Nearly a month to the day after the hedge fund Osmium Partners gained control of online dating powerhouse Spark Networks by winning a contentious proxy fight, the company's president and CEO announced his exit Monday.
Greg Liberman leaves Spark, parent of specialty dating sites like JDate and Christian Mingle, after ten years with the company, and Michael McConnell, Spark's chairman of the board, will take over for him in an interim capacity until the company can find a replacement.
"It has been an incredible ten years, and I am honored to have spent more than half of my professional career at such a special company," Liberman said in a statement. "Spark is a relationship business in every sense of the word. Through iconic brands like JDate and ChristianMingle, we create countless relationships for our members every day. But, behind the scenes, it's the relationships we have in the communities we serve and the relationships within our team that drive everything."
Osmium spent the better part of a year trying to unseat the majority of Spark's board after announcing a heated proxy battle in December 2013, citing poor marketing tactics and an archaic growth strategy among the reasons it believed the company needed a change in management.