Brian Farnham, the guy in charge of AOL's Patch network, is leaving because Patch is not enough of a start-up for him, he said in an unnervingly positive farewell blog post Wednesday. Forbes' Jeff Bercovici picked up the news and still has the best rundown on what happened, pointing out that nowhere in Farnham's farewell post does he mention Arianna Huffington, "who, as editor in chief of the Huffington Post Media Group, has officially overseen Patch for the past year." Nor does Farnham mention AOL, we'd add, but rather focuses on the individuals he's worked with and how much he likes all of them. So maybe the super-positive farewell post isn't the place to read tea leaves about the company's internal politics.

Farnham's on-the-record reason for leaving is as benign as they come, in keeping with the relentless positivity of his post: "It turns out I really love creating things from scratch, and while Patch is in a continual process of truly fascinating evolution and only a toddler of a company, it has definitely left 'scratch' in the dust. So I'm heading off to explore some other startup opportunities." He's even relentlessly positive about his critics, which he describes as a "single large, screechy, off-key band called BI and the Haters." The good news, Farnham writes:"I think it's safe to say that we wouldn't be constantly deboned by all these critics if we weren't doing something really interesting and potentially threatening."

Clearly, this kind of missive is not going to include complaints about the boss or the mother ship.

[Photo via Mike Mueller / Flickr]

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Adam Martin