Facebook's IPO filing, released this week, is fascinating for many reasons: We've already covered several angles.

Perhaps the most exciting, though, is the wealth of data about the company that is finally public - from its user statistics to its growth around the world to its finances. I've highlighted and visualized some of the most interesting data in this series of charts.

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One of the most powerful things about Facebook is how many of its users log on every day.

Facebook's IPO filing includes quarterly stats of its Monthly Active Users and Daily Active Users, both worldwide and broken down by region. (Also, how about some appreciation for Facebook to sticking with "active" users in its stats, not just total, all-time sign-ups?)

Worldwide, you can see that 57% of the people who use Facebook within a given month also use Facebook on an average day, up from 47% in early 2009.

This varies, of course, by region, which gives an idea of how "sticky" Facebook is in different parts of the world. In the U.S. and Canada, it's 70%. In Asia, where Facebook isn't as established - but is growing fast - it's only about 50%.

Facebook is increasingly a global story. Its user base is now almost equally concentrated in the four regions it breaks out. That's a pretty big change from 2009, when it was primarily focused in the U.S. and Canada.

In 2011, about 30% of Facebook's new users came from Asia, and about 40% in the "rest of world" category. Only about 10% of its new users came from the U.S. and Canada.

Facebook's IPO filing also brings us new access to its finances. Here, we can see one reason why Facebook's revenue growth (88% in 2011) is outpacing its user growth (39% in 2011) - because Facebook is bringing in more revenue per user than it did in the past.

How did that happen? Significant growth in both Facebook's ad business (85% of its revenue) and its payments business (part of the 15% of "other" revenue).

Facebook's future success, of course, relies on both its ability to attract new users and its ability to generate more revenue per user.

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Picture this: You're at a party, and your good friend introduces you to one of their friends. You two hit it off, and boom - a new friend! You've just become friends with a friend of a friend. In real life, this is a common occurrence. On Facebook, a friend of a friend isn't necessarily an actual friend.

A new study from Pew Internet discovered this and an array of other interesting facts about peoples' Facebook friendships. The researchers found that most peoples' friend lists were not very interconnected. In a friend list with a density of 1, everyone knows everyone. On Facebook the density is quite low at .12 with a maximum density of .42, which means that your chances of knowing a friend of a friend on Facebook fall between 12% and 42%. In its its S-1 filing on Wednesday, Facebook toted 100 billion friendships. What it probably meant to say was 100 billion connections, many of which are dormant.

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To understand the friend ties idea, here's an example. Say you have 10 friends; this means that the number of possible friendship ties among everyone in network is 45. The average Facebook user has 245 friends, which means there are 29,890 possible friendship ties in the network. With an average density of .12 and a total number of 245 friends, that means there are only 12% of 29,890 friendship linkages between "friends." A 1992 study by social network scholars found that offline social ties had a density of .36, or three times the density size of Facebook's.

"We suspect that Facebook networks are of lower density because of their ability to allow ties that might otherwise have gone dormant to remain persistent over time," the study says. Those ties that should have gone dormant are the people who you've Facebook friended from grade school, middle school, high school and other pubescent times in life. These are the people whose friend requests you naïvely and curiously accepted. This is where the Facebook "drama" potentially begins. "Facebook is a giant emotional locker," writes Andy Kessler on the Wall Street Journal.

"We expect that new Facebook users typically start with a core group of close, interconnected friends," the study says."But over time their friend list becomes larger and less intertwined, particularly as they discover (and are discovered by) more distant friends from different parts and different times in their lives."

The study also reports a curious finding: People are more likely to be friends with people who have more friends than they do. They are less likely to become friends with people who have less friends than them. Hence, the popular kid syndrome: Everyone wants to be friends with the popular kid, and few willingly try to buddy up with the loner who sits alone at lunch.

Tagging friends in Facebook photos is the only activity that the study says is associated with having more close ties. These people tend to be friends who the user interacts with both online and offline. This does not account for those awkward photo taggings that happen on the fly, without a user's permission. Lifehacker's Jason Chen argues that no, you shouldn't tag someone in a photo without their permission. For if someone is truly your friend on- and offline, they'll show some rexpect by first asking if you'd like to be tagged in the photo they're about to upload. When it comes to more innocuous taggings, such as a status update or photo, permission isn't completely necessary, but it's still quite welcome.

