Facebook: Mark Cohler Explains His Departure

Kevin Maney adds: News yesterday of the departure of top Facebook exec Mark Cohler raised questions about why he'd go. If you weed through a lengthy and puffy transcript of the Q&A, you get to these comments from Cohler:

Yeah, if you look at the things that I've done in my career so far, such as his, it's really basically been about one core thing. Try and find really interesting companies, and try to help great entrepreneurs to help build companies that are going to last and can have a meaningful impact on people in the world. I was unbelievably lucky to do that with Reid Hoffman, who is a phenomenal entrepreneur and then I get to do it again with Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook. I always knew that that's the thing at the core that I'm most passionate about, is that process. It's something I want to keep doing for the foreseeable future. Mark and I talked about that as kind of a trajectory.

I probably talked about that before I even joined Facebook, so a few years ago. In terms of the specific timing, I wasn't thinking about leaving Facebook. I wasn't out looking at other things. I think Facebook still has a tremendous growth trajectory ahead of it, I love the people, I love the company and I love the product. I was just incredibly lucky that this came my way, and the timing on it, frankly, took me by surprise. It wasn't about leaving Facebook, it was rather more about joining Benchmark. It is an incredible opportunity, and for me personally, as Bill said earlier, when you are in a private partnership, the philosophies and the personalities and the values have to really resonate.