Allan Leinwand, chief technology officer of infrastructure for San Francisco-based social games company Zynga (s ZNGA), has left the company, according to an update on his LinkedIn profile page. Leinwand is assuming a similar role at ServiceNow (S NOW), a company that offers software to automate enterprise IT operations as a service.
Leinwand was once a venture partner at Panorama Capital and founded Vyatta, an open source networking company. He was also the CTO of Digital Island, a content delivery network and CEO of Proficient Networks. Leinwand was one of the key people behind Zynga’s shift away from Amazon’s cloud service to Zynga’s homegrown Z-cloud.
Zynga has been losing senior executives at an alarming rate. Earlier this summer, the company lost about seven executives including Mike Verdu, Zynga’s former chief creative officer and Bill Mooney, who spearheaded the Farmville franchise. Zynga went public at $10 a share and hit an all time high of $14.69 a share in March 2012, but since then has been in a swoon. At close of trading on Friday, Zynga stock stood at $2.88 a share, giving company a market capitalization of $2.19 billion.
Disclosure: Leinwand was an occasional contributor on cloud & infrastructure related topics to our blog before joining Zynga.
ServiceNow for the win!
User and big proponent of the company.
On the other side, Zynga is clearly a sinking ship.
Travis
I too have heard good things about ServiceNow – clearly a low profile company here in Silicon Valley.
My organization has been a customer for 4 years and have not regretted the move.
They aren’t as sexy as a lot of the consumer driven tech companies, but they have flipped the enterprise IT Service Management market on its head and put other ITSM vendors (HP and BMC) on notice. What they’ve done against the legacy titans is remarkable. I just hope they can keep it up under the new leadership and post-IPO.
Travis, thanks for the Insight. Looks like Allan is a great hire for them especially as they start to scale their operation.
I’m going to be a scratched record on this but Zynga is a bad example of how to retain talent. When you take away stock from employees pre-IPO it’s a notice that you aren’t employee friendly company. Their past few quarters have been all accounting magic and slowing Facebook growth with equate to some anxious executives and tech talent.
It’s a shame because Zynga has to great technology that a bunch of folks would love to work with including their Z-Cloud.