The study reinforces findings from past research, which suggest that heavy Facebook users are more trusting than others.

Images via Nikki Lynette's Facebook page and Shutterstock.

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Facebook is worth $75-$100 billion. If we broke that down by user, it would mean that each individual is worth $118.34. Or, if we're looking at it in terms of revenue from 2011 - $3.71 billion - each user is worth $4.39 in revenue per user per year. Yet Zuckerberg owns 28.4% of Facebook, and holds 56.9% of the voting power.

The world over is reacting to the fact that Facebook has now put a dollar value on 845 million users' personal data. Zuckerberg had something to say about it, too. About three hours after the IPO dropped, he posted a revealing photo to his Facebook page.

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The status update has more than 70,000 "likes" and 6127 shares, but only 128 comments. Most of them are congratulatory: "Like!" says Larry Chiang, emphatically. "Keep the vision and stay thirsty my friend! Congrats!" writes Ken Walden. Zuck is absent from the entire comment thread.

There's a common, understood practice in the Facebook culture. If a user gets feedback on a status update, they take a few minutes to go through and "like" some of the comments that their friends left. It shows recognition and approval of the comment, producing a feeling of momentary happiness in the user. It's even better than a smiley-face approval.

Zuck didn't "like" any of the comments that anyone posted. Notably, KuoChuan Chang, a user in Taipei, Taiwan, went through and liked quite a few of the comments that other Facebookers left Mark. Chang even shared the "Stay Focused & Keep Shipping" photo to his own page. For added emphasis, he decided to "like" it, too.

"Personal relationships are the fundamental unit of our society," Zuckerberg writes in his IPO letter. "Relationships are how we discover new ideas, understand our world and ultimately derive long-term happiness."

Zuckerberg is the man (er, boy) behind the technological side of Facebook. But when it comes to making "friends," he does not participate in the culture of Facebook that he helped create.

Beast photo via Zuckerberg's Facebook profile.

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You hear that? Nothing, right? That is beautiful, delightful silence. And it will continue for the next three to five months.

That is because the residents of a certain complex in Menlo Park, California have been forced to stop running their mouths following Facebook's S-1 filing for an initial public offering yesterday. The Securities and Exchange Commission requires a "quiet period" for any company preparing to go public. It is a bit of karmic justice for the ruckus caused when a company files its S-1. Facebook will be allowed to communicate some information, but nothing that could possibly influence investors. For a company that values the free flow of information, you might think that would be a problem. For Facebook? Probably not.

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What does the "quiet period" actually entail? Companies are allowed to make forward-looking statements, factual progress reports on products and updates to critical infrastructure. For example, if Facebook is down for millions of users, the company can tell people why and how they are fixing it. Communications to developers, such as is made through its developer blog, are permitted.

"Non-reporting issuers are, at any time, permitted to continue to publish factual business information that is regularly released and intended for use by persons other than in their capacity as investors or potential investors," the SEC explainer page on the quiet period states.

In plainer English, that means that investors do not get any information regarding the financial performance and critical infrastructure of a company. Communications with non-investor entities is permitted.

What does that mean for Facebook? Business as usual, more or less. Mark Zuckerberg's company has never been one to flaunt its financial progress. Facebook put off its IPO for as long as possible in "the hacker way." It wants to create products to make the platform better for more people. Being beholden to investors has never been comfortable for Zuckerberg. In an interview with 60 Minutes in 2008, Zuckerberg laid out his notion of what it means to go public.

"Really what we are focused on is not that exit strategy, it is on how do we build just the best thing possible," Zuckerberg said. "As a private company we have that advantage of not having to report to the outside world all of our financials. This is something that I think burdens a lot of public companies, having to go through and publicly state exactly where they are spending their money and where they are making money forces them to focus on things that will make the company look good, as opposed to the things that are actually important to building, long term, a great product and a great company."

Facebook finally released those financial numbers yesterday though likely not because the company wanted to but rather because the SEC would eventually force it to do so. When that happens, a company can stay private with its financials exposed or move forwards with an IPO to build capital that will help it with liquid assets that can help it grow.

Yet, Zuckerberg's reluctance to go public should make Facebook's quiet period, well, quiet.

