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Fab PR Head Deborah Roth Has Left the Company

The Pandora and IAC vet left the company in February.

Jason Del Rey
Jason Del Rey has been a business journalist for 15 years and has covered Amazon, Walmart, and the e-commerce industry for the last decade. He was a senior correspondent at Vox.

Now who’s going to rein in Jason Goldberg’s free-wheeling blogging and tweeting ways?

Deborah Roth, the veteran communications exec who joined Fab last summer and oversaw a turbulent period in the e-commerce startup’s short history, departed the company in February.

Roth confirmed the move and said she is currently exploring new opportunities. Goldberg, Fab’s CEO, also confirmed her departure.

Roth previously oversaw communications for Pandora and LendingTree as both companies went public. And when she joined Fab in June right before it announced a $150 million investment, a future IPO didn’t seem farfetched.

But that was before an abrupt business model shift away from flash sales, three rounds of layoffs and the departure of several top-level executives reset expectations for the heavily funded startup.

Roth’s temporary replacement, hired by Fab, may stay on long-term, Goldberg said in an email.

Roth’s departure raises the question of whether Goldberg will return to blogging and tweeting about the business more frequently, after promising in a January post to blog less. “Despite what you may tell yourself, not many consumers actually want to get to know the CEO of the companies they interact with,” he wrote at the time. “It’s not about you. It’s all about the product.”

But since Roth’s departure, Goldberg has started tweeting about Fab — using the hashtag #startupturnaround — and let loose with an 18-tweet monstrosity this past weekend.

He’s also back to blogging, publishing three posts in the last week alone, including one titled “It’s a fucking startup. Why are you here? — We’re here to Build.”

In an email, Goldberg said the company wouldn’t be doing any business press in the foreseeable future.

“My blog and tweets should speak on their own,” he said in the email.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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