Facebook just added Tony Xu to its board of powerful tech players.- Xu cofounded DoorDash in 2013 with some classmates from Stanford University.
Tony Xu is the latest major tech player to take a director seat on Facebook's board.
The company announced in a filing with the SEC on Tuesday that Xu, the co-founder and CEO of delivery company DoorDash, would join its board of directors. While he does not yet have a committee appointment, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement, "I've always thought it's important to have great tech leaders on our board."
"Tony has direct experience both running a tech company and solving complex challenges in commerce," Zuckerberg added. "I look forward to learning from his perspective as we build towards the metaverse."
Xu noted that Facebook, which recently changed its corporate name to Meta, had various business tools for "local merchants" and said he, too, is looking forward to "working with the board as the company enters the next stage of its journey."
Xu has been CEO of DoorDash since he founded it with a trio of Stanford classmates in 2013. It went public in 2020 after an initial public offering.
Among the rest of its 10-person board are Peggy Alford, who leads global sales at PayPal; Marc Andreessen, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz; Drew Houston, cofounder and CEO of DropBox; and Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund.
The addition of Xu comes as Facebook, which makes nearly all of its revenue from selling digital ads on its platforms, including Instagram and WhatsApp, invests heavily into the commerce part of its business.
In 2020 Facebook acquired Kustomer, a customer management company, for a reported $1 billion as it expanded into ecommerce. A leaked document from late last year also detailed the company's plans to invest more into shopping capabilities with Dan Levy, the VP of Ads and Business Platform, saying he envisioned Facebook's apps "being a primary destination for commerce" to rival Shopify.
Facebook has seen a number of top executives leave in the last year, including its former head of ads Carolyn Everson. Longtime CTO Mike Schroepfer also announced he would step down last year, with Andrew Bozworth, the company's head of augmented and virtual reality, taking over as it pivots toward building an immersive future of social media, called the metaverse. Internal documents obtained by Insider show the company doesn't plan to invest in ecommerce in the metaverse until at least 2023, however.
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