Gideon Yu is the former chief financial officer at Facebook. In late March, Yu had suddenly quit and it was uncertain where he was headed to next. According to a source with TechCrunch, Yu has joined Khosla Ventures as a General Partner.
Yu was previously an SVP in Finance and Yahoo! and he was also the former CFO of YouTube. Before joining Khosla, Yu worked for a short while at Sequoia Capital. He was one of the main reasons why Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion.
Khosla recently raised $1 billion in a fund to invest in various startups in the mobile, Internet, science, and clean-tech sectors.
In late March, Facebook’s former CFO Gideon Yu had quit. The rumor about why Yu left was that he was not getting along with Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg. An internal memo went around that Facebook was looking for a CFO that has more experience with a public company.
This is where former Genentech CFO David Ebersman comes in. Genetech is a biotech company that was bought out by Swiss company Hoffman-La Roche for $46.8 billion on March 26, 2009. Genentech is also an investor in 23andMe, a genetics company that was started by Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s wife. Ebersman worked at Genentech for 15 years, but Hoffman already had a CFO making his job much less important.
Facebook CFO Gideon Yu is stepping down from the company. In the past, Yu worked for YouTube, Yahoo!, and NightFire Software. Facebook announced today internally that the company is looking for a new CFO that has experience with a public company.
Even though the company announced that they are looking for a more experience CFO, several sources within the company believe that Yu left out of a bitter relationship with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
“At Facebook, you’re either with Mark or you’re not,” stated an AllThingsD source. “And, if you’re not, you leave.”
In another internal memo, Facebook confirmed that the company is not in any sort of financial weakness and needs to raise more funds. The company said that their revenue growed 70% in 2009 and EBITDA profitability this year. The company plans on being cash flow positive in 2010 and is getting closer to a potential IPO.
Many former Google executives were hoping for the company to have an IPO or sell to a larger company like Google or Microsoft. Microsoft expressed interest in acquiring Facebook in the past, but the social network turned it down. Yu and former Facebook exec Owen Van Natta were instrumental in getting Microsoft to outbid Google in the company at the $15 billion valuation.
Where will Gideon Yu end up next? Since he’s moving around some of the top different Silicon Valley, who knows maybe he’ll end up at Twitter.
