Facebook has announced that recently-hired chief financial officer Mike Sheridan will be replaced by Gideon Yu. We reported in April that Yu was leaving YouTube to be a junior partner at Sequoia.
At that time, we called Yu’s career a “wild ride.”
“What a ride he’s had: He was a Yahoo treasurer until September of last year, when he was scooped up by YouTube to be their chief financial officer, a month before the acquisition by Google, where he apparently played a major role. When negotiating the sale to Google, Yu admitted to Time that he told Google different things about YouTube’s budget than he was telling his own team at YouTube. That’s the sort of brass-knuckles Sequoia likes. Thus, he follows the path of Roelof Botha, chief financial officer of Paypal, who did something similar before joining Sequoia. (Via Valleywag).”
The move comes at a time of frenetic growth for Facebook. Perhaps the company is playing rough by kicking out one promising hire and, separately, swooping in on a Sequoia recruit — but curious, also, that such a well-connected and proven dealmaker is coming on board.
Facebook says that Sheridan left the company, then it looked for another CFO, then they approached Yu and he accepted, which leaves us wondering if there were other issues between Sheridan and the company.
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