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Comment by michaelhart | Hacker News Reader

I imagine most people want the pre-IPO stock. That's the only reason I could honestly conceive. It's the sad truth of the world we live in. Facebook is, like MySpace, always at risk of being overwhelmed by the next social go-to website. Application developers follow the users, not the platform.

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I agree, to me it has to be the pre-IPO stock. At least for me, it seems like Google has much cooler problem sets to work on. I don't know what is in the queue for Facebook but Google tends to get into a lot of interesting technologies. They remind me of Bell Labs.

Some people may follow the money for pre-IPO stock options, but those are exactly the kind of people you don't want. They are in for the money and will jump ship at the next perceived opportunity to strike it rich.

Most people change jobs because they want a new challenge. They want to build something new, or do something they haven't done before. The fact that stock options are part of the deal is frosting on the cake.

In the case of high profile startups with multi-billion dollar private valuations, the upside potential at IPO may be pretty limited anyway. Stock options are always a gamble. In this environment of limited IPOs they are a big question mark.

With Wave getting the axe, I'm sure he could have easily moved on anywhere internally that he wanted to... If he really wanted something new, with a taste for social, Google, I'm sure, could have benefited from his talent in their latest social efforts.

So, I don't think it was for a new challenge. I think that door has been WIDE open to him for around a month now.

> Facebook is, like MySpace, always at risk of being overwhelmed by the next social go-to website.

I think Facebook has passed that hurdle. Its users are invested enough by now, with their friends lists/groups/games/etc, that they won't be moving en-masse somewhere else for the foreseeable future.

Even if some new upstart creates a compelling feature that threatens to steal users, Facebook can buy it or copy it, as they're doing with location-based services.

I think people are more likely to switch search engines, from Google to DDG/Blekko/whatever, than from Facebook to some other social network.

This is a commonly cited reason, but in reality, how many employees can be given pre-IPO stock before the company ends up with so many owners that they're forced to file for IPO?

Someone correct me if I'm wrong but I thought the number of owners that a privately-held company can have before being forced to go public is only 300.

Employees would typically only be given options, not actual stock. I might be wrong, but I think they can give as many options as they want. And as anyone who has been granted options knows, options usually end up being worthless.

Facebook got an exemption from the SEC from that rule (it's 500 stockholders and $10 million in assets):

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/nov2008/tc200...

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