Social gaming company Zynga is growing at a rapid clip. More importantly, their revenue is growing at a rapid clip. And they need a big gun to handle that. They believe they’ve just got him: Dave Wehner, formerly a managing director at Allen & Company LLC.
Wehner is stepping in for current CFO Mark Vranesh, who is becoming chief accountant of Zynga. While they obviously won’t say it, it should be fairly clear what this shuffling is all about: it’s not CFO, it’s another three-letter acronym, IPO. While Zynga is still undoubtedly a ways away from such a move, they have to get their finances in order now. Especially since they’re growing so quickly.
At Allen & Co. Wehner was in charge of a number of key investments, including Pandora, Quantcast, and StubHub. He led the corporate finance teams responsible for capital raises and M&A in Silicon Valley.
This move follows moves by LinkedIn, who is also position itself for an IPO run. Interestingly enough, it was just reported that a Facebook IPO was just pushed from a possible 2011 timeframe, to 2012 — well, probably.
Facebook is obviously a key to Zynga, as most of their users come from the giant social network. But a new investment by Google in Zynga points to the search giant getting into the social gaming realm as well.