No this isn’t an April Fool’s joke. And the CFO i am referring to is not the Chief Financial Officer - he is the Chief Food Officer. Josef Desimone, Google’s chef who is admired chiefly for the kombucha tea that he ferments from scratch (and which is rumoured to get the creative juices of employees flowing) recently left Google for Facebook.

The Chef in Silicon Valley firms has become increasingly important – if you’ve read ‘The Google Story’ then you would have read the chapter on Google’s 1^st executive Chef – Charlie Ayers who was responsible for giving constantly innovating Googlers exotic and nutritious meals that helped them concentrate better. Various studies have shown the importance of food with respect to performance, reflexes, stamina and relative peace of mind. I think the idea of an executive chef within an organisation is great. I also see an opportunity for an Indian Executive Chef to start a chain which can meet the gastronomic needs of the growing number of Indian Internet Startups and make food in India scientific as well.

So this is the 2^nd employee that Facebook has managed to poach from Google. While the short sellers would have taken note I have my reservations with respect to the long-term value that Facebook can provide to investors. It really hasn’t been able to make the revenues that it should be making. As we reported earlier, China’s top social network currently makes 4 times more than Facebook. Also, Facebook now is becoming the quintessential mumbo – jumbo firm. It’s deviating focus away from revenues to things like opening up its API’s, leveraging the social graph et al. The fundamentals of a stock depend solely on its financials. While the buzz about Facebook may be great from a technological perspective for drawing room conversation, there’s no way that all this talk is going to earn investors money.

Incidentally it was this kind of mumbo jumbo web terminology fuelled an investor euphoria which eventually led to the Internet Bubble on Wall Street and indeed in many other parts of the World.

Just as a side note, I plan to now start a short series on the Internet bubble in the US to give you an insight into how investor euphoria coupled with a lack of understanding on the part of both the firms and the investors can lead to people’s shirts being taken off their backs.

On a lighter vein, we here at the WAT office desperately need some great food. Poor Rupesh and Ankit’s food from the Dabawala is more oil + water rather than anything substantial. Rajiv doesn’t eat at all while the others are lucky enough to get food from home. So far we’ve been giving the excuse that the food from the dabawala is made by aunty; ‘pyar se’ or with a lot of love but now even that doesn’t seem like a good enough reason to continue! Executive Chefs – are you listening? 

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