In Schrep, Facebook Trusts

In 2008, an alarming number of Facebook’s top brains left the company. Dustin Moskovitz, the Harvard roommate of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook co-founder, decided to start his own software company. He teamed up with Justin Rosenstein, a Facebook engineer who had driven much of the work behind the Like button and Facebook’s Beacon advertising platform, to form Asana. Adam D’Angelo, a computer science wunderkind and chief technology officer at Facebook, bailed out to start Quora, a type of question-and-answer hub, with Charlie Cheever, an engineer responsible for Facebook Connect and Facebook Platform. And Jeff Hammerbacher, one of the first data scientists at Facebook, left that same year and started Cloudera, a maker of data analytics software.

Following the exodus, Facebook still had plenty of computer science whizzes on staff and the cultural leadership of Zuckerberg. But it needed someone to inject fresh life into the engineering organization to help it create an infrastructure that would have to grow to support 1 billion people. One of the main figures who would end up playing this role of the engineering team’s Obi-Wan was Mike Schroepfer, who came to Facebook from Mozilla in the middle of 2008.