Meta Chief Strategy Officer Dave Wehner Leaves to Join Fireworks as CFO

Dave Wehner Leaves Meta for Fireworks

Dave Wehner, Meta’s chief strategy officer, is leaving the company to become CFO of AI startup Fireworks, he announced on X on Friday.

Wehner joined Meta, then called Facebook, in 2012 and was the company’s chief financial officer from 2014 to 2022. In November 2022, he became Meta’s first chief strategy officer.

About Fireworks

Fireworks is an AI inference and model-training platform that helps companies customize and run open models. The four-year-old startup was founded by former Meta and Google employees and was valued at $17.5 billion during a Series D fundraising round in July. Its latest investment round was led by Atreides Management, Index Ventures and TCV, and it is also backed by Nvidia and Sequoia Capital.

Statements

Wehner wrote on X: “Fireworks has the right mission for the moment.” He added: “I’ve become increasingly bullish on what they are building. There’s a remarkable depth of technical talent here, coupled with a very practical focus on what customers need.”

Meta COO Javier Olivan said in a statement to CNBC: “Dave helped guide Meta through tremendous growth and complexity over 14 years, and brought disciplined thinking to some of our hardest company-level decisions.”

Fireworks CEO Lin Qiao said in a statement to CNBC that Wehner will be tasked with scaling the company’s finances and operations. In a LinkedIn post, Lin wrote: “Dave told me he wanted to get back to a smaller company where he could build toward a big impact again.”

Security Incident

In October, Fireworks found “a security incident involving unauthorized use of internal Fireworks credentials,” in which “an unauthorized third party accessed environment variables used in evaluation jobs in a limited number of customer accounts,” the company said in a press release. The release added: “Based on our investigation at this time, we have not detected evidence of unauthorized access to customer models, datasets, training data, personal information, or inference traffic within the Fireworks security perimeter or control.”

Why it matters

• Wehner’s departure ends a 14-year tenure at Meta, where he served as CFO from 2014 to 2022 and then as chief strategy officer.
• Fireworks, valued at $17.5 billion in July, is hiring a CFO with eight years of experience running a public company’s books.
• The startup disclosed a security incident in October involving unauthorized access to environment variables in a limited number of customer accounts.

Sources

• cnbc.com: Meta strategy chief Dave Wehner joins Fireworks as CFO
• mlq.ai: Meta strategy chief Dave Wehner leaves to become CFO of AI inference startup Fireworks | MLQ News

This article was drafted with AI assistance and checked against the sources above. Company claims are reported as claims. Cover image is AI-generated.