Facebook Appoints New Main App Boss After Instacart Poaches Simo
Facebook has appointed longtime product and engineering executive Tom Alison as the head of its core social networking app.
(Bloomberg) -- Facebook Inc. has appointed longtime product and engineering executive Tom Alison as the head of its core social networking app, making him the fourth person to hold that role in the last four years.
Alison, who’s been at Facebook for 11 years, will take over the job from Fidji Simo, who is leaving the social network to become CEO of Instacart Inc., according to a company announcement Thursday. Alison was Simo’s No. 2 executive, and previously had short stints running the app while she was on leave. He has worked on a variety of different parts of Facebook’s main social network over the years, including the news feed and search products. More recently, he was in charge of Facebook’s community products, including Groups, which are a top growth priority for Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg.
Alison inherits the day-to-day responsibility for the world’s largest social networking app, which has more than 1.88 billion daily users, in consultation with Zuckerberg and Chief Product Officer Chris Cox, who oversee all of the apps.
Simo leaves Facebook after a long career in which she helped run many of the app’s most visible products, including all of its video features, like Live and Watch. Simo’s departure also means that all of the company’s highest ranking product executives—the leaders of Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger and its hardware division—are men.
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