Facebook Needs a New CEO, Says Munson
Facebook (FB) shares can't seem to catch a bid leading up to Thursday’s Android event. In an invitation sent out last Friday, Facebook is looking to create some hype inviting the press to “come see our new home on Android.” Rumors have so far debunked the possibility of a handset launch and instead the Facebook Android strategy is assumed to be about prime home screen functionality.
For those looking for the next great thing out of the social networking giant, Lee Munson, chief investment officer at Portfolio LLC and author of Rigged Money
, says the company should start with re-evaluating leadership.
“I don’ t think Zuckerberg really should be running the company, I think that it would be great if he had Chairman Emeritus [title] and he could go off and take some of his own money and invest,” says Munson, referring to Zuckerberg’s recent venture into the political arena. “I don’t think he should be CEO at this point.”
The Facebook co-founder and CEO recently began raising money for a Silicon Valley political advocacy group that intends to be active in matters affecting the U.S. economy and tech industry.
Munson believes the 28-year-old billionaire is becoming too distracted and would serve the company better in a smaller role. Specifically, he’d like to see Facebook exec Sheryl Sandberg be seriously considered to run Facebook. Sandberg, who has served as Chief Operating Officer since 2008, was previously the VP of global sales and operations at Google (GOOG).
“Remember when Google came out, that’s less than ten years ago, they did a lot of crazy stuff that we forget about,” he says, pointing to their focus on wind farms. As it turns out, Google knew their servers used a lot of energy, and today they’re still working with utilities to set up wind energy to power their data centers.
“I think Facebook is only alive because people think ‘well, Google did a lot of crazy things, it worked out. Is Facebook doing a lot of crazy things, and will it work out too?’ I don’t think so in this case.”
Beyond the call for new leadership, for Munson it really boils down to Facebook’s business model and ability to generate real cash flow. He put his money where his mouth is and had his firm, Portfolio LLC, test-run some Facebook ad pages in targeted markets.
“It’s sort of a watered down version of Google,” he says about Facebook ads. “But in the end, if I’m going to spend money, I’m not going to be giving any money to Facebook, we tried that experiment for a few months. If I’m going to spend SEO dollars, I’m going to do it with Google or some other service.”
