Chief Strategy Officer Imran Khan will leave the social-media company as the parent of Snapchat struggles to keep users.
Last month, Snap reported a 2% drop in daily users, its first such quarterly decline ever, and indicated that the near term could be bumpy as well. Earlier this year, Snap launched an app redesign, but the redesign was said to have hurt user growth.
Snap’s class A stock is down 32% this year and, in premarket trading, those shares fell 0.4% to $9.89, near their all-time low of $9.62.
Snap said Mr. Khan is leaving “to pursue other opportunities” but will stay for an interim period to assist with the transition. It hasn’t been decided when the executive’s last day would be, the company said.
“Mr. Khan has confirmed that this transition is not related to any disagreement with us on any matter relating to our accounting, strategy, management, operations, policies, or practices (financial or otherwise),” Snap said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Mr. Khan has been in his current role since January 2015, according to Snap’s website, and played a significant role in the company’s initial public offering in March 2017. Snap shares, on their first day of trading, soared 44% above their offering price to close at $24.48.
Before joining Snap, Mr. Khan headed internet banking at Credit Suisse Group AG, where he helped lead Alibaba Group Holding Ltd’s IPO.
In May, Snap said its Chief Financial Officer Drew Vollero was leaving the company to pursue other opportunities. Tim Stone, former vice president of finance at Amazon.com Inc., took Mr. Vollero’s place that month.
Mr. Khan becomes the latest example of a Wall Street banker joining a Silicon Valley startup around the time of their IPO, only to leave the startup shortly thereafter. Anthony Noto was the lead banker on Twitter Inc.’s IPO in 2013 and later became its financial chief and then chief operating officer before leaving earlier this year to become the chief executive at Social Finance Inc.
According to FactSet, Mr. Khan owns 0.9% of the company’s class A shares and 0.8% of the outstanding Class B shares. In total, the market cap of Mr. Khan’s ownership is about $92 million.
