Facebook: What's Going On In There?

Kevin Maney wonders: Matt Cohler is, by most accounts, a really smart guy. So why is he leaving Facebook? Cohler is 31, the fifth employee at Facebook, CEO Mark Zuckerberg's closest advisor, and is VP of product management at Facebook. He got a BA from Yale and while there learned Mandarin Chinese. So when someone like that leaves a high-flying company, you have to wonder what's going on.

Rumors have popped up that new COO Sheryl Sandberg is pushing out the old guard (or as old as they can be at a baby company like Facebook) at the top of Facebook. Could be -- but most companies do that when they're in trouble, not when they're supposedly the hottest entity on the Web. Cohler says he really wants to be a VC, and he's joining Benchmark Capital, but that's not a move that a lot of people in Cohler's position are making these days. Maybe he's really looking for a company he wants to run himself. Or maybe he's realizing that Facebook will never be the kind of thundering force that everyone is expecting. We'll try to find out more.