If Facebook is trying to distract the public from recent privacy snafus, it's doing a good job. CEO Mark Zuckerberg told the WSJ he expects to attract between $1.2 and $2 billion in revenue this year, and will IPO at some point.
“We’re going to go public eventually, because that’s the contract that we have with our investors and our employees,” Zuckerberg told the WSJ’s Jessica Vascellaro. But he added, “We are definitely in no rush.”
Zuckerberg talking IPO is a sure-fire attention-getter (and effective diversion). The 25-year-old founder has been notoriously blasé about IPO plans until now.
Vascellaro’s sources say that investors buying and seeking to buy Facebook shares expect the company to go public in 2011 with a market capitalization of $35 billion to $40 billion. Lou Kerner, a former Internet analyst at Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs, calls even those estimates conservative. He thinks the company will be worth $59 billion next year, and $100 billion by 2015.
Shares of the company exchanged on the private-company trading platforms like SecondMarket and SharesPost.have reached as high as $30 a share. That’s roughly the price Microsoft was willing to by Yahoo for in 2008, before its stock plummeted.
In the WSJ article, Zuckerberg also revealed that he used to end meetings by thrusting his fist in the air and leading employees in a chant of “domination!” but stopped after employees told him it was weird. Kind of creepy--one wonders why Mark would cough that one up.
It’s almost enough to get peoples’ minds off of those pesky misdirected messages.
image credit: mauricesvay
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SharesPost makes private equity liquid by efficiently matching buyers, sellers of private company stock and giving them the information, tools and process to make transactions easy and safe. At SharesPost you can download research reports and corporate documents for hundred’s of private companies, including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Plus, see prices from previous transactions. When you’re ready, connect directly with buyers and sellers of private company shares without brokers or their commissions. SharesPost provides you with automated contracts and integrated e-signature and escrow services to handle transfer restrictions like company rights of first refusal and help process your transaction.Startup/Business
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SecondMarket is the marketplace for alternative investments. It has become the online destination for accessing market data, building your investor network and transacting in assets such as private company stock, structured products, public equity and bankruptcy claims. SecondMarket centralizes and simplifies secondary market activity by connecting buyers and sellers, and providing world-class market and operations expertise. Since 2004, SecondMarket has brought together more than 75,000 individuals and institutions and completed billions of dollars in alternative investment transactions. SecondMarket is a registered broker-dealer and member of FINRA, MSRB and SIPC. For more information, please visit www.SecondMarket.com.
