The latest from TechCrunch
- $1 Billion Isn't Cool. You Know What's Cool? $50 Billion. Goldman And Facebook Agree.
- FriendFeed Traffic Is Actually Up Since The Facebook Deal; Thanks Largely To Turkey
| $1 Billion Isn't Cool. You Know What's Cool? $50 Billion. Goldman And Facebook Agree. | Top |
| While everyone has been busy wondering when Facebook was going to IPO, most were looking past the first question: how is Facebook going to IPO? But not TechCrunch alum Evelyn Rusli and Andrew Ross Sorkin. Tonight the pair are reporting that Goldman Sachs has just led a major new investment in the social network. An investment that values it at a nice round $50 billion. And the likely reason is so Goldman can take Facebook public. More specifically, Goldman has invested $450 million in Facebook while Russian firm (and current large stakeholder) Digital Sky Technologies threw in another $50 million for a total of $500 million in this round. But the round is more complicated than that as apparently Goldman will be able to unload some of its stake to DST, according to the report. So is the IPO a done deal? Not exactly. While Facebook itself hasn’t given a timetable for the milestone, many were expecting it to happen in 2011. But more recent indications suggest it will more likely occur in 2012. Facebook, obviously, wants it to happen as late as possible so they don’t have shareholder to answer to. But that’s the thing; with all the investment they’ve taken, and the red-hot activity on the secondary markets, they already do have a lot of shareholders — they just don’t technically have to answer to them. Yet. The SEC is said to be looking into whether or not that Facebook is improperly skirting around the rules for going public. Either way, Goldman looks to make a a good chunk of change before the IPO as well. From the report: In a rare move, Goldman is planning to create a "special purpose vehicle" to allow its high-net worth clients to invest in Facebook, these people said. While the S.E.C. requires companies with more than 499 investors to disclose their financial results to the public, Goldman's proposed special purpose vehicle may be able get around such a rule because it would be managed by Goldman and considered just one investor, even though it could conceivably be pooling investments from thousands of clients. If that doesn’t piss the SEC off too much, that is huge for the firm. They’ll get fees for all of that. But not drawing the further SEC attention will be hard given that Goldman is said to be trying to raise up to $1.5 billion for Facebook from investors at that $50 billion valuation. Remember that it was barely a month ago when we reported on Accel Partners selling off a big portion of their Facebook stock at a $35 billion valuation. Of course, they made something like a 247x return on that sale, so it’s hard to argue with it. A few weeks later, we noted that Facebook had hit the $50 billion mark in valuation on the secondary markets. With this investment, that valuation has just been validated. As if The Social Network needed any more buzz leading up to its DVD release next week… Oh and here’s a little something Facebook could use some of the money on. [image: 20th Century Fox] CrunchBase Information Facebook Goldman Sachs Digital Sky Technologies Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| FriendFeed Traffic Is Actually Up Since The Facebook Deal; Thanks Largely To Turkey | Top |
| FriendFeed . You remember it, right? It was that awesome service that Facebook acquired in August 2009. It was a smart deal all around. Facebook got an awesome team of developers and product people, while FriendFeed got to translate some of what they were doing to a service with a reach as large as any on the web. Unfortunately, it was a somewhat raw deal for many of the people who actually used FriendFeed. While the team and Facebook said it would be staying up, many users left and for most it became a ghost town . Or did it? There’s a hot thread on Quora right now talking about the demise of FriendFeed called: Does anyone still use Friendfeed? Why? So far, there are 29 answers, many from people in the tech community who still do use it to surface information (this is what I loved it for as well). But the best answer comes from Bret Taylor , one of the service’s co-founders, who is now the CTO for Facebook. “ US usage has decreased significantly except for a small group of devoted users (many of whom are on this thread), but the site grown quite a bit in Turkey, Italy, and Japan. Turkey is now the largest user base by a decent margin, essentially compensating for the decreased US usage. The site actually has moderately higher traffic than before to the acquisition, but it is all international usage, ” Taylor writes. A quick glance at Google Trends for Websites seems to back up this claim. While this data is never perfect, it does usually give a good overview — and sure enough, it shows that Japan and Turkey are now ahead of the U.S. in regional popularity (though it has Japan first on the list). It also shows traffic to be about the same (or slightly above) what it was around the time of the acquisition (there was a spike just prior to the event, which we knew about ). Also, our own Mike Butcher uncovered the huge Turkish usage of FriendFeed about a year ago for TechCrunch Europe. As he wrote at the time, “ As well as it's fascination with Facebook, Turkish people have latched onto Microblogging in droves. But it's not Twitter they turned to first. It turns out FriendFeed is the platform of choice .” All of this is particularly interesting since aside from keeping the servers up, the old team and Facebook have done basically no work on the service — it exists in a state of “ chrysalis ,” as fellow co-founder Paul Buchheit put it. But many of the features of FriendFeed, such as real-time updating, are still ahead of many other social services that attempt to do the same thing. That’s true even though Facebook has open sourced much of the technology behind it. CrunchBase Information FriendFeed Information provided by CrunchBase | |
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