Snapchat maker losing another top executive

Snap Inc. is losing another executive. Tom Conrad, the Venice company’s vice president of product, plans to leave in March, the company confirmed Thursday. He’ll be replaced by Snap’s director of growth, Jacob Andreou.

Conrad, who was reportedly one of Snap Chief Executive Evan Spiegel’s closest lieutenants, told TechCrunch he was leaving the technology industry altogether.

“It’s time for me to put my energy outside of tech, into music, food, photography and things closer to art than entrepreneurship,” Conrad told the publication. “It’s easy to put these things off forever but I didn’t want to wake up 10 years from now and not have explored these other passions of mine.”

He will be at least the seventh executive to leave the struggling social media company since its high-profile initial public offering of stock in March.

The others to have left include Tim Sehn, head of engineering; Chris Handman, general counsel; Chloe Drimal, an executive in charge of content development; Robyn Thomas, vice president of legal and human resources; Martin Lev, vice president of security; and Jad Boutros, vice president and chief security officer.

Despite great fanfare, the maker of the video messaging app Snapchat has struggled to live up to its pre-IPO expectations.

The company’s stock ended Thursday down 5% at $13.71 — well below its pre-IPO price of $17 and its peak of $27.09.

Investors woke up to news Thursday that Twitter was developing a Snapchat-like feature that would enable users to post videos more easily.

Andreou, Conrad’s replacement, has been employed at Snap since 2015, according to his LinkedIn profile. He has a background in software engineering.