Yes, I don't know about the rest of you but I'd rather be working on what will be the hottest thing around in a year's time. Catch the wave _before_ it breaks.

Google's big wave came and facebook's hasn't. What's your point?

If an entrepreneur goes to work for an established company, he ceases to be an entrepreneur.

yeah I read that comment as the opposite.

The time to join FB was back when it was a harvard thing. If you join them now, you're jumping someone else's train, and you aren't shaping the company, you're just a plug compatible engineer.

I'll bet the 300th employee at Microsoft and Google disagree.

This is like giving a reason for why stock X is overvalued. Time to buy it was last year. It can't possibly go any higher.

There's nothing wrong with being a top-flight employee and helping build something big, but by the time a company has reached a size where two pizzas aren't enough to make everybody full the company has started to settle, the culture is beginning to congeal and the BIG decisions have been made.

If you want to build something insanely great that works the way you think it should you have to pioneer and risk the arrows.

You are aware of the origin of the phrase "insanely great", right?

Something to do with the original macintosh, iirc.

Entrepreneurs want to make their place hot, not go to someone else's. I also doubt Facebook is recruiting top hackers: they don't have hard technology there. They are probably getting a lot of idea guys/socially savvy people.

Yes, I bet that at facebook placement they have air conditioners.