Brain Drain II

Wow, yesterday's post about the eBay Brain Drain seems to have hit a nerve. I've received tons of emails from people pointing out other depatures I didn't know about or failed to mention last time. 

One commenter added this interesting insight (note I have verified this person indeed worked at eBay until very recently):

"I won't dispute the numbers from the Forbes article, but the number of departures seems higher in reality. What is more disturbing is the mass exodus of technical talent which has left PayPal as well as eBay. You could probably count the number of original PayPal developers on one hand. The current price of the stock, the emphasis on cost-cutting vs. innovation, and the large-scale movement of technology to Scottsdale will certainly not improve this situation."

This was news to me, I didn't realize the Scottsdale office was going to be the new engineering arm of Paypal, I had assumed it would be more of a customer service center.

Here are more brains that have drained:

• Tony Pecora - Was senior BD at eBay, left to run BD for become.com.  I believe become.com has
• Henry Vogel - Ran internet marketing at eBay, left to be senior exec at Quigo.
• Marty Abbott - Ran eBay IT/ops from 99 on.  Along with Vogel also senior exec at Quigo.  Oddly enough he's (and look there's Lynn, back from the dead) still on some eBay management pages like this.
• Tom Keeven - Backfilled Marty and left in May06.
• Marty Cagan - Is a very big shot in the product management world.  He has evidently left eBay and started his own PM consultancy (this was news to me!)
• Chuck Geiger - Was CTO of Paypal and prior to that a senior engineering guy at eBay - now working with Marty on that gig.
  

That's it for today - if you know of more, keep them coming.   Here's an interesting article that has a picture of the "folks that make eBay tick" (Lynn Reedy, Tom Keevan, Sanguedolce, Maynard, Cagan, Tom Keevan, Alex Kazim).  It's interesting to note that all of these people are gone now with the exceptions of Sanguedolce who I think is still CIO (but can't confirm) and Kazim who now runs Skype after the "JJ shuffle").

Comments

[Loose Lips Sink Ships]

This will get very interesting quickly if eBay blocks ChannelAdvisor's access to the API, effectively shutting down all of Wingo's customers. It would then be immediately important for all CA customers to have their automated keyword bidding algorithms setup to drive traffic to all these micro-websites so they can more easily compete with Amazon and all of eBay's other merchants. Interestingly, Google Checkout hasn't listed any new merchants on its site since the day after the launch.