Two large technology companies laid the groundwork in 2011 for Facebook's announcement and registration with the SEC. Each is a stark difference from the other. LinkedIn filed its S-1 papers in June 2011. It showed solid, if unspectacular numbers. LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman held his tongue during the quiet period as Wall Street and the tech world dissected the S-1. When LinkedIn rung the bell and started trading publicly, its shares popped to levels that not many expected. It has stayed within that range since.

On the other hand, there is Groupon. Its S-1 was probably one of the more controversial business documents to be released in 2011 more or less because of the way it calculated revenue and company culture. Unlike LinkedIn, Groupon's CEO Andrew Mason could not help but chafe at the critics that tore up his company while he was forced to take it and be quiet. A "leaked" memo to the Groupon staff from Mason surfaced several months before the company started trading, a memo that later would be investigated by the SEC for breaking the quiet period rules.

What the quiet period means to the Facebook ecosystem is that business will continue as normal. Developers will get the information they need, users will be told about platform problems and updates. Facebook will likely not announce any major new products during the quiet period but expect a barrage of new verticals and innovations once the company finally does start trading, likely in June or July.

The inverse aspect of the quiet period for a company is that everybody not forced by the SEC to be quiet will be exceptionally loud. Take a look a Techmeme's top stories for today. The top 11 stories are Facebook IPO related.

After the luster from the S-1 blows off, the news coming out of Facebook will slow to a trickle. After the madness of the last 24 hours, everyone will be able to breathe a sigh of relief.

Including Facebook.

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When Hugh Hefner founded Playboy in 1953, he famously offered photographers, writers and artists the choice of cash or stock in the then-private company. While most chose cash, a few held onto shares that were worth millions by the time the company went public.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg used a similar tactic, which means David Choe, a graffiti artist who was given stock for painting the walls of Facebook's headquarter, worth an expected $200 million when the company's shares start trading publicly. That and other details about who will be instantly wealthy were revealed in Facebook's $5 billion IPO filing Wednesday.

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The New York Times has a complete round up of who will gain the most from Facebook's IPO. What follows is a condensed version of some of the highlights from that list.

Zuckerberg holds 553.8 million shares worth $28.4 billion, based on a company valuation of $100 billion, or $53 per share.Peter Thiel, who invested $500,000 in Facebook in 2004, has 44.7 million shares that could be worth $2 billion.Bono's venture capital fund Elevation Partners invested $120 million in Facebook in 2010.Accel Partners, which owns 201.4 million shares, could see a thousand-fold return on its initial investment.Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg could eventually hold as much as 40 million shares (she currently has 1.9 million shares, according to the filing)DST Global, the investment firm led by the Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, owns about 7% of Facebook.Zuckerberg's father, a dentist in New York, owns 2 million shares.Co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, Zukerberg's Harvard roommate, holds 133.8 million shares.David A. Ebersman, Facebook's chief financial officer, holds seven million unvested shares. He has been working at the company for less than three years.Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, former business partners of Zuckerberg, own 1.2 million shares as part of a legal settlement with Zuckerberg.Eduardo Saverin, Facebook's estranged co-founder, settled for a 5% stake in the company. A block of those shares have been sold in the secondary market.

Photo courtesy of ShutterStock.

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NASA is no stranger to apps, but the space agency is branching out further into some new territory with its two latest offerings: a pair of educational games. The first is Sector 33, an air traffic control simulator for iOS devices that certainly won't be confused with Flight Control, but which NASA hopes will help teach math and possibly get folks interested in aviation. Those who prefer their games a bit more casual can also now try out NASA's very first multiplayer Facebook game, Space Race Blast Off, which tests folks' knowledge of various space-related topics (and is considerably more challenging than it first appears). Additional details and the games themselves can be found at the source links below.

[Thanks, Mo]

NASA debuts two new educational games for iOS, Facebook originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 02 Feb 2012 07:05:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Need to sign a contract, like, now? There's an app for that. Several actually, but the folks who create EasySignMobile have gone and made their service a bit more accessible to the unwashed masses with an updated version that supports Facebook authentication. The new feature is currently available only for iOS, although we'd imagine Android users will find similar love in the near future, as the company released its first version for Google's platform last October. Also on deck for iPhone and iPad fans, the latest version of EasySignMobile offers integration with Dropbox and Box.net for easy file storage and retrieval. So next time you need to make your mark, perhaps you can reach into your pocket rather than rummage for a pen. Those interested will find the full PR after the break.

