Facebook goes public Friday, May 18th. Imagine what it might be like inside the company right now. Soon, paper stock option agreements tucked into employee compensation folders could erupt into cascades of real dollars. Maybe employees will soon barge through the doors and board shuttle busses to the BMW dealerships, software bugs be damned.
Or something like that.
What is it really like to work at a company when it goes public? And what happens afterward? How will Mark Zuckerberg hold on to the people who make the company what it is, now that many of them will be independently wealthy perhaps intoxicatingly so? How will he hold them together to make the company what it can be next? How will he align the haves and the future have not so much hires to pull on the same oar?
