Facebook To IPO In 2008 (It’ll Have To)

I’m still on vacation, but catching up on my reading, I see that Facebook is "years away" from going public, said founder Mark Zuckerberg last week. I also see Facebook will have more than 700 employees next year, in 2008. So, like Google and Microsoft, it’ll be forced to IPO against its will sometime next […]

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I’m still on vacation, but catching up on my reading, I see that Facebook is "years away" from going public,
said
founder Mark Zuckerberg last week. I also see Facebook
will have
more than 700 employees next year, in 2008. So, like Google and Microsoft, it’ll be forced
to IPO against its will sometime next year, if those employees all have options
(as they likely will).

POSTSCRIPT: I stand corrected: A Letter to Facebook’s Founder covers how the law was recently changed. Below, the rest of my original article.

To quote what
Barron’s Online wrote about Google back when it played the "we won’t IPO
until ready" game:

Google appears to have triggered a fairly obscure provision of the 1934
Securities and Exchange Act that lays out circumstances under which companies
not listed on a securities exchange must report financial results in public
filings to the SEC.

CEO Eric Schmidt won’t publicly discuss the possibility of an initial
public offering, but SEC regulations make it likely that the Internet
search-engine outfit will have an IPO within 6 months.

To trigger the provision, a company must have at least $10 million in
assets — as Google surely does — and at least 500 shareholders of record of
any class of equity securities, a definition that includes employee stock
options.

Google almost certainly has more than 500 employees with stock options. For
one thing, its website says that the company has more than 1,000 employees.
And most probably get stock options: Its online job listings site ranks
"pre-IPO stock options" as one of the "top 10 reasons to work at Google."

To follow the rules, Google would have to start making quarterly financial
filings 120 days after the end of the fiscal year in which it crossed the
500-employee level. Ergo, if you assume that the company has a December
year-end, the first Google 10-Q should show up at the SEC by the end of April.

As Google found out, the rules did indeed cause its IPO decision to be
"accelerated," as it said in

its IPO filing
:

A number of factors weighed on the other side of the debate. Our growth has
reduced some of the advantages of private ownership. By law, certain private
companies must report as if they were public companies. The deadline imposed
by this requirement accelerated our decision. As a smaller private company,
Google kept business information closely held, and we believe this helped us
against competitors. But, as we grow larger, information becomes more widely
known. As a public company, we will of course provide you with all information
required by law, and we will also do our best to explain our actions. But we
will not unnecessarily disclose all of our strengths, strategies, and
intentions. We have transferred significant ownership of Google to employees
in return for their efforts in building the business. And, we benefited
greatly by selling $26 million of stock to our early investors before we were
profitable. Thus, employee and investor liquidity were significant factors.

As the filing (and the Barron’s article) notes, Google could have stayed
private by releasing financial information as it if was public. But doing that
meant it didn’t get any of the advantages of being public. I’d expect Facebook
will reach a similar decision. FYI, it is at 300 employees right now, so it does still have time before hitting that magic 500 mark.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Danny Sullivan
Contributor
Danny Sullivan was a journalist and analyst who covered the digital and search marketing space from 1996 through 2017. He was also a cofounder of Third Door Media, which publishes Search Engine Land and MarTech, and produces the SMX: Search Marketing Expo and MarTech events. He retired from journalism and Third Door Media in June 2017. You can learn more about him on his personal site & blog He can also be found on Facebook and Twitter.

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