Says one former Facebook employee in reference to the first dot-com crash: "If you've seen the world blow up once, you just don't know what's
going to happen a year from now." According to company policy, current Facebook employees can't sell stock. "It seemed very risky to stay in a situation where all of your liquidity was tied up in what
I consider a high-risk company," the unnamed employee told The Times.
More broadly, employees and investors at dozens of start-ups have sold hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of shares, according to The Times, which, in turn, is fueling what it call a "booming market in private transactions."