Facebook VP Brian Boland, 11-year veteran with partnership focus, resigns
Long-time Facebook Vice President Brian Boland announced last week that he will be leaving the social network to focus on his foundation.
Courtesy of Facebook
The Facebook vice president in charge of the partnership product marketing team resigned last week, a source familiar with the matter told CNBC.
Brian Boland, who was vice president of partnerships, product marketing, operations, partner engineers and analytics, announced his resignation from the company last week on Workplace, the company’s internal social network. Boland posted a picture of his badge, a custom among Facebook employees when they leave the company.
Facebook confirmed Boland’s departure to CNBC. Boland will continue in his day-to-day role until the end of September, and he will continue to help Facebook find a new leader for the partnerships organization until the end of the year, a spokeswoman for the company told CNBC.
Following his departure, Boland plans to focus his efforts on The Delta Fund, a foundation he co-founded with his wife that is focused on addressing poverty alleviation and inequity.
One of Boland’s roles was overseeing partnership data, which includes advertising data the company and its partners share with each other and developers that tap into the company’s application programming interfaces (APIs). In April 2018, Facebook imposed new limits on how apps could use information from some of its APIs as part of a tighter focus on user privacy following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which a political consultancy used information about Facebook users that it had gained improperly (although that case did not involve Facebook APIs).
Boland also served in a number of other roles during his time at the company, including the company’s product marketing division.
At one point, Boland was in charge of Facebook’s Audience Network, a tool that lets third-party software developers use Facebook’s data to target ads to users on their apps. Last week, Facebook announced that it expects an upcoming change in Apple’s iOS 14 to reduce revenue from Audience Network by as much as 50%.
Boland was one of Facebook’s longest tenured employees, having joined the company in 2009. Over that time, Boland had become a key insider, growing close with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg. Boland was also known for having high moral character, the source familiar said.