This article was published on June 24, 2011

Facebook’s longest serving employee is set to leave – and yes, he’s set for life


Facebook’s longest serving employee is set to leave – and yes, he’s set for life

Kevin Colleran is Facebook’s longest serving employee after founder Mark Zuckerberg. But news has emerged Kevin Colleranthat he will be leaving Facebook from early July, reports All Things D.

Colleran joined Facebook as Global Sales Lead in April 2005, and one of his first big ad deals was a user-acquisition buy by Party Poker, which is thought to have netted around $60k per month, though this was later dropped due to gambling restrictions. Colleran was also a lead in the creation of ‘sponsored Facebook groups’, which you’ll now know as Facebook Pages.

Last month we wrote about what it’s like to work at Facebook, noting that there has been a mass exodus of staff recently. It transpires that the employees in question had joined before Facebook started giving staff ‘restricted’ stock – which meant they were all able to sell their stock on secondary markets and become very rich. Facebook switched from issuing ‘options’ to employees, choosing instead to issue restricted stock units (RSUs) from 2007 onwards.

And given that Colleran joined Facebook long before 2007, he’ll be set for life. He has stated that he has no immediate post-Facebook plans, but he will be taking some time off to travel. After that, he says:

“I also hope to eventually do some additional angel investing as well as potentially some consulting, public speaking, and non-profit work.”

Meanwhile, here’s a video of Kevin Colleran discussing Facebook:

http://youtu.be/1B6gKZkmTWM

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