Brad Fitzpatrick is the founder of LiveJournal. LiveJournal has over 5 million accounts and currently serves as the Chief Architect of Six Apart, the company that owns LiveJournal, Vox, Movable Type, and TypePad. Wikipedia also has an in-depth history of Six Apart.
What helped scale the high number of users for LiveJournal, Fitzpatrick led the development of memcached, a distributed cache system widely used by social networks and blogs today. Even Facebook uses it for scaling the high number of users too.
Another portion of the rumor includes speculation regarding Facebook and MySpace making an offer for Fitzpatrick as well. Why the leave? Some of the sources I’ve read included that Fitzpatrick is simply bored. And apparently, Six Apart’s management has tumultous relationships:
“The company has been divided into two departments. One is engaged in selling blogs and different software to large companies, while the other supervises Live Journal and Vox social networks. According to Western analysts, the mentioned departments are difficult to get along within one company, while the management presented by the Barak Berkowitz, the Acting Director, Mena Trott, President and Founder, and Andrew Anker, Head of Business Department, simply do not cope with their duties and are not able to withdraw Six Apart out of a prolonged crises.”[1]
References:
[1] CNews: Live Journal creator leaves for Google
[2] ValleyWag: LiveJournal creator leaves as Six Apart fails to spin