I would actually guess that the timing is mostly driven by the vesting schedule from the Salesforce acquisition. They announced the acquisition in December 2010, and it closed fairly quickly thereafter. I think 2 years is a standard vesting period after an acquisition, so now is a good time to leave unless he wants to make a career of it at Salesforce.

You see stories all the time like "Founder X leaves ____ 2 years after acquisition by ____." There's one just from today about a Tweetdeck founder: http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/31/iain-dodsworth-leaves-twitt... .

I found the whole rap genius thing overblown. The idea that a single request should block a server until it returns is absurd, given that it probably is spending most of its time waiting on io. If you really need to load balance CPU bound tasks you should do it properly with a work queue rather than expecting your reverse proxy to do it. Its true their docs got out of date, but i found their response "we'll help you design your apps properly for the 21st century" reasonable, even though they got slammed for it.