Rumors started to leak earlier today that Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and colleague Justin Rosenstein were leaving to start their own company.
Facebook has since confirmed the rumor to us with a simple quote from Mark Zuckerberg: “Dustin has always had Facebook’s best interests at heart and will always be someone I turn to for advice.”
Fortunately, Rosenstein (who formerly worked at Google as product manager of Google Page Creator) has posted more information about their reasons for departure in a Facebook note to friends, which we have reproduced with his permission below.
In it, he describes briefly how Moskovitz and he plan to build to an “extensible enterprise productivity suite” that uses Facebook Connect as its user authentication system and borrows many of Facebook’s own design conventions. The two of them thought about building this suite from within Facebook but eventually decided that it would make more sense to build it within their own company. The choice quote: “We hope our products will become to your work life what Facebook.com is to your social life.”
