For some people, Roche Holding AG's takeover of Genentech Inc. was bad news. For others, good. Put Facebook Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg in the latter category. After Roche took over, the biotech giant didn't need its own CFO, which made David Ebersman available to become CFO at the social networking company. The hiring was
announced Monday, as Bloomberg reported.
Zuckerberg, who plans an IPO down the line, said he wanted public company experience in his CFO. Ebersman brings that and more. Now 39, he got the CFO job at Genentech -- then a $50 billion company -- in 2005, when he was only 35.
The Deal's pharma-biotech writer Alex Lash wrote a
profile of him at the time. Here's an excerpt:
As one might guess from his age, Ebersman
has risen fast. He joined South San Francisco, Calif.-based Genentech
in 1994, just three years out of college. He has done tours of duty in
several of the company's crucial organizations. For the past four
years, he has served as senior vice president of product operations,
overseeing the company's manufacturing, engineering and supply chain.
Before that, he was immersed in business development, learning how
Genentech approaches deals (cautiously and diligently).
In
fact, Ebersman cut his teeth on one of Genentech's biggest deals - its
mid-1990s collaboration with IDEC Pharmaceuticals that produced the
non-Hodgkins' lymphoma treatment Rituxan.
Will it be hard to move from a biotech company to a Web outfit still building a business model? Ebersman, who studied econ and international relations at Brown, told Lash something that sounds pretty apt now that he's headed to Facebook.
"I'm happy focusing on anything I'm doing," he said. "I never really planned my career much. I didn't know where I
would be two years down the road at any stage." - Kenneth Klee
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