Facebook After Ipo

Facebook after IPO

Facebook was founded in February 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow Harvard University students Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. "Facebook was not originally created to be a company," CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in his SEC Registration letter a little more than three months before Facebook went public on May 18, 2012. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected."

Facebook is a company now, a huge corporation in fact, with a market cap of more than $60 billion, a staff of nearly 5,000 employees and an active user base of more than 1.1 billion. Perhaps most importantly, it must now answer to shareholders rather than just users. That simple fact has had a noticeable impact on Facebook, both in terms of how employees operate and the new features that have been released.

Revenue-orientation

Until the Facebook filed to go public, it was never concerned about making money. In the same SEC letter, Zuckerberg attempted to position himself as being more interested in making money than some might have assumed before.

After eight years of focusing on user growth, Facebook has pushed revenue up its priority list and restructured its business so that many of its best minds are now thinking about driving sales.

Before filing for its IPO, Facebook made 85% of its revenue from desktop ads in the right-hand column of its website, with the rest coming from a payments business fueled by virtual-goods sales from Zinga Inc. games. Today, the company is experimenting with more than 10 other ways to make money, including a fledgling e-commerce store and fees that it charges users to send chat messages to strangers.

In one sign of how a more revenue-centric culture was being inculcated, Facebook in March organized a field trip to Cincinnati for a few dozen employees including product engineers to one of its biggest advertisers, Procter & Gamble Co., so...