Today’s Facebook IPO is adding fuel to the burning desires of startups and investors the world over with valuations both corporate and personal of truly incredible amounts of money. At the start of the day the company was being valuated at $104 billion with Mark Zuckerberg’s personal stake somewhere in the exceedingly comfortable range of $20 billion. If Facebook follows in the footsteps of other major tech IPOs, this new influx of cash will give it the freedom to invest in new areas and new products in much the same way that Google’s IPO allowed them to acquire YouTube and continue development of Android. But what will $20 billion do to the mindset of founder Mark Zuckerberg? What about the other mere millionaires who are the key engineers in Facebook?
One of the primary benefits of personal wealth (or so I’m told) is the freedom to pursue what interests you as opposed to what a company or customer is willing to pay you to do. This could mean bad things for Facebook if their top engineers decide to pursue their dreams elsewhere.
More recently, though, some of that enthusiasm appears to have subsided. Key engineers have left, among them co-founder Moskovitz, Zuckerberg’s Harvard University roommate (who decided to create his own software startup), and Adam D’Angelo, a computer science wunderkind who bailed out to start Quora (an online question-and-answer service). Zuckerberg is determined not to get absorbed with projects like self-driving cars, as Google has, but as a result some of Facebook’s finest engineers got bored. — Bloomberg Business Week
So as Mr. Zuckerberg and his Facebook colleagues contemplate their new wealth, and the rest of us look on in a mix of admiration and jealousy, I can’t help but to contemplate a world where I could get up every morning and only do the work that I want to do. I count myself as fortunate in knowing that even if I had $20 billion in the bank I’d still want to write software. But what software? That is the question.
If you had that level of freedom what would you do? Would you shuck it all for a life of comfort on a beach or build the worlds next Internet empire?