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Posts Tagged ‘Owen Van Natta’

Van Natta, Formerly of Facebook, In At MySpace

April 24th, 2009 Paul No comments

Owen Van Natta, former Facebook COO and current CEO of Playlist, is now CEO at MySpace.

This is interesting for a variety of reasons. Van Natta joined Facebook very early in its development, when the social network was CLEARLY behind MySpace in relevance within the social networking space. Depending on who you ask, Van Natta was either demoted by Mark Zuckerberg or changed roles to focus more directly on generating revenue for Facebook as its chief revenue officer and vp of operations in 2007. He later left Facebook in early 2008.

In light of this – let’s call it “history” – with Facebook, I can only imagine that Van Natta is sharpening his knives, ready to take a run at his previous employer. MySpace’s challenges are innumerate; yet, someone who was inside the circle of trust at Facebook has a great opportunity and the pedigree to scale those challenges in the coming months.