★ Valley Career = 6 Months

from TechCrunch:

Former Foursquare Head of Operations and current Facebooker Nathan Folkman will be joining photo-sharing startup Path as an engineer, Path CEO Dave Morin tells me.

Prior to Facebook and Foursquare, Folkman was an engineer at bit.ly, AOL and Betaworks. He also holds the honor of being the only employee to have ever left Foursquare (for Facebook last November), Foursquare has verified with me.

This has been bothering me a lot lately. The fact that all of my colleagues have been at this company for 5+ years and have accomplished great things with no intention of leaving anytime soon and someone like this gets a TechCrunch post for the following career:

LinkedIN & Crunchbase Data:

• Time Inc – 01-04/05-05
• AOL – 05-05/01-07
• Harvard – 01-07/06-07
• AOL – 2007/9-2007
• Betaworks / Bit.ly – 9-07/11-09
• Foursquare – 09-09/11-10
• Facebook – 11-10/05/11
• Path – 05/11 – (maybe 2-6 months if he’s feeling like it)

Talk about an overuse of “meh, I just didn’t fit in” and maybe I’m just jealous here, but he then gets a TechCrunch post about him? Sigh. I love my job and am very happy. This guy needs to find a happy place. Maybe this works fro him but does this work for his employers?

We should start honoring the guys who stick their neck out at IBM / Microsoft for 20 years each and every day and invent cool shit. Not write posts asking them to leave. When I’m at a company for 1 year, friends start saying, “you’ve been there too long”. NO WAY. It’s depressing that staying somewhere and getting shit done is considered boring and settling.

I guess that’s why no one in the valley dates anyone longer than 6 weeks. “settling down is overrated”