MySpace on the Bounty

No mutiny here actually, but we like the pun – today, MySpace’s COO and SVPs of Engineering + Product Strategy jumped off the boat. Noted as a “rising star,” 27-year-old Amit Kapur (MySpace’s COO) is leaving for a start-up after 13 months at the social network portal. In charge of global ops, it’s a fresh turn for Kapur; and a dynamic story of an acquired start-up supporting player turning into a new, untethered, start-up featured role. Think Googler turned Xoogler metaphor.

Kapur is young and can capitalize on MySpace’s 140M users globally, while starting anew like many former, or Xooglers (former Googlers), did when Google became a big company with added or requisite bureaucracy.

The curse of big business, and sometimes but not always, the first seismic move away from innovation.

With new crustal plate movements afoot:

• Yahoo! (big CEO changes and restructuring in fact);
• MSN (also following suit and trying to go cloudy);
• AOL (yes, constant rejiggering of the sails – sorry, ‘pirate/sail speak’ is going to be the way here, mateys; plus AOL revenues being challenged by MySpace (see chart below per MySpace’s Jeff Berman); then consider that
• Google is sitting tight (and pretty) with its search technology to weather the storms; and, last but not least
• Facebook’s 175M users globally (and Andreessen promoting their $1B+ revenue opportunities to come on Charlie Rose)

… It starts to make sense that MySpace would start restructuring by force of nature, Murdoch’s force of business (one and same?) and/or individual, internal shifts of employees.

Amit Kapur’s new start-up could be the next FriendFeed or better, Twitter (Blogger, anyone?). And while MySpace is decidedly continuing to own the social marketing budgets of big brands, as represented by Chris DeWolfe’s internal memo on the departures, published to the WSJ:

MySpace is a social portal that empowers its global community to interact with people, content, and culture by giving individuals a personal, portable, and secure social experience. Originally, Yahoo gave consumers an organized way of navigating the Internet. Then, Google made searching the Internet extremely easy. Now, MySpace is making it simple for users to organize what’s important to them through a personal and social lens.

Niching (“niche-ing”) out their platform, creating a community-driven social network and then a branded social portal platform is interesting.

A genuine bisection of what users – who haven’t defected to Facebook – and advertisers will pay into. MySpace still outshines Facebook in attracting marketers who want take-over sizzle.

My own best (and personal, mind you – I coined it…) quote of the post:

Like Google, which likes to promote advertiser competition without actually making it possible given the infinite vastness of search; Facebook is creating a more open, less brand-owned platform than MySpace.

And more from DeWolfe in his Kapur departure memo – interesting that he’s coupling the two sides – private/users and public/brands – into how 2009 will be salvaged:

Despite what the market tells us, 2009 will be a big year for our business. This year we will mature our existing market leading advertising technologies such as MyAds and HyperTargeting, as well as continue to innovate new ways for companies big and small to best leverage the MySpace platform. We are effectively monetizing the stickiest sections of our site such as Music by coupling the world’s richest content offering with creative ad programming online and off. What will always differentiate MySpace from others in the industry is our commitment to balancing revenue and relevancy.

In sum, except for one final Business/Alley Insider piece of info, we wish Kapur well. It’s good to see a high profile departure who is not literally ‘walked off the PR plank‘ by a major media company like News Corp.

One senses that his star will still rise, and his timing works in any event; plus when operations walks with engineering/product strategy, you know something very logical and ordered will happen in whatever start-up they create.

In terms of how it affects other senior management, Jeff Berman’s slide below shows some portal-like strength in the ad world, and as for Chris and Tom; well, salaries and money made on the MySpace/NWS transaction make them pretty safe – no matter what fall-outs, present or future.

From AlleyInsider by way of the Financial Times

We love the people, the product, and we believe in the future of the company,” [Chris DeWolfe] said. “We are not thinking of leaving . . . our heads are down and completely focused on building a profitable, scalable business.

The two men [Chris and Tom Anderson] … are among the best paid employees at News Corp and are in the final year of a lucrative two-year contract worth $30m each, provided the online social network meets earnings targets.

Now, if I were Chris and Tom with those financial bounties, I’d invest in Amit’s new start-up before News Corp/FIM does.

My two pieces of eight…