StumbleUpon co-founder Garrett Camp just announced that he’s stepping down as CEO and becoming chairman of the company’s board.
The change is effective immediately, Camp says. He’ll be leading a search for the company’s new CEO, someone who has more experience with international growth and running a large organization, while the current executive team handles day-to-day operations.
Companies are rarely candid about the reasons for a management change like this one, but for what it’s worth, both Camp and Marc Leibowitz (StumbleUpon’s vice president of business development and marketing) say this was Camp’s choice. After all, he’s been at StumbleUpon for 10 years. Camp argues that it’s time for the company to find a leader who can take it to the next level, plus, “I think it might be good to take a vacation that lasts for more than a week.”
Camp also says he feels comfortable leaving now because of the success of the content discovery service’s redesign and rebranding at the end of last year, the fact that it recently crossed 25 million registered users (a nearly 5x increase from its user base when Camp and his investors bought the company back from eBay three years ago), and the strength of the current management team.
“The platform is in a much stronger place than it was in the past,” he says.
As for his involvement going forward, Camp says that he’s not sure yet. It will definitely be a part-time role, one where he focuses on broader strategy. He won’t be in the office every day, but he’ll probably do more than just show up for board meetings, he says.
In the meantime, given Camp’s involvement in other startups (he’s co-founder at Uber, and an investor and advisor elsewhere), I wouldn’t be surprised to see him start something new soon, too.
