Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz leaves for start-up

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Dustin Moskovitz, a Facebook co-founder who had overseen engineering, is leaving the social networking start-up to form another.

Moskovitz launched Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg, its chief executive, while they were students at Harvard.

Moskovitz will leave Facebook in about a month with Justin Rosenstein, an engineering manager who joined Facebook from Google.

Rosenstein and Moskovitz, who couldn’t be reached for comment, are joining forces to build software they hope will be ‘to your work life what Facebook.com is to your social life,’ according to a note on Rosenstein’s Facebook page. Moskovitz recruited Rosenstein to Facebook, and the two have been collaborating on software for business users in recent months. Social media is increasingly gaining traction inside businesses, which are experimenting to see if they can increase productivity and communication.

Rosenstein became well known in Silicon Valley circles for his enthusiastic embrace of Facebook as the new ‘it’ company that was ‘on the cusp of changing the world.’ After joining in June 2007, he called it ‘that company that shows up once in a very long while -- the Google of yesterday, the Microsoft of long ago.’ In his post today, he said, ‘Leaving Facebook makes me sad, but I feel I have to follow my passion on this.’

Moskovitz is the latest in a series of departures of executives from Facebook as the 4-year-old Palo Alto company hires seasoned managers such as former Google executive Sheryl Sandberg, who is now chief operating officer. Moskovitz and Zuckerberg are close friends and confidants.

‘Dustin has always had Facebook’s best interest at heart and will always be someone I turn to for advice,’ Zuckerberg said in a statement.

-- Jessica Guynn