Facebook Executive Mike Buckley Is Leaving and Caryn Marooney Is Taking Over Communications

Things are about to look a little different near the top for Facebook’s communications team.

VP Mike Buckley is leaving the company in May to work full time at New Frontier Foods, a food company he co-founded back in 2012 known for its “Ocean’s Halo” seaweed snacks. Buckley joined Facebook that same year and has been moonlighting with Ocean’s Halo while also managing all of Facebook’s business communications under longtime comms and policy boss Elliot Schrage.

As a result, Caryn Marooney, Buckley’s counterpart running product and technology communications, will step in to manage the entire comms team on a day-to-day basis. She’ll still report to Schrage, who oversees communications and policy on a big-picture level and also focuses on specific projects important to CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg.

Ocean's Halo

So instead of having a product comms lead (Marooney) and a business comms lead (Buckley) reporting into Shrage, Marooney will handle both sides of the department. She joined Facebook’s communications team back in 2011 from The Outcast Agency, a tech PR firm she co-founded.

The reason for Buckley’s departure: He caught the entrepreneurial bug. “Facebook has been the best job I’ve ever had and it’s crazy to think about leaving,” he told colleagues last week when he announced his departure. “But my little startup has a chance to be more than little — and I have to go for it.” The seaweed snacks are in store like Costco and Whole Foods.

Facebook has a massive PR and policy team (trust us), and Marooney is well respected internally. So it’ll likely be business as usual.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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