A High-Tech Mystery: 4chan Founder Christopher Poole Quietly Leaves Google After 5 Years

4chan founder Christopher (Chris) Poole has parted ways with Alphabet Inc.'s GOOGL GOOG Google after five years with the search engine company, where he disappeared from view after being feted as one of the Internet's brightest personalities.

A Young Net Icon: Poole founded 4chan in 2003 when he was a 15-year-old living in New York City. He originally operated 4chan under the alias “moot” until he was outed in a July 2008 Wall Street Journal report.

After his identity became known, Poole was the object of mostly glowing media coverage and was invited to speak at tech industry conferences; he also delivered a TED Talk in 2010.

Under his leadership, 4chan morphed from benign imageboards featuring a surplus of cat memes to an unregulated community of NSFW content that often spilled over into real-world arrests involving hacking, child pornography and harassment.

GoDaddy suspended the 4chan.net domain in February 2004, forcing Poole to move the site elsewhere, and over the years several Internet service providers temporarily blocked access to 4chan due to its problematic content.

Poole stepped down as 4chan administrator and sold the site in 2015. He joined Google in 2016 as a product manager with the photos and streams team run by company Vice President Bradley Horowitz.

See Also: Benzinga PreMarket Prep: How Will A Higher Capital Gains Tax Impact Stocks?

Exit, Stage Left: Google made no formal announcement of Poole’s departure. CNBC broke the story after obtaining an internal document that reported that Poole’s last day at Google was April 13. However, the circumstances of his leaving were not clear and Poole did not respond to CNBC’s requests for comment.

When Poole was hired, he wrote a now-deleted Tumblr post declaring he would tap into his “experience from a dozen years of building online communities” and help Google “grow in ways one simply cannot on their own.”

At the time of his hiring, there was some media speculation Poole would help the company reanimate the poorly-received Google+ social network and become a factor in Google’s Area 120 workshop for experimental products.

But after becoming a Google employee, Poole vanished from public view. Google never cited him in any of its public relations outreach, Poole’s social media posts ceased and no new photographs of him surfaced online.

Despite his high profile within the online world, Poole never moved up the ranks of the company hierarchy. Instead, he stayed at the product manager level, shifting between different departments over the last five years before his quiet exit.

(Photo of Christopher Poole from 2012, courtesy of SHARE Conference / Flickr Creative Commons.)