[johnglasgow]

An IPO for Facebook would mean losing all of their top engineers who are hanging around until they can cash out. Everyone will leave for the next hot startup and to work on their own projects. Zuck is smart for dragging the process out.

[mwerty]

AFAIK, everyone is free to quit and sell their shares on sharespost.com.

[fleitz]

Who? Do you know this or is it simply conjecture. Do you know for sure that Joe Hewitt is there just for the IPO? Also, if the contracts were created correctly there should be an earnout to prevent just such a thing if it was a serious risk. Many companies have been through an IPO with out losing their top talent, perhaps you should look at GOOG and see how detrimental the IPO was to that stock.