14 DAY TRIAL // Following in the footsteps of another great Internet company's founders, and I'm talking about Google's Page and Brin, Mark Zuckerberg opted to share the financial information that he had with some of his employees, in the Palo Alto theater, near the company's headquarters. The only difference between the two sides is that the Google founders used to coordinate their talking with their execs, while Mark was voluble by default.
Kara Swisher of kara.allthingsd.com wrote about the chatty afternoon while the information was provided to her firsthand. The surprise was great, even to her, but for the employees there it was more than that: "I can't believe he was doing it. It was really unbelievable," she quotes one of her sources present at the meeting.
Zuckerberg acknowledged that the revenue for Facebook for 2007 was of about $150 million, but that's really not something new, as most of the analysts foresaw that figure. However, the 23-year-old said that the predictions for 2008 were more than double, 300 to 350 million dollars, while investing something like $200 million on capital expenditures, namely servers. Kara also reported him saying that the employee levels would rise to more than 1,000, from 450 at the moment.
The numbers above prove to be very interesting, because this means that the company will actually be presenting a negative cash flow, due to the EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) being of $50 million for 2008. Nevertheless, the Microsoft investment made in autumn last year would be enough to keep it afloat. Not that it mattered to Zuckerberg, like he said.
Plus, having a company valued widely at 15 billion dollars, that would never be a problem, not in the serious way. There comes a time when people seem to be getting tired of the strongpoint of the social network, applications. Interesting indeed.