Jeff Weiner just joined both Accel Partners and Greylock as en EIR. EIRs are basically former company execs looking for something to do… at a new company funded by the VC housing the EIR or at one of the VCs companies.
The thing is… usually it’s one VC, not two. Say what you want about how the VCs absolutely love Jeff and are willing to share him etc., but that’s BS. This one is pretty obvious: Jeff Weiner was tapped to become Facebook’s next CEO.
Accel and Greylock share an investment in Facebook and frankly, neither company has really helped Mark Zuckerberg navigate through privacy, advertising revenue, revenue in general… the one thing that Facebook has done well, frankly, is not sell to Viacom, IAC, Yahoo!, Google, MSFT and Yahoo! again… yet something tells me that Facebook’s VC did want to sell (at every cross road from $800M on out); the only one that held out was Mark…
Yet now, the VCs tagged team to lure Jeff with the promise on giving him the CEO role. This begs the question: did the VCs run this by Mark Zuckerberg before? If not, they are dumb as rocks because this will create a lot of friction between Mark and the VCs (Mark is said to own 30% of the company).
More importantly, in Yahoo!’s numerous failed attempts to buy Facebook, what role - if any - did Jeff have? Jeff basically had everyone and their cousin report to him… so naturally Mark has already once balked at reporting to Jeff… why should things be different now?
Sure, Beacon was a disaster and Facebook remains in search for a business model befitting the $15B valuation that MSFT bestowed on it… but is Jeff the man to deliver that?
No disrespect to Jeff at all, I don’t know him, never dealt with him, but I would not put too much stock in anyone hailing from YHOO these days, or ever. YHOO is the best example of a shipwreck.
Bottom line: Mark Zuckerberg just found himself in the corner with two less people to trust (hint: David Tse and Jim Breyer). The question is, did he ever trust Jeff to do a deal with him while at YHOO?
UPDATE: Valleywag has a great piece on why this actually might not happen.
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