Top 10 Google Employee Defections to Facebook

by Clint Boulton

Getting Sheryl Sandberg from Google was quite the coup for Facebook in 2008. Here is Sandberg with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the AllThingsDigital show last June.

Facebook CTO Bret Taylor came to the company from Google indirectly. Taylor, one of the Gmail founders, left Google in 2007 to create FriendFeed, which Facebook snapped up last year. Like Sandberg, Taylor reports directly to Zuck. Along with Taylor came Paul Bucheit, who is Taylor’s co-creator for Gmail and FriendFeed.

Now director of the Facebook Developer Network, Beard joined Facebook a few weeks after Sandberg from Google, where he served as director of social media and director of new business development. No wonder Google has struggled in social media.

One of the first Xooglers’ Facebook poached, Yu joined Facebook as CFO in July 2007 after serving as finance chief for YouTube, whose $1.65 billion sale to Google he helped complete. Yu left Facebook in 2009 after solidifying Microsoft’s investment in Facebook to become a general partner at Khosla Ventures.

Ling created Google Checkout and oversaw Google Product Search before joining Facebook in 2007 to run product marketing, developer operations and partner solutions for the Facebook Platform. He then left Facebook and now leads monetization efforts for YouTube.

Signaling Facebook’s super shift into online advertising under Sandberg, the social network lured David Fischer, vice president of global online sales and operations for Google, in March 2010. Fischer, who worked closely with Sandberg when they were at Google, serves as Facebook’s vice president of advertising and global operations.

Tseng served at Google as senior product manager for the Android team until May 2010, when he joined Facebook to give its mobile products a much-needed shot in the arm. Tseng just presided over the single sign-on for Facebook’s mobile iPhone and Android apps. Seeing as how Google is betting its ad future on mobile, losing any Android team member to Facebook is a big blow.

In June, Papakipos left Google for Facebook. This one was a head scratcher because Papakipos, the engineering director behind Google’s yet-to-be-released Chrome Operating System, left Google to become director of engineering at Facebook. Ouch. It can’t be good when engineers leave Google before the company can bring products to fruition.

Yes, he’s essentially public relations. But Schrage, the former vice president of communications and public affairs for Google, has done a masterful job improving public relations at Facebook since he joined in May 2008. As journalists, we appreciate that Schrage assembled a big PR team under his watch that proves pretty responsive.

Rasmussen is the last high-profile Googler to leave for Facebook. Rasmussen famously built Google Maps, a huge success, and then went on to launch Google Wave, which failed. Rasmussen has the talent to tackle any software project, so Facebook has acquired some fine engineering firepower to build its application portfolio.