Who Founded Facebook?

There’s been a lot of talk recently about an IPO for the latest internet flavour of the month, Facebook.  The official founders of Facebook are Mark Zuckerberg, Chris Hughes and Dustin Moskowitz who will make a fortune if Facebook did float or was acquired.

However, there are a number of individuals, including three of Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard classmates, who also want a piece of any pie created. Mark’s classmates are claiming that Zuckerberg stole the idea, source code and business plan for their social networkng site called HarvardConnection, that they claim later materialised as Facebook.

I always find these legal standoffs about who’s going to get paid when a company floats or is acquired interesting, after I missed out on my big paycheque during the first dot com boom.  My company was about to be acquired for a 9 figure sum, but 24 hours before the deal was going to be announced to the market and I paid off my mortgage and bought a VERY flash car, the acquiring company got cold feet because a lot of the senior directors had taken legal action to ensure that they got to cash in all their shares, which made the acquiring company realise that all the talent was going to walk out the door as soon as the deal closed.

It’s a problem that many companies face when they go through a merger or a acquisition. I think Google are going to face this problem after August this year, when the four year options that many key employees got when Google floated vest. Google have taken steps over the last couple of years to help employees unlock some of their wealth, but I’m convinced there’s still going to be a mass exodus.

It could be a very exciting time for the internet though, as it might allow some of the talent from the ‘Google University’ to pursue their own private projects similar to how the Paypal ‘graduates’ (LinkedIn, YouTube, Slide, SpaceX etc) spent their new-found wealth.

Read Related Posts

1. What Direction Will Facebook Go In Next?
2. Facebook Becomes The Biggest Social Networking Website
3. 2% Of UK Population Registering With Facebook Every Week
4. October 2007 Web 2.0 Update: Microsoft Beats Google In Facebook Deal, and more
5. Facebook Traffic Has Grown By 500% Last Six Months In UK

Subscribe To RSS Feed Updates (What is RSS??)