Tencent, Chinese Facebook, is already a public company. Take a look at their numbers here: http://www.tencent.com/en-us/ir/reports.shtml

$30,957,952 Sheryl Sandberg, COO 0.089% Sheryl Sandberg

The second most important person at Facebook takes most of their compensation in cash - with her stock in the company being worth roughly 3 yrs salary.

She's older than Zuck, no reason to think she'll ever be CEO. I have to believe she has career aspirations beyond Facebook if she's willing to work there for less than defectors Moskovitz and Parker are making on the IPO, among others.

I suppose that perhaps there's an appearance of questionability when one gets cash out, but even if they don't "cash out" in any other sense, I'd think that at least that first bit of big money would be hard to turn away from.

Clearly the move by Groupon was a mistake. Ok, you want to build a big company and have a vision, etc, etc... Great. Who cares? That kind of money doesn't come along very often — take it and move on to your NEXT great idea. You'll have another one. Millions in the bank and vacations on yachts and private islands do wonders for the imagination.

Of course, I thought Zuck was crazy for turning down $1 billion from Yahoo 5 years ago. He turned out to be right on that one.

Consider Google, valued at $200B has a revenue of $10.6 billion/quarter, and $2890M in profits.

Also, GOOG has been consistently growing:

http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:GOOG&fstype=ii

While Facebook is failing to.

So what is the realistic value of FB? Based on these numbers, $15 billion at best.

If you want a return now, you could just buy shares in a utility company for a fraction of the price, since they already make multi-billion pound/dollar profits and distribute large chunks to shareholders.

Even easier task for them would be creating an ad content network similiar to AdSense since they can provide way more information about a visitor than Google's tracking.

This is precisely why Larry Page tries to shove Google plus into everyones throat.

What do you generally search for, and how can Facebook serve you relevant hits?

Actually, you can get web search results on Facebook through Bing. It is one of the side tabs on the search page. But I can't imagine many people doing that.

All of the 3 points are true. Facebook search form (that used to find friends) is used more often than Google's search. If people at Facebook can think of a good way to force people to search the Internet through the Facebook, they can get quite substantiable share of the search market. Many people have set the Facebook as their homepage.

Facebook enables better targetting. You can't for example target specific age groups with AdWords

Google plus was a response to Facebook, contrary to what Google's PR team tries to estabilish.

Remember that Microsoft made it very convenient to use MSN Search for many years by setting it to the default home page and having it in their search box of IE. It didn't work, people typed google.com and did their searches there.

And you're wrong about advertising. Facebook's is valuable but it will never be as valuable as that of people who are searching for something with the intent of buying that thing.

After reading your assertion, I Googled for the volume of Google search queries, and ran into this article -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3928298 (that I just submitted) -- which contradicts your claim, stating that Facebook search volume lags behind the other five big search engines.

On what grounds do you assert that it's true?

It wasn't a factor, but I'd also question whether or not Facebook enables better targeting. I'll concede that they have strong targeting, but I don't know that anybody can say for certain that it's 'better' than Google's, especially as Google can target ads based on what you're looking for at that particular moment.

Facebook might know that I like comic books, or Elmore Leonard novels, or what have you, but Google knows that "I want more information about vacations to Fiji". Which is the more powerful target? The latter, I would guess, especially as I already have suppliers for my other interests.

[citation required]

(presuming this is an English question, not a philosophical one).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norm_(social)

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21458486/ns/business-us_business...

If, as some claimed regularly since a few years (including Fred Wilson, implicitly[1]), we are in a tech/financial bubble, what is the probability that the Facebook IPO will be the sting popping the bubble? If so, what are the likely results?

[1] "If you are playing a game of musical chairs", http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/04/what-if-web-and-mobile-apps-...

I personally feel Facebook is over-valued but they have revenue and profit. I think it's a bad early investment and will settle way down south of the debut, but they will be around a very long time. They aren't Pets.com.

I had always thought Adam D'Angelo was a co-founder of Facebook, so I was surprised to not see his name listed in the ownership section.

But Wikipedia lists Dustin Moskovitz, Eduardo Saverin, and Chris Hughes as co-founders in addition to Mark.

Answered by Adam:

"I was in college as an undergrad at California Institute of Technology full time until I graduated in 2006. Facebook launched in spring 2004. In summer 2004 I lived with the Facebook founders in Palo Alto and helped out a little, though I was mainly working on Wirehog, which was a social filesharing network. In summer 2005 I was officially a full time employee at Facebook, and then I took off the next semester from college to keep working at Facebook through the end of 2005. Then I went back to college for the second half of the 2005-2006 academic year, graduated, and went back to Facebook full time after that."

Maybe that's why you thought that.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_Exeter

* each stockholder known by us to be the beneficial owner of more than 5% of our outstanding shares of Class A common stock or Class B common stock;

* each of our directors;

* each of our named executive officers;

* all of our directors and executive officers as a group; and

* all selling stockholders.

It's safe to say Eduardo doesn't fit into buckets 2-4, so as long as he doesn't own at least 5% or isn't selling stock as part of the IPO, he wouldn't need to be disclosed.

:)

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1111.4503v1.pdf

There's 125 billion friendships and 900 million monthly active.

125 billion / 900 million = 139 friendship pairs / user

A pair = 2 friends so you double it to get 278 friends/users.

This is of course an overestimate as people are friends with people who use fb < once a month. Not sure what total user count is though.

Penetration in Turkey: 85%

If market research is not the first thing that comes to your mind, then you should probably go see a shrink.

Also worth mentioning that James Breyer does not own 7.632% of Facebook. Accel Partners owns most of that stake, and Breyer has his own personal, smaller stake in Facebook.

I've updated the post to specify that revenue was for last quarter.

The S-1 describes James Breyer's shares as a combination of his and Accel's, with the following footnote:

(12) Consists of (i) 11,703,132 shares of Class B common stock held of record by James W. Breyer, Trustee of James W. Breyer 2005 Trust dated March 25, 2005 (Breyer 2005 Trust); (ii) 149,527,730 shares of Class B common stock held of record by Accel IX L.P. (Accel IX); (iii) 15,931,653 shares of Class B common stock held of record by Accel IX Strategic Partners L.P. (Accel SP); (iv) 13,939,214 shares of Class B common stock held of record Accel Investors 2005 L.L.C. (Accel 2005); (v) 9,949,820 shares of Class B common stock held of record by Accel Growth Fund L.P. (Accel Growth); (vi) 194,230 shares of Class B common stock held of record by Accel Growth Fund Strategic Partners L.P. (Accel Growth SP); and (vii) 132,570 shares of Class B common stock held of record by Accel Growth Fund Investors 2009 L.L.C. (Accel Growth 2009).

Edit: updated the total.

And also, page 56 of the pdf lists $1,058M as total revenue for 1Q 2012.

#1 how is it possible that there is 0% users in China.. IF they truly believe NOONE in China has facebook account, then any other of those numbers could be made out of the blue as well.

#2 Why is it soo important to attach Zynga everywhere they disclose info? is it some sort of Zynga-FB agreement or what?

#3 David Fischer is missing comma after "VP"

#4 Peter Thiel, James Breyer, Reed Hastings, Erskine Bowles, Donald Graham -- what are they "Directors" of?

#5 Frequency of words appearing in S-1: second place: mobile. This is a HUGE indicator to anyone thinking about startup... things ARE and will continue to happen over the mobile device more and more. This sound trivia, but think about another indicator: your startup idea versus mobile.

So they definitely know people are using it there.

There are also alternative Chinese social networks where their friends are, and without the added chore of finding a VPN service which they can pay without a non-Chinese PayPal account or credit card.