New Tuber at YouTube
In what some “Tubers” describe as a controversial move, YouTube chief Susan Wojcicki has hired former eBay executive Matthew Mengerink to lead the Google unit’s engineers. The role was previously held by Venkat Panchapakesan, who died in May.
The question now is whether John Harding, the longest-serving eng executive at YouTube, will stick around. Mr. Harding had been a de facto leader of the group after Mr. Panchapakesan’s death. Described as “an engineer’s engineer,” Mr. Harding is known to advocate for his staff and to not be afraid to push back against certain requests from Ms. Wojcicki.
Mr. Mengerink knows something of the YouTube culture; he worked with Steve Chen at PayPal before Mr. Chen co-founded YouTube. Still, bringing in an outsider to fill a high level role at Google is considered risky.
Amir Efrati is executive editor at The Information, which he helped to launch in 2013. Previously he spent nine years as a reporter at the Wall Street Journal, reporting on white-collar crime and later about technology. He can be reached at [email protected] and is on X @amir