public company experience

Facebook Selects New CFO: Former Genentech Exec Ebersman

Kara Swisher in News on June 29, 2009 at 11:19 am PT

Facebook picked a new CFO quietly, after its cloddish public parting with longtime top financial exec Gideon Yu earlier this year. The fast-growing social-networking site said in late March it was looking for a CFO with “public company experience,” and it seems to have gotten one in former Genentech CFO David Ebersman. And, indeed, with the addition of Ebersman, Facebook inches ever closer to an IPO.

BoomTown Channels Miss Cleo: A Twitter Transaction? More Facebook Follies? And Will There Finally Be a Yahoo-Microsoft Deal?

Kara Swisher in News on April 13, 2009 at 4:42 am PT

This weekend on Twitter, someone paid BoomTown a compliment of a sort: “I read you because you are a solid fact-based reporter with a Miss Cleo intuition :)” Yipes, because of being fact-based and since I had brought her up in an originating tweet, I had to point out that the well-known-via-infomercials Psychic Friends Network shaman turned out to be a bit of a fraud, although she’s always entertaining, with her jaunty Jamaican accent (she was not, of course, from there). Nonetheless, it got me thinking about how I would predict what would result from all the deal-making that is suddenly in the air, after six months of ennui from the current economic downturn.