Zynga COO, CTO among those reportedly departing the company
Beleaguered social gaming company Zynga is likely on the verge of losing more of its core leadership base.
According to a new report from BuzzFeed on Tuesday, the following two executives are traveling through that heavily-trafficked revolving door at Zynga: Chief operating officer David Ko and chief people officer Colleen McCreary.
AllThingsD reported that chief technology officer Cadir Lee is also leaving.
The news follows just after a month when founder Mark Pincus stepped down from the CEO post to be replaced by former Microsoft exec Don Mattrick.
The C-level changes are thought to be part of Mattrick's new restructuring plan.
The San Francisco-based company also confirmed back in June that it would be cutting approximately 520 jobs, translating to roughly 18 percent of its global workforce.
Zynga has had a rough time of it since its tumultuous initial public offering in December 2011, placing it (arguably alongside Facebook) as one of the several botched IPOs by consumer tech companies in the last couple years.
Most of the trouble (at least from a public standpoint) has been most visible by the long string of exits by senior executives.
We pinged Zynga for comment, and we'll update this story when we hear back.
UPDATE: A Zynga spokesperson declined to comment.
UPDATE 2: A Zynga spokesperson followed up with an internal note sent out to Zynga employees by Mattrick on Tuesday. Essentially, it confirms the departures and fills in the blanks about the replacements.
Here is a copy, in full:
ORGANIZATIONAL UPDATE
Internal Note & External Blog
August 13, 2013
By Zynga CEO, Don Mattrick
http://blog.zynga.com/2013/08/13/organizational-update/ Team,
Over the past month, I have had a chance to interact with a cross section of our employees and have been able to get a general sense of the caliber of people working here, the passion for winning and desire to get Zynga back to a strong leadership. Zynga is an amazing company and has tremendous potential for future growth. Thank you for taking the time to share your stories and business, as well as your creative and technical insights with me. On a personal level, I feel privileged to be the CEO and am more aware than ever before that the time for us to decisively move forward is now.
In parallel to these meetings, I have been working with our leaders to review different parts of our business in order to develop a set of operating principles to help reset the company. We are now calibrating against the market opportunity and developing detailed plans to achieve topline growth and improve profitability in the future.
To support the above, we are announcing today a number of changes to our organization.
We are taking layers out of the executive rank to get senior leaders closer to important product initiatives. With that in mind, I have asked the leaders to sharpen their focus and properly densify talent to resource teams.
Our studios leaders include Steve Chiang EVP Games, Villes and International, Barry Cottle, EVP Games, Social Casino, Travis Boatman, SVP Games, With Friends and Network, Tim LeTourneau, SVP Games, FarmVille, Steve Parkis, SVP Games, Midcore, Mark Skaggs, SVP Games, and Jon Tien, SVP Games, Casual.
Tech, live ops and publishing includes Nick Tornow, CTO, VP, Dorion Carroll, CIO, VP, and Adam Sussman, SVP Game Publishing (which includes distribution, direct advertising sales and ops).
Our functional area leaders are Reggie Davis, General Counsel, EVP Legal, Corporate and Business Affairs (which includes Corporate and Business Development and Communications), Mark Vranesh, CFO, EVP, and Meg Makalou, VP Human Resources.
These leaders will report to me and form our new executive team with immediate effect.
As part of the change, Cadir Lee, Colleen McCreary, and David Ko will be leaving the company to pursue other interests. Each person has contributed to the growth of Zynga and I would like to take this opportunity to thank Cadir Lee for his dedication in the creation of a world class technical organization during his 5 year tenure, Colleen for her work with our recruitment and people process over the last 4 years and David Ko for the 3 years that he spent in leading various teams across the organization. We appreciate their contributions to Zynga’s first chapter and wish them well in their future endeavors.
With the above in place, I believe that we will have the best chance to grow, build a world class executive team and culture, establish cadence and really become committed to important priorities and opportunities for our long term success.
I look forward to sharing more detail and answering your questions at tomorrow’s All-Hands meeting.
Best,
Don