A senior Snap executive, Steve Hwang, is leaving the company after a string of recent employee complaints to HR about him spurred his sudden exit, according to several people familiar with the situation. Hwang worked at Snap for more than 10 years and was SVP of partnerships and strategy.
A Snap exec is out following HR complaints
The complicated departure of a longtime SVP speaks to the unease inside parts of the company.
The complicated departure of a longtime SVP speaks to the unease inside parts of the company.
is a contributing writer and author of the Sources newsletter.
The complaints were filed since he took over Snap’s partnerships and content organization in February. They include an instance where he told members of his team that he used to eat at a street food cart called “Bin Laden’s” in New York City many years ago, an interaction with a female employee about her rape whistle, and for appearing intoxicated with some of Snap’s clients at the Cannes Lions advertising festival in France last month.
Hwang informed his team he was leaving earlier this week, saying in an internal memo I’ve seen that he is “looking forward to spending more time with my family.” When reached for this story, he declined to comment on the record beyond the following statement: “I am grateful to Snap for the incredible career and learning opportunities I’ve had over the past decade. I have truly enjoyed working with such an amazing team, and I look forward to my next chapter.”
Snap spokesperson Russ Caditz-Peck said the company doesn’t “comment on personnel matters” but that “We take our code of conduct very seriously, along with our commitment to maintaining an inclusive environment.”
My sources said that Hwang chose to resign and was not fired by Snap. But the exit is a complicated one that speaks to the unease inside the company right now.
While he was never a public-facing executive, Hwang has been a close advisor to CEO Evan Spiegel and was instrumental in the company’s acquisitions and fundraising efforts since its earliest days. More recently, he was Snap’s main point of contact with key partners like Google, Apple, and OpenAI.
Current and former Snap employees I spoke with for this story said that how the company’s February layoffs (which Hwang helped orchestrate) were handled rubbed some on the partnerships team the wrong way, and some suggested that certain employees have been out to get Hwang since then. I’m told that he was also reported to HR in recent months for relatively mundane things, like being late to a meeting and not having a prepared agenda.
They also said that Hwang quickly turned up the heat on Snap’s content division, which manages the Discover and Spotlight sections of the Snapchat app that bring in most of the company’s ad revenue. That team has already been under tremendous pressure given the company’s laggard business performance and has been working for some time to merge Discover and Spotlight into one video feed.
Still, everyone agreed that some of Hwang’s comments certainly didn’t help his case — saying “Bin Laden” in just about any context at work, even if you recall it being the actual name of a food cart you ate at in the early 2000s, isn’t a good idea. “He was a mentor to so many people at the company which is why it’s sad,” someone who worked with him told me.
As I’ve covered for many years, Snap is no stranger to employee drama, though an exec departure like Hwang’s hasn’t happened in quite a while. People who worked with him told me that, since taking over a much larger team with morale issues in February, he was probably going to be pushed out at some point no matter what. Whether he deserved that or not, the pressure that people feel inside Snap right now makes it easy to take sides.
People moves
Some other notable career moves:
- A couple of senior Meta leaders I’ve heard were let go as a result of the recent Reality Labs restructuring: Caitlin Kalinowski, head of AR glasses hardware, and Ingrid Cotoros, a VP of tech engineering. Their internal farewell posts mention the coming launch of “Ventura,” Meta’s codename for the lower-cost Quest headset, later this year. We’ll see that device along with a public showing of “Orion,” the codename for Meta’s full-fledged AR glasses that have been in development since about 2018.
- In other Meta moves, Stephane Kasriel, its VP in charge of fintech and commerce, is leaving at the end of the month. Meanwhile, the company’s generative AI org hired a trio of researchers from Carnegie Mellon: Russ Salakhutdinov, a former AI director at Apple, will be the new VP of research, while Jing Yu Koh and Daniel Fried are joining to work on multimodal agents.
- Two senior leaders at Humane — Ken Kocienda and Brooke Hartley Moy — have left to create Infactory, an “AI fact-checking startup.”
- Kyle Kosic, an early xAI employee who defected from OpenAI, has already boomeranged back. And Martin Signoux, formerly of Meta, is OpenAI’s new head of policy in Europe.
- DeCarlos Love, a former Google product leader, is the new CEO of Thrive AI Health, a new company funded by Thrive Global and the OpenAI startup fund.
- What’s going on at Snowflake these days? Grzegorz Czajkowski, EVP of engineering and support, is suddenly leaving only one year into his three-year contract.
Interesting links
- Coatue’s 2024 presentation on the state of tech and the markets.
- The FTC’s research paper on open-weight AI models.
- A research report from Goldman Sachs on all of the spending going into AI.
- Andrej Karpathy’s keynote address for Berkeley’s AI hackathon.
- Benedict Evans on the “VR winter.”
- “I am the most well-known person of my generation.” - Mark Zuckerberg in a fascinating email exchange from 2020 with Peter Thiel and others.
- Elon Musk has reportedly “volunteered his sperm to help seed a colony” on Mars.
- New York Magazine’s cover story on how the NDA has infiltrated every corner of our lives.
- The “Chum King” of AI.
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