VentureBeat

Bram Cohen, the inventor of the BitTorrent peer-to-peer sharing protocol and founder of the company of the same name, has stepped down as chief executive.

The company has named a new Doug Walker its new CEO, and Cohen will move into the position of chief scientist, once again focusing on the company’s P2P technology. We speculated almost a year ago that Cohen (pictured here) would need to step out of the CEO role as the company grows.

Companies that help distribute video, called Content Delivery Networks, are increasingly using BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer technologies. P2P reduces infrastructure and bandwidth costs by including consumers in the distribution chain, coordinating a network that swaps pieces of files between user’s computers.

BitTorrent, the company, has doubled in size this year, signing on new partners and striking a deal with Brightcove earlier this month that will see it delivering content for CBS Corp., MTV and the New York Times, among others.

Walker was previously CEO of a company called Alias Systems, a 3D graphics software company that had close ties with Hollywood. His role will begin as a supporting one, securing BitTorrent’s fledgling relationships with media companies and other partners (now 55 in all).

Although the process of becoming legitimate appears to have gone smoothly for BitTorrent, its greater challenge will be staying a step ahead of the competition.

In April, CDN operator Akamai acquired a P2P company called Redswoosh, which puts it in the position to offer a bundled package including both CDN and P2P distribution for media providers.

Walker says that BitTorrent’s technology is still “well ahead” of that offered by other companies, and says he hopes to enter into business relationships with other CDNs as the year goes on.

The company also hired a new chief technology officer, Eric Klinker. He formerly held the same position at Internap, a much larger company.

(Picture courtesy of BusinessWeek.)

Plenty of rumors have circulated about BitTorrent, the popular San Francisco file-sharing company, speculating on its latest funding round and the fate of its brilliant chief executive.

Here’s word from the horse’s mouth: BitTorrent has raised $20 million in its second round of capital, led by Silicon Valley firm Accel Partners, the company told VentureBeat earlier Thursday. Existing investor DCM participated. And while we don’t know what will happen with Bram Cohen, we came away from a conversation with the company thinking he may be stepping down as CEO soon.

BitTorrent is a hot company because it’s at the center of a revolution in video file-sharing. It is controversial because it is still a distributor of predominantly pirated video. Its peer-to-peer technology defies centralized control, and so controlling piracy on its platform is a hard thing to do — but it is working on it nonetheless. BitTorrent has millions of users, and says its traffic accounts for as much as 40 percent of all worldwide Internet traffic.

BitTorrent is also working with the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) to remove copyright infringing content from its independent website. Over 20 film studios and television networks, including 20th Century Fox, MTV Networks, Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. Home Entertainment, expect to publish thousands of movies and TV shows on BitTorrent.com, the company says.

As VentureBeat reported earlier, Ping Li, a venture capitalist at Accel led the investment. In that earlier piece, we wrote about the challenges BitTorrent still faces in becoming an easy, useful consumer-oriented site. Those challenges remain.

Separately, we asked BitTorrent’s director of communications, Lily Lin, about reports that there is an executive search underway to replace Bram Cohen as chief executive. She said everyone knows BitTorrent had become a large company, with 35 employees, but then she repeated what she told us Wednesday, that Bram was “here to stay.” We noted she was not saying he was CEO to stay. She paused, and said again, “he’s here to stay.”

So with the clues, we now believe Cohen will stay at the company but will step down as CEO. She referred to a bigger company, a hint that organization was needed. This Wired piece from more than a year ago suggests organizing people may not be Cohen’s forte. It is a snippet from a part about his wife’s view of him:

She pats her husband affectionately on the head: “My sweet little autistic nerd boy.” (Cohen in fact has Asperger’s syndrome, a condition on the mild end of the autism spectrum that gives him almost superhuman powers of concentration but can make it difficult for him to relate to other people.)

We may be wrong. Who cares about titles, right? Cohen could stay CEO, and the search may be on for a chief operating officer who effectively runs the company. Doesn’t really make a difference.

That’s what Rolling Stone wants you to believe, in its latest edition. In a story called “Baby Billionaires of Silicon Valley,” Rolling Stone catches up with a group nine entrepreneurs who get together to strategize. This is another hype job, since none of these people are billionaires. (Update: Blake Ross, in comment below, says this is no secret society, and headline is wrong.)

From the piece:

That’s why they’ve gathered here tonight. This is one of the first meetings of a secret society they formed and jokingly called the Young Guns; a more apt moniker might be the Valley Brats. It’s an invite-only cabal of the most powerful under-thirty-year-old mavericks in town. Every few weeks they gather to drink, plot global domination, make friends and, mainly, just act their age. “We got sick of hanging out with older guys,” says the Brats’ gregarious founder, Rob Pazornik, twenty-six-year-old creator of an online shopping startup called LicketyShip. “All they talk about is mortgages and nannies. It’s like hanging out with your dad’s friends.”

Featured in the cover photo, from left to right: Blake Ross (formerly Firefox, now Parakey), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Matt Sanchez (VideoEgg), Robert Pazornik (LicketyShip), Seth Sternberg (Meebo), Todd Masonis (Plaxo). Also featured are Chad Hurley & Steve Chen (YouTube), and Bram Cohen (BitTorrent).