It's also noteworthy that neither FB or Google were ever what could be termed a startup. FB was a college website first, then expanded gradually, it didn't try

It's also noteworthy that neither FB or Google were ever what could be termed a startup. FB was a college website first, then expanded gradually, it didn't try to instantly be huge, and I'm pretty sure zuckerberg knew that it wouldn't make money for a while. Google was a group of genius guys who had come up with a brand new method of web search (the pagerank algorithm) that had never been seen before, they had a legitimate product already.