Facebook's employee No. 7 has a new job.
Kevin Colleran, a sales executive who left the social network company last year, is joining General Catalyst Partners as a venture partner. With his new role, he joins a widening circle of Facebook executives who have left the company to tackle venture capital in recent years. He will be based in General Catalyst's headquarters in Cambridge, Mass.
"Kevin's experience monetizing social networks and deep understanding of the consumer experience make him a tremendous addition to our team," Joel Cutler, a managing director at General Catalyst, said in a statement on Monday.
In his new role, Mr. Colleran will most likely focus on advertising-supported Internet start-ups, given his experience at Facebook, where he helped sign the company's first major advertisers and helped create the first branded pages for corporations. Mr. Colleran, who was Facebook's longest-tenured employee (after its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg) when he left in July, spent more than six years with the company, most recently running its largest global partnerships.
For the former Facebook executive, the new role represents an opportunity to learn about new businesses and reconnect with Boston's venture capital scene, which he said was rich with opportunity.
"I wanted to get back in the game," Mr. Colleran told DealBook. "Every year there are new start-ups coming from within the dorm rooms of Harvard, M.I.T., etc., and I hope to be able to make early stage investments in the next Mark Zuckerberg while he or she is still in Boston."
He said he was particularly interested in start-ups that were thinking about advertising in innovative ways and building ad products that did not interfere with the user experience and seemed "uniquely genuine to the environments they will appear."
In a recent interview, Mr. Colleran fondly recalled the early days of Facebook, when its New York office was briefly his apartment at Normandie Court, a high-rise building on the Upper East Side. During those days, the fledgling social network frequently told advertisers that the minimum buy-in was $5,000, "but honestly, we'd take what we could get," he said.
After six years with the company, Facebook's staff had ballooned from 7 to some 3,000 employees worldwide. Eager for a break, Mr. Colleran gave Mr. Zuckerberg six months' notice early last year.
"I felt like I had done everything I wanted to do," he said. "We had built up such a great sales team, I no longer felt like a unique asset."
As a Facebook executive, Mr. Colleran was also limited in what he could do outside of the company. Executives are allowed to do some official advisory work for other start-ups, but must obtain approval first, according to Mr. Colleran.
Several of Facebook's prominent alumni have become active in venture capital, as partners in large firms or, more commonly, through angel investing. Sean Parker, Facebook's first president, who hired Mr. Colleran in April 2005, is an executive general partner at Founders Fund. Chamath Palihapitiya, the former head of Facebook's mobile and international initiatives, recently started his own venture firm, Social+Capital Partnership. And, Matt Cohler, another early Facebook vice president, is a general partner at Benchmark Capital.
The burgeoning Facebook mafia frequently invests in its own; Mr. Colleran, for instance, has invested in Mr. Parker's new start-up, Airtime, a video chat service, and he is an adviser to Path, a social network started by another former Facebook executive, David Morin.
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