Eddie Frederick, President and Co-Founder of LivingSocial, has stepped down from the board according to an email just sent out from CEO Tim O’Shaughnessy. Eddie has been at the company since the start and was the original creator of Visual Bookshelf, the app that served as the motivation behind creating Hungry Machine (the company which formed LivingSocial).

LivingSocial is the direct competitor to Groupon, which went public late last year. It’s also anticipated that LivingSocial will soon file to go public which makes me wonder about the timing. However rather than speculate, I’ve simply included the email out from Tim and the email response from Eddie.

LivingSocialites,

Every so often you have to write one of those emails that you just hate to write. One of those emails that’s on your to-do list all day but you keep procrastinating until finally it’s the end of the day and you can procrastinate no more. Well, it’s the end of the day.

Today I’m writing with a little sadness and a lot of gratitude to let you know that Eddie Frederick will be stepping down from his current position on our leadership team and our board and moving on to new challenges and adventures (and if you know Eddie, you have no doubt that there will be plenty of new “adventures”). As friends and colleagues, we wish him the best.

A big reason for the success and vision of LivingSocial has been the leadership and passion of one of our founders. Eddie has seen it all at LivingSocial - his work has ranged from leading our user acquisition efforts to A/B testing button colors for Facebook Apps to pushing to launch Me + 3 and countless other contributions. Importantly, he’s also been a partner and driving force in always pushing us into new business opportunities and scaling existing businesses even further. His “negative space” view has provided a unique voice as we’ve grown. On every decision, Eddie framed it with a binary question: Does this help us win? And he usually helped us get the right answer.

Please join me in thanking Eddie in helping us become the company we are today, and helping position us for the company we’ll become in the future.

–
Tim O’Shaughnessy
CEO

Thanks Tim for the flattering send-off.

Wanderlust aside, the opportunities in local ecommerce are enormous and I’m more confident than ever that livingsocial has just the right team to capitalize on them. I can’t wait to see what strong moves come next.

Truly, thanks again everyone.

Eddie