The WSJ’s Jessica Vascellaro has a long profile on Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, and the forthcoming IPO.
Here are the highlights:
- Mark confirms that Facebook is going public, but not for a while
- Accel partner Jim Bryer says that the IPO won’t be in 2010 (read: 2011)
- Facebook expects to do between $1.2 billion and $2 billion of revenue this year
- Employees are agitating for an IPO to cash in, but the private-market sale plan mollified them somewhat
- Facebook got around the rule the forced Google to disclose its financials (having more than 500 shareholders) by switching to restricted stock units instead of options. Now employees won’t become shareholders until the company goes public.
- Mark is worried (justifiably) that going public will reduce the company’s flexibility
- Mark used to end meetings by thrusting his fist in the air and leading employees through a chant of “domination!” Someone hurried to tell the WSJ that this was a joke. Mark stopped doing it after he was advised that it was ridiculous and that some people might not think it was a joke. We doubt it was a joke (“jokes” like this get old quickly).
- Mark started wearing a tie instead of a t-shirt recently because “This is a serious year.”
- Mark is a micro-manager who has recently begun to step back and focus on broader strategic issues.
- Yale professor Jeff Sonnenfeld says Facebook is at the point where some companies blow up because the founders are “too sure of themselves.” Facebook, Prof. Sonnenfeld says, “is at a crossroads where we have to see if Mark can build a team strong enough to challenge him.”
- Mark used to brag about his ability to delay gratification
- Mark’s Mom calls him “Princely”
Read it the whole profile here >
Since this is a tech blog, there’s a good chance most readers know that their Domain Name System is what compares the typed URL of a website against the IP number of a given website. http://crenk.com, for example translates to 954.236.55.186 on your DNS, which then points your browser to the right place. This checking process has to happen before the page you’ve requested starts downloading, a process that generally takes a fraction of a second.
Google has decided that this fraction of a second is too long for it’s valuable customers to wait, and is now providing its own publicly available DNS. You can change your network settings to point at their service from the one that your ISP uses. Should you bother? Only if your network is making thousands of lookups a minute. For domestic use the 0.01 of a second that switching DNS could save you is largely irrelevant, but if your network is dealing with hundreds of thousands of lookups, as in a big office building or other massive corporate environment, then you could significantly reduce the wait time for your network, which might filter down enough to be appreciable by individual users on your system.
Of course, google will then know every single page that every single user on your system uses, an information gathering facility which is more likely to be their motivation for providing the service than any altruistic time-saving opportunity for users.
Rubicon Project is now in public beta and has even named their product, Automatic. Automatic is their ad network optimiser and for this service they will be charging 10% of your ad revenue, but say they can increase your CPM and fill rates. We will see if this works! For a while now I have been in their private beta, and im very curious to see if their service actually works and by how much.
