AOL Social Media Dude Frank Gruber Leaves (AOL)

Frank Gruber

One of AOL's more visible employees, Frank Gruber, is leaving the company's Dulles office to focus on his own projects.

Frank's new day jobs: His "Tech Cocktail" events business and Shiny Heart Ventures, an Internet startup he founded with fellow ex-AOLer Jen Consalvo.

Reached by IM, Frank tells us he is leaving AOL because he had finished up his most recent projects -- including AIM Lifestream -- and "thought it was good breaking off point."

He explains more in a blog post:

This year my New Year's resolution is to be bold and what better way to do that than to start the year off by leaving the solid paycheck, benefits and comfort of a job at Aol. Today is my last day as an Aol employee as I have decided to move on to pursue some of my own entrepreneurial endeavors. It has been just over 3 years since I joined Aol to help bring some "Web 2.0 & social media" perspective and expertise to the Aol team. In Internet years that is about 10 years. My first task was to join the product development team responsible for the myAOL triple threat including a personalized homepage, a feed reader with bookmarking and an innovate recommendation engine. We then went on to launch it in 28+ countries before it turned one. More recently with the launch of AIM Lifestream I saw about 18 months of planning and strategy come to fruition which included work on AIM buddyupdates and the acquisition of SocialThing. I have racked up a lot of airline miles bouncing between DC and the West Coast. It has been a good run and a great learning experience working in a large organization and I have met so many great people along the way. I am proud of our accomplishments at Aol. As anyone who has ever worked at a large company can attest, it is not easy to launch a product in a big organization and I did it a few times in just three years.

Continue reading at Somewhat Frank >

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