Aaron Batalion, the co-founder and CTO of daily deals site LivingSocial, is leaving the company. He announced his departure in a post on his personal blog published Friday afternoon.
Here is the full text of his blog post:
“Moving on to new adventures…
What an incredible journey it has been since June of 2007, when the four of us knew only our direction, but definitely not our destination. After much soul searching, I have decided to leave LivingSocial to pursue some new ideas. No new adventure to announce yet, just a urge to go create… that there is more to do.
As I look back today, we have processed billions in commerce transactions and have sent tens of billions of emails on technology we created. We took a simple two-week prototype and scaled it to an international business with thousands of fellow employees around the world. We built a culture I am proud of and millions of consumers around the world have experienced their local cities because of our products. More importantly, we created an incredible team with many more strong moves yet to come. Knowing this makes me confident in LivingSocial’s future and the vision of local we have all been fighting for.
I am incredibly proud of what the team has accomplished to date and have been so fortunate to play a role in this amazing journey. My decision to depart has in no way been easy. The experience and, most importantly, the friendships… have been the best of my career.
Always live hungry,
Aaron”
And here is the internal memo regarding Batalion’s departure from LivingSocial’s CEO Tim O’Shaughnessy:
“Hey folks,
I wanted to pass along an update.
Over the last few years, I’ve had the pleasure of working with Aaron Batalion, first at Revolution Health, and then as a co-founder of LivingSocial. Now we’ll get to see what else is in store for Aaron in the future. He’ll be moving from a day-to-day role as an employee to an outside advisory role, where he’ll help me and the company with hiring senior technologists and act on a consultative basis with the technology team, among other things.
Aaron has been an important part of LivingSocial’s story since there wasn’t even a LivingSocial, just a Hungry Machine and he’ll continue to be important moving forward. I’ve tried to emulate his consistent drive and passion, but with limited success because there is only one “Tank”. We owe him a great deal of thanks for the long days, nights and weekends he has given to this company and in helping to grow and scale our technology team. Please wish him the best of luck as he moves on to whatever is next outside of LS and transitions to an advisory role at the company. If you’re ever in SF, where he’s been based since last summer, don’t hesitate to drop him a line.
– Tim”
Batalion’s departure comes just one month after LivingSocial raised $110 million in a massive new round of funding. The company has raised more than $800 million since it was founded in 2007. It’s been a complicated road in some ways lately for the company, which laid off some 400 staffers back in November. While its 2012 revenue was $536 million, the company is not turning a profit, posting a net loss for the year of $650 million.
The fresh funding secured in February (which was raised at a $1.5 billion valuation) is sure to kick off some new projects for LivingSocial in the months ahead, but it seems that one core member of LivingSocial’s team will not be a part of them.