The Matt Cohler Exit Interview

MC: I joined Facebook in early 2005.

MA: Had the company moved to Silicon Valley at that point?

MC: Yes it was. I was in silicon Valley, at LinkedIn, prior to joining Facebook; when Mark and Dustin were the two core co-founders of the company, dropped out of Harvard, and moved out to SV. I actually met Mark for the first time the summer of 2004 when we happened to be at Peter Thiel's office talking with Peter about potentially investing in the company. This was the first, practically angel round of financing. He did end up making the investment, and asked me to come over form LinkedIn to Facebook after he did.

MA: So you joined once it was sort of? safe?

MC: (laughter) It's still a very rapidly growing company, there's a lot of really interesting things going on now, so in a lot of ways Facebook is still a start-up environment

MA: How many employees were at Facebook when you joined?

MC: If you count the two founders, at the time I agreed to come aboard there were 3 or 4, and when I actually started there were 5 or 6.

MA: How many are there now?

MC: There are between 550 and 600

MA: You announced today that you are leaving Facebook in the fall and joining Benchmark, yet you are going to stay on as a special advisor at Facebook. What does that mean? Because it doesn't mean anything as far as I can tell. Does it mean your stock will continue to vest?

MC: Well I can't comment on that, but what we are going to figure out over the summer, while I am still at Facebook, is two things: one is to transition my operational responsibilities at Facebook, and we are going to figure that out in the coming weeks.

MA: You'll hire somebody from Google to take over.