Facebook Launches 'Startup Days': Monthly Hacker Events For Platform Developers

Leena Rao

Leena Rao is currently a Senior Editor for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... → Learn More

Monday, January 31st, 2011

As part of the launch of Startup America, a national campaign to “celebrate, inspire, and accelerate high-growth entrepreneurship in the U.S.”; Facebook has announced a new initiative called ‘Startup Days.’

Facebook will hold 12 monthly Startup Days in 2011 to “provide early-stage companies with engineering and design support on the Facebook Platform.” These meetings, which will be held around the country, will provide entrepreneurs with resources to build social applications. Facebook has also announced it will continue its efforts to stay active in open source communities.

Startup Days builds on Facebook’s previous initiatives to help connect entrepreneurs with the Facebook platform including 170 Developer Garages hosted globally and the social network’s joint seed fund and incubator fbFund. And Facebook has also launched customized programs for Y Combinator companies as well as for Kleiner Perkins’ sFund.

For Facebook, the benefit of holding these hacker sessions are two-fold. Initiatives like ‘Startup Days’ help contribute the greater good of the entrepreneur community by giving founders and developers access to inside resources and APIs. And these events also help continue to grow the ecosystem around the Facebook platform (though the social network doesn’t seem to need to much help in that department).

Company: Facebook
Website: facebook.com
Launch Date: February 1, 2004
IPO: NASDAQ:FB

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...

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