Whoa, this is pretty huge news. Neil Roseman, the former Amazon.com vice president who joined Zynga last year, has left the company after just 12 months on the job.
The news was reported today by Tricia Duryee at AllThingsD, with Roseman telling the tech news site that he left due to the travel demands of commuting between Seattle and San Francisco. Roseman led Zynga’s new social games platform, and was the manager of the company’s one-year-old Seattle office. Zynga, which went public last December and now has a market value of $9 billion, is based in the San Francisco Bay Area.
“I had a couple ideas that I had been working on, but I had the opportunity to essentially be my own entrepreneur here,” Roseman told GeekWire shortly after joining Zynga last March. “Mark (Pincus) really does believe that … and so it seemed like it would be crazy to pass that opportunity by.”
It’s unclear what Roseman’s departure means for the Zynga office in Seattle, located in the old Washington shoe building in Pioneer Square. Duryee reports that the company employed about 50 people at the location earlier this year and that the office is now being led by Jim Veevaert, a former Microsoftie who previously served as president of Jerry Bruckheimer Games.
UPDATE: Roseman tells GeekWire that he has a few things “cooking,” including helping some local startups and kicking around his own idea.
“I am going to spend some time getting plugged back in to Seattle tech startup land,” said Roseman, adding that he left Zynga in order to get back to a small entrepreneurial company.
“Zynga was very good to me,” he said. In terms of the Seattle office, he said the company is still very much committed to the area.
Previously on GeekWire: Meet Neil Roseman: The ex-Amazon exec leading the charge for Zynga in Seattle
And here’s a video I shot of Roseman at the company’s Seattle office opening last Spring.