Continue reading EasySignMobile enters the Facebook fray for iPhone and iPad

EasySignMobile enters the Facebook fray for iPhone and iPad originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 01 Feb 2012 23:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Facebook is about to jump into unfriendly waters. If founder Mark Zuckerberg thought the company faced fierce competitors in Silicon Valley, he is about to find that the denizens of Wall Street are not nearly so forgiving. There are risks to going public. How does the world perceive your company? Can the platform grow and maintain its edge? The trick for Facebook will be to balance the concerns of its shareholders with the need to push the boundaries of innovation. This is no easy task.

In its S-1 filing today, Facebook outlined a litany of risks for the company going forward. Monetizing the mobile user base in a system dominated by its competitors will be a major challenge going forward. Diversifying its portfolio away from its reliance on advertising will be a big task, one that Google has never quite figured out. We take a deep dive into Facebook's risk factors below.

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Jump to: Mobile Reliance On Mobile Platforms Competition User Growth, Retention And Revenue Zynga and The Zynga Ecosystem The Zuckerberg Effect What Are the Risks?

Facebook's risks are fundamentally tied to the fact that nearly 85% of the company's revenue is related to advertising. When most of your assets are tied to one cash vertical, any fluctuations can lead to dramatic swings in performance. Facebook also has concerns with competition, global expansion, infrastructure and retaining top talent. Here is the summary breakdown from the prospectus, with the exception of some specific stock risks.

We enlisted Antone Johnson, founder of the Bottom Line Law Group to help with the analysis of Facebook's risk factors. Johnson is a respected Silicon Valley lawyer who has spent 15 years representing technology and media companies. He was vice president of legal affairs at eHarmony as well as assistant general counsel to Intermix Media, which included serving as director of business and legal affairs at Myspace, culminating in the company's $650 million sale to Fox.

Johnson on Facebook's reliance on advertising:

"Main story here is the drop from 98% to 85% of revenue being generated by advertising. Obviously a good risk mitigation approach to diversify with revenue from virtual goods, etc. Again, mobile jumps out as an important theme; given they admittedly don't make ad revenue from mobile users, this could be a significant headwind for FB in coming years as smartphones become near-universal and people become accustomed to using them as their primary means of accessing social media.

"The rest of this risk factor is par for the course."

Mobile

According to the S-1, around half of Facebook's users access the website through mobile devices. Facebook has a robust mobile presence and it iterates its native apps constantly. As an advertising-based business, Facebook has a distinct problem here.

It does not serve ads in its mobile apps.

Facebook has 425 million monthly active users on its mobile platform as of December 2011. Mobile is rapidly becoming a replacement for personal computers and that threatens Facebook's advertising model. The key for Facebook will be to turn mobile users into mobile dollars.

"They are forthcoming about the challenges," Johnson said. "No revenue currently generated from mobile advertising; unclear how much mobile use could be monetized; failure to solve this puzzle combined with a dramatic shift toward mobile usage could be a serious problem for FB; and per the next risk factor, they don't control the iOS and Android platforms. Frankly, if there were one thing that persuaded me not to invest in FB (given the growth assumptions built into current valuation), this would be it."

As we have written before, Facebook iterates constantly. Its philosophy in mobile is to "move fast, break things and fix things fast," the company's managing engineer for mobile, Dave Fetterman, said at Facebook's f8 developer conference last September.

"Being able to write it once today and ship it tomorrow? That is something that Facebook is really good at and that we love doing and that is at the center of being able to move fast," Fetterman said.

Now that Facebook is a public company, will it be able to keep that mentality? When things break, that directly affects a company's stock price.

Reliance on Mobile Platforms

Facebook also has the problem that it does not control the mobile platforms that carry its app. That means part of Facebook's prosperity is tied to the stability of Apple's iOS, Android, BlackBerry etc.

Many of the major technology companies are dependent on the others. The Big Five (Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon) have something of an incestuous relationship. Each is a pillar that supports a much larger structure. When one of those pillars is weakened, another may become stronger but the overall ecosystem may suffer. This is exemplified in Facebook's mobile predicament.

