Facebook's fbFund Takes a Mulligan - Requires All Applications to be Resubmitted
When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced his new application developer grant program, fbFund, at TechCrunch40, everyone clapped (including me). I did have some concerns immediately and one of them was right …
Context & Ripple Effects
fbFund is barely three weeks old. Facebook, Accel Partners and Founders Fund unveiled the grant program for Facebook app startups in mid-September, with Zuckerberg pitching it at TechCrunch40, and the platform's developer gold rush was already drawing dedicated capital — Bay Partners launched a Facebook-apps-only fund back in July amid what CNET called an app feeding frenzy.
Now the program has hit a self-inflicted snag: every application submitted so far must be thrown out and resubmitted from scratch. Webware picked up the story the same day, so the stumble is playing out publicly across the tech press rather than quietly inside the developer community.
First-order effects
- Every developer who applied to fbFund loses that work and must rebuild the application under whatever revised process Facebook specifies, pushing the first grants further out.
- Accel and Founders Fund, whose names lent the program credibility at launch, now have a delayed deal pipeline and a public-process embarrassment attached to their brand.
Second-order effects
- Rival vehicles like Bay Partners' Facebook-apps-only fund can pitch themselves to developers as the steadier bet while fbFund restarts, competing directly for the same early-stage app teams.
- Facebook needs a clean second round to keep the developer ecosystem it opened this year convinced that platform programs are worth the effort of applying.
Third-order effects
- If platform-tied funds are going to be a standard part of the playbook — Facebook with fbFund, Bay Partners with its apps vehicle — then operational competence becomes a differentiator, and a botched intake process is a competitive liability, not just an administrative one.
- The episode tests whether corporate-affiliated grant programs can match traditional VC discipline; repeated fumbles would push serious app developers toward independent funds instead.
The trend: As platforms spawn dedicated application-ecosystem capital, the race is shifting from who announces a fund first to who can actually run one without stumbling.