Calling All Entrepreneurs - Come Hack with Us!

This morning, the White House introduced the Startup America Partnership to bring people across public and private industries together to foster entrepreneurship. As a company with strong entrepreneurial roots, we’re pleased to be involved with this project to provide the resources and technologies needed for entrepreneurs to create the next great companies.

As part of our commitment, we plan to host 12 Startup Days in 2011 to provide early-stage companies with engineering and design support on the Facebook Platform. Startup Days are monthly events for entrepreneurs to work and hack with us to build new apps and websites that incorporate the latest social technologies.

In addition, we plan to stay active within open source communities and are proud of what we've contributed in the past. Open source technologies continue to be important to startups that are scaling and growing quickly. They allow entrepreneurs to spend more time working on their products.

Over the past few years we've been contributing to a wide range of existing projects, from PHP to memcached to Varnish and many others. We also open source our own projects, ranging from major pieces of infrastructure (most recently HipHop for PHP) to small tools that make developing all sorts of software faster and easier (such as XHP and Three20).

These initiatives build on past programs such as the 170 Developer Garages hosted around the world, fbFund (a $10 million fund created in partnership with Founder’s Fund and Accel Partners to invest in talented entrepreneurs and developers), and recently announced initiatives such as Kleiner Perkin’s sFund and our involvement with organizations like Y Combinator.

Companies like Zynga, Playfish and Playdom in three years have shown what’s possible in social gaming on Facebook Platform. They’ve created a new industry through developing fun and meaningful experiences for the 200 million people who actively play their games with friends on Facebook. We’re starting to see the same thing happen in areas like commerce, news, music, and entertainment, and encourage startups to pursue building products that give people new ways to connect with their friends in these industries.

We’ve bet big on startups, especially those who build social into their products from the ground up. We look forward to seeing many of you join us and the other companies working with the Startup America Partnership. Stay tuned for details on the next Startup Day.