Zynga, the fast-growing maker of wildly-popular online video games such as FarmVille and CityVille, filed for an initial public offering this morning, seeking $1 billion. This is in addition to the more than $500 million in venture-capital funding the company has raised since it launched in 2007.
Back in early 2010 when Zynga CEO Mark Pincus delivered a keynote presentation at a Vator.tv event, he said the company had grown with lightning-fast speed in 2009 — jumping from 181 employees and about 34 million monthly unique visitors in the first quarter to 564 employees and 235 million unique visitors by the end of the year. For anyone who needs the translation: That’s a crazy amount of growth to manage in a short amount of time.