XenSource making changes — "normal Silicon Valley stuff"

Updated

XenSource, a Palo Alto start-up backed by Kleiner Perkins, and active in the open-source “virtualization” area, is shuffling its management team, and has made a few layoffs.

The Palo Alto start-up only recently raised a boatload of money, about $23 million last year, so when there rumors percolated about layoffs recently, and a few changes in the management team, some readers wrote in asking what had happened.

Turns out, co-founder Moshe Bar resigned in October, and relocated to Texas with his family, according to a spokeswoman. And chief executive, Nick Gault is leading the search for his replacement. In addition, several engineers were laid off, as the company shifts its R&D team to the East Coast Cambridge, UK, where some of the remaining seven co-founders were based anyway; there was also the need to “align skill sets,” according to the spokeswoman, Heather Fitzsimmons.

We asked whether it was more than five layoffs. She answered: “I can only say it was definitely not massive, but we aren’t giving numbers or commenting beyond that.”

But she assured us: “This is normal Silicon Valley stuff….I know XenSource is alive and well.”

Here was our first post on XenSource last year.

Update: Corrected reference to Cambridge, UK (We’d heard Cambridge, and assumed it was Mass.), and spokeswoman wanted to be clear that Bar resigned a few months ago.

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