring.
Lessin is the latest of Zuckerberg's friends to leave the company, most of whom helped the CEO build Facebook from the ground up. Napster co-founder Sean Parker was Zuckerberg's early advisor and he left in 2005. Chris Hughes went to Harvard with the Facebook CEO and served as spokesman during the early days of the company before leaving in 2007. There was also Dustin Moskowitz, another classmate from Harvard, who started his own startup in 2008.
Facebook has not made any comments yet on Lessin's departure but maybe his leaving isn't all that surprising. According to reports, Lessin's responsibilities in product management for the company have been scaled back since last fall.
