New CEO For Skype Print E-mail
Written by Adam Gosling   
Tuesday, 26 February 2008
eBay has announced that Josh Silverman will become the new Chief Executive Officer of Skype in a copmany re-shuffle that follows the announcement of Meg Whitman's resignation as CEO of eBay last month. Whitman will leave the company next month.

Whitman transformed eBay during her ten year tenure taking the start-up from 30 employees to more than 15,000. Another eBay executive, John Donahoe will take over her role as President and CEO after three years with the company.

Now also to be internally promoted is Silverman, who will take over the Skype job after working as CEO of Shopping.com on March 24 and will report directly to Donahoe. Michael van Swaaij, who was appointed interim CEO in October last year when Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström stepped aside, will stay "actively involved with Skype".

"I am very pleased to be joining Skype's dynamic team at this important time in the company's history," said Silverman. "Skype is an incredibly exciting company. Our opportunities are tremendous as we continue to bring Skype to more people around the world, while finding new ways to add value and helping users continue to set their conversations free using Skype."
Although Skype now has more than 276 million registered users its Q4 2007 revenues totalled only US$115 million, but that was a 76 per cent increase over the year prior.

Silverman's role as CEO of other eBay brand, Shopping.com, is just the latest of a series of leadership roles at eBay, including General Manager for Marktplaats.nl. He helped build eBay's classifieds businesses in Europe and before joining eBay in 2003, Silverman was co-founder and CEO of Evite, a social event planning web site.

Silverman's spot at Shopping.com will be taken by another internal hire with "eBay veteran" Andre Haddad. Haddad joined eBay in 2001, when it acquired iBazar, a leading European online marketplace he co-founded and successfully ran in Paris.


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