Facebook's Building 8 Chief, Regina Dugan, to Step Down Next Year

Regina Dugan, the head of Facebook's secretive hardware unit - Building 8 - will step down early next year, she said on Tuesday.

"Today I am announcing that early next year, I will be leaving Facebook to focus on building and leading a new endeavour. I will be working with leadership over the next several months to ensure Building 8 makes a smooth transition into 2018," Dugan wrote on Facebook.

Earlier this year, Facebook provided a peek into the hardware division, called Building 8, revealing it was studying ways for people to communicate by thought and touch.

Although any hardware rollouts from the unit are years away, potential products could help the social media giant lower its heavy reliance on advertising revenue.

Dugan, a former chief of the Pentagon's research arm, has also led a similar hardware group at Alphabet's Google.

The entire text of Dugan's Facebook post can be found here:

Today I am announcing that early next year, I will be leaving Facebook to focus on building and leading a new endeavour. I will be working with leadership over the next several months to ensure Building 8 makes a smooth transition into 2018.

This was a difficult decision for me. Together, we have already done so much good work. And there are many people that I will miss, personally, and professionally.

It was Kennedy’s words, delivered more than 50 years ago, that inspired me:

'The world is very different now. United, there is little we cannot do… divided, there is little we can do. Let us begin anew — remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness. And if a beachhead of cooperation may push back the jungle of suspicion, let both sides join in creating a new endeavour, where the strong are just and the weak secure. This will not be finished in the first 100 days. Nor will it be finished in the first 1,000 days. Nor even perhaps in our lifetime. But let us begin.'

And so, I begin. I will do my part.

Written with inputs from Reuters