More Early Hulu Hires Head Out the Door

Hulu’s owners have decided not to sell it. And they’ve brought in a new CEO. So what happens next?

Some longtime Hulu employees aren’t going to wait around to find out. Over the last few weeks the company saw several Hulu vets leave the Santa Monica-based company, many of them heading for other L.A.-based startups. Here’s a (partial) roundup:

Eric Yellin, formerly vp of marketing and distribution, is now svp of content & distribution at Whisper.
Ilya Haykinson, formerly director of software development, and the company’s mobile dev lead, is now vp of technology at NationBuilder.
Jacob Rokeach, formerly a content marketing manager, is now director of marketing at Bitium.
Lindsay Monroe, formerly the lead marketing designer, is now at Fremont Project.
Alex Kruglov, former head of content acquisition, left last week for “something new“.

A Hulu rep declined to comment. But retention and recruitment is top of mind for new boss Mike Hopkins. In the year-end blog post he published last month, Hopkins made a point of noting that the company had hired 260 people in the last year, and that the company now had 725 employees, up 20 percent from a year before.

The flip side of that argument: Lots of early Hulu employees have been streaming out of the company for the past year, triggered in part by a “liquidity event” that allowed many of them to turn their ownership stakes in the video site into cash. And that stream continued once it became clear that onetime CEO Jason Kilar would be heading out.

Kilar himself is responsible for some of the exodus. He’s recruited at least nine of his former co-workers, including Monroe, to his Fremont Project, a startup he has yet to unveil to the public.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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