eBay Strategies

Brain drain: Key datacenter/infrastructure engineer leaves the 'bay

I heard through the grapevine today that one of the elite engineers at eBay (he was a 8yr veteran and eBay Fellow, which is a big honor there) has departed.  I dug into it and found this press release from Rearden commerce.  Here's the blurb:

In his role as VP, Network Operations, Paul Kilmartin is responsible for managing the company's technology infrastructure and IT operations. Kilmartin's background includes more than 20 years of experience in information technology management. He joined Rearden Commerce after eight years with eBay, where he managed several different operational teams for both eBay and PayPal, including Systems Administration, Database Administration, Capacity Planning, Data Center Management and Infrastructure Architecture.Kilmartin was named eBay Fellow in 2004, for his leadership in the areas of scalability and availability design and procedure.

I'm sure there are tons of smart people still thinking about scalability at eBay, but these kind of high profile brain drains make me nervous.

As we enter 08, we're hearing messaging around low listing fees (which means LOTS more listings are coming) plus Finding 2.0, both of these will put incredible strain on the eBay system and we (everyone in the ecosystem) need these initiatives to work flawlessly.  Come back Paul!!!!

BrainDrain/Rumor: Lorrie Norrington leaving eBay?

UPDATE: Just heard from eBay and they are saying that this rumor is absolutely, categorically not happening.  I was pretty confident of my source on this one, but rumors are rumors and it looks like this one was vapor vs. substance.  Apologies to Lorrie and I'm happy to hear you'll be with eBay for the foreseeable future!!

Original post follows:

I'm hearing from non-eBayers in the Bay that Lorrie Norrington, President of eBay International, is leaving eBay for Yahoo! where she'll be running products. 

This is interesting on many angles:

• Why is Lorrie leaving eBay?
• Admittedly eBay has issues, but Yahoo!?  This could be a frying pan/fire situation.
• Will Yahoo! hiring away a senior eBay person sour/put stress on their so-far sun-shiney partnership?

eBay Brain Drain: Goodbye April Kelly!

The buzz from several large sellers is that April Kelly has left eBay.  April was the director of account management at PayPal running their Omaha, NE location.  She was liked/LOVED by large sellers because of her GSD attitude and will be sadly missed.  April made every effort to meet with sellers at a variety of events and industry get togethers, never afraid to get out there, gather feedback and make a positive difference.

The buzz on the street is April has gone to work at a Paypal alumni company, LinkedIN.  In fact, her linkedin profile shows that she is now the Director of Omaha for LinkedIN.  Best of luck in your new role April from your friends at CA and the eBay World.

eBay Brain Drain: Goodbye to Ro Choy!

Rogelio Choy (Mr. Let Me Be BLUNT) started out in the eBay developers program and then went over to work on Motors/Auto parts.  He announced on his blog yesterday that he's leaving eBay for Rockyou.com.

Ro rocketed to blogosphere fame when he posted a pretty good Paypal vs. Google checkout trash-talking on his blog and then it was digged and started to get quite a bit of press so he deleted it and then that made it spin even more.

I'm not familiar with Rockyou, but they have some pretty cool widgets that I'll check out for the ole' blog.  They also seem to work closely with MySpace which is smart.

We worked closely with Ro and he's always been a stand-up, go to bat for the large-seller (and developer) guy.  So I wanted to publicly wish Ro nothing but the biggest success in his new venture, we're going to miss him in the eBay world, but i have a feeling he'll iterate his way back here over time.

Update: While researching this article, I found several articles about a nasty legal wrangle that involves Rockyou and the previous company where the founders worked. I hope this doesn't impact Ro.

Update 2 - Gotta love the internet, google took me to this slideshow of pics from Ro's goodbye lunch.  Greg Isaacs makes an appearance and several other eBayers.  One of them is marked "soon to be ex-ebay" - hmmm.

In his honor, I used RockYou to create this "scatch-picture".  Use the coin to scratch and see the underlying image!

| Create Your Own

ebay brain drain...

The WSJ has an article (subscription required I believe) that goes into more detail on the eBay Brain drain.  yahoo! is also covered.

Here's a highlight:

Indeed, "voluntary" turnover at e-commerce companies -- which occurs when employees choose to leave rather than being pushed -- rose to 17.4% last year from 15.5% in 2004, according to Radford Surveys + Consulting, an employee-benefits and consulting unit of AON Corp. And voluntary turnover jumped even as overall turnover in the e-commerce sector fell to 24.5% last year from 27.4% in 2004, says Radford.

EBay and Yahoo say they aren't suffering a talent drain and that some employees have always left. They add that their head counts grow each year, a sign that they can still recruit the best talent. Overall, eBay had 12,900 employees at the end of the second quarter, up from 8,900 a year earlier. Yahoo, meanwhile, had 10,500 at the end of the second quarter, up from 8,800 the year before.

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").

The eBay Brain Drain...

With eBay's stock near a 3-4yr low (thus limiting the appeal/golden-handcuff-ability of stock options) and with the recent departure of Jeff Jordan,  the media and Wall St. are zoning in on the eBay Brain Drain.

We thought we'd start a new category here at eBay Strategies (uncreatively called 'eBay Brain Drain') for tracking some of this on the Blog. 

To kick it off, there's an excellent story at Forbes: The PayPal Exodus .

Some highlights:

• "Elevating an eBay executive to run PayPal instead of finding someone within PayPal to do it made a statement about how they wanted to run things," Jackson says.
• (This one is startling)  Former PayPal employees estimate that half of the 200 or so employees who worked at the company's headquarters before the 2002 acquisition have left;
• (followed up by this eBay PR flack gem) "Four years later, we're still proud of our retention of those people," she says. "We were able to keep PayPal's vision--and after some acquisitions, that's just not the case."

To add to this anecdotaly, it seems like a very large percentage of the hundreds of eBay folks I've met over the years.  Here's a short 10 minute blog between flights list:

• Shira Levine - Was an awesome category manager, then ran Powerseller program - now at Prosper.
• Sean Crotty (eBay blogger) - Moved to art.com to run their affiliate program
• Jeff Housenbold (used to run eBay API team and then marketing) now is CEO of shutterfly.com
• Doug Galen - Jeff brought him onboard over at shutterfly too.
• Jeff McManus - Jeff wins the "most changes award". Originally I met him as part of the Microsoft development community, then he was a Senior Manager with eBay's developer program.  One week we had a meeting with Yahoo! to meet their new director of their developer program and BOOM, there was Jeff. (At the same visit we saw no fewer than five ebay people we hadn't known were at Y! now)
• Lynn Reedy - profiled in this Forbes article, Lynn ran a big chunk of engineering/product management throughout her tenure.  Rumor has it she was very corporate (the trains run with X seats and thats how we do things - period!) and when Donahue came in they didn't get along to say the least.
• Dr. Ralph Werner (eBay Germany-super sharp guy with PHD in physics) after running corp dev, took over Mobile.de.  eBay then put some BCS consultant-guy in charge and Ralph is no longer with the company.

This a handful of highlights, there have been several PMs, developers, marketing folks, category managers, etc. that have gone on to other opportunities from eBay/Paypal.  Of course they are hiring new folks and these higher level departures sometimes clear the field for a great more junior person to progress up the ladder.

For execs, in addition to JJ, there's the retirement of Maynard Webb, COO which will happen in August.

That leaves these executives.  Bill Cobb (took over for JJ running eBay ) has been around for a while as has Mike Jacobson and Rajiv (but he's in a new role)