Rumor: Douban Losing High Level Employees to Startups [UPDATED]

TechWeb is reporting that according to its internal sources, Chinese artsy social networking site Douban has been experiencing an unusually high rate of employee turnover these past three months among high-level employees. The departures include high-level engineer Peng Yu, who has already confirmed his departure with TechWeb, as well as interaction designer Shang Wenhuan (who has mentioned his departure on Weibo), deputy director of product structure Tu Fengfeng, mobile development engineer Wu Jianjun, and core team members for Douban Music and Douban Movies and eight other employees.

UPDATE: An official rep from Douban confirmed the departures, but indicated that TechWeb’s initial reporting contained several factual errors, including the job titles of several of the departed employees (we have corrected our own article to reflect this). The Douban rep also said that while there had indeed been 12 departures from the site in the past three months, this wasn’t particularly unusual for a company with 300 employees.

Peng has apparently left to start his own mobile internet company, but it is unclear why other employees may have left. Shang Wenhuan appears to have confirmed his own departure with a wistful goodbye message to Douban on his weibo account, and it certainly doesn’t give the impression there’s any bad blood between him and the company, so it may well be that these departures coming in the same time period are purely coincidental. Peng is apparently under that impression; he told TechWeb that Douban had indeed lost a “relatively” high number of employees recently but when asked for a reason, he said only that it was a good time to do a startup, and that many of the folks who left Douban did so to found new startups.

Best of luck to all the new startups, then! And best of luck to Douban, which may have its work cut out for it trying to keep up with everything as it replaces these folks.

[via TechWeb]

This post was updated at 8:36 PM on Friday to reflect Douban’s official response.