Facebook says goodbye to Tom Arrix, head of U.S. sales

Arrix had been with Facebook since 2006, helped build up Facebook's ad platform

(Updated to reflect comment from Facebook)

As Facebook continues to grow its all-important ads platform, which is the basically the lifeline for the entire company at this point, it is suddenly losing a key player who helped grow that part of the business.

Tom Arrix, Facebook’s head of North American sales, announced that he is leaving the company in a Facebook post put up on his wall on Tuesday.

"I want to let you all know that I’ll be leaving Facebook and plan to spend a lot of time with my family over rest of the summer. This was an incredibly difficult decision to make," he wrote.

"I feel strongly that the work I set out to take on here at FB is complete, we built the foundation for the future of our Ads business. And because of that, it's an ideal time for me to move on. I'm really excited to take some time but so energized to explore what's next to build."

Arrix will be replaced, at least temporarily, by ad chief Carolyn Everson, according to AllThingsD, who first spotted this news. 

When Arrix first joined Facebook in 2006, the company had only 8 million users. Seven years later, the company no has over 1.2 billion. And, during that time, Arrix was instrumental in helping Facebook grow its relationship with brands, as well as help to created an ad platform pretty much out of nothing. 

When Arrix arrived, the company was barely advertising at all. As of its latest earnings report, the company's advertising revenue was $1.25 billion, or 85% of total revenue. It increased 43% from the same quarter the year before.

Prior to joining Facebook, Arrix worked at Univision, Turner and Walmart.

Arrix made sure to note how proud he is of what he, and his team, accomplished during his time at the company.

"We crafted a vision that allowed marketers to better connect their brands with people, we started from scratch and built a multi-billion dollar business, we adopted and excelled at mobile advertising faster than anyone could imagine and we have the most passionate and amazing teammates around the world," he said.

"Tom was an early and integral member of Facebook's global sales efforts. He leaves a great legacy at Facebook and we wish nothing but the best for him in the future," a Facebook spokesperson told VatorNews.

What Arrix is going to do next is anyones guess, but given his experience running sales for the world's largest social network, he would basically have his pick for where he wants to go.

Arrix is the second Facebook executive to depart in less than a month, following Gokul Rajaram, Facebook's Product Director of Ads, who left to become Square's Product Engineering Lead.

(Image source: https://allthingsd.com)