Facebook's chief technical officer Bret Taylor to leave company While a transition like this is never easy, I'm extremely confident in the teams and leadership we have in place. He referred to Mr Zuckerberg not only as his boss for three years, but as among his closest friends. It is common for startup employees made rich by the initial public offering of stock to depart companies to pursue dreams or new endeavors, according to analysts who anticipated that might happen at Facebook. By far the Internet's dominant social network, Facebook went public on May 18 in a $16bn share sale, the second largest IPO in the United States ever. The run-up to the sale was marked by bubbly enthusiasm reminiscent of the dot-com era, to the extent that lead underwriter Morgan Stanley agreed to raise the offering price and increase the number of shares issued. But the shares barely held above the $38 introductory price on the opening day and have since fallen, delivering real and paper losses in the billions of dollars to the new investors. Facebook shares rose six percent to close at $30.01 Friday.