"The best way to view this might be as the 'Google Risk Factor,' and I think recent Android sales/market share figures must have FB running scared. Apple has never been a significant player in social and seems unlikely to be anytime soon," Johnson said.

Elaborating, Johnson compares the Google/Facebook relationship to the trouble caused when Microsoft built Internet Explorer into Windows in the late 1990s and how that affected the biggest player at the time, Netscape.

"'Any changes in such systems that degrade our products' functionality or give preferential treatment to competitive products' presumably means Android being optimized for G+ in every iteration going forward, giving it unfair advantages vs FB mobile. (Shades of Microsoft building IE into Windows years ago?) It would probably raise some serious antitrust concerns, but the wheels of antitrust enforcement turn so slowly that it might not matter much in the end (as was the case with Microsoft and Netscape)."

Competition

Right next to reliance on advertising, one of the biggest risk factors is the fact that Facebook faces a vibrant social ecosystem that wants to chip away at the company's user base. Google+ and Twitter are both mentioned in the S-1 while other entities worldwide, such as Orkut, could hinder Facebook growth.

The way Facebook defines itself in the S-1 is directly correlated to how it describes the competition. More or less, that means the denizens at Google at this stage.

"Competition is always a highly ranked risk factor, in this case the broad range of what FB considers competitive is striking," Johnson said. "This is also the second 'Google Risk Factor' with references made to G+, Orkut, 'Google Search plus Your World,' Android, and war chests for acquisitions (presumably Google and Microsoft's). International competition plays a greater role than I would have expected, but it make sense given how much of FB's growth in recent years has been driven by international."

User Growth, Retention and Revenue

Facebook's first bullet point in its risks section is the ability to retain users and get them to spend more time on the site. While Facebook is the dominant social platform on the Web, its position as the top dog is not guaranteed in the long run. Look at what happened to Myspace.

Johnson's analysis:

"'We anticipate that our active user growth rate will decline over time' reflects the 'law of large numbers' - i.e., don't expect metrics to grow at these rates forever. This is a common-sense observation. What will be interesting is how FB responds. 'To the extent our active user growth rate slows, our business performance will become increasingly dependent on our ability to increase levels of user engagement in current and new markets.' That suggests FB is rightly focused on increasing site engagement per user over time rather than merely squeezing more revenue out of each user through aggressive monetization tactics. This language sends the right message that FB is focused on the product/user experience long-term and is willing to trade off short-term monetization against that principle.

"The striking contrast here is MySpace. I didn't see this myself because I left in August 2006, but many MySpace execs who stuck around longer argue the UX was degraded and ultimately ruined post-News Corp. acquisition because the mandate to hit revenue targets undermined the product itself. This risk factor might as well go on to name MS explicitly the way it continues, 'A number of other social networking companies that achieved early popularity have since seen their active user bases or levels of engagement decline, in some cases precipitously.'"

Zynga and the Zynga Ecosystem

When Zynga filed for its IPO, we noted that the company was overly-reliant on Facebook for all of its revenue. We also wondered why Facebook does not just buy Zynga. That would eliminate this entire risk category. Well, the inverse is also true. Right now, Zynga drives about 12% of Facebook's revenue. Zynga is important to Facebook in two aspects: direct advertising revenue and payments. Much of Facebook's Credits program is tied to games and Zynga is the largest provider of games to Facebook. Overall, Zynga contributes 80% to Facebook Credits revenue.

Zynga is not exactly a company conquering the world right now. Its own stock has been more or less flat since it went public, its management has been criticized heavily and, outside of a few major hits like Mafia Wars and Words With Friends, many of its titles are lackluster. It is also in Zynga's best interest to diversify its portfolio and rely less on Facebook. That will include its own mobile strategies, websites and social platforms like Google+.

Zynga is also indicative of the third-party ecosystem that Facebook relies upon. The growth of the Facebook application ecosystem ties in with the company's ability to grow the platform and monetize each user either through ads or payments.

"Much of this just sounds like variations on the theme of trading off user experience vs. monetization - in this case through viral promotion of social gaming," Johnson said. "The wording, 'We are continuously seeking to balance the distribution objectives of our Platform developers with our desire to provide an optimal user experience, and we may not be successful in achieving a balance that continues to attract and retain Platform developers' suggests that users will always win (probably wise) at the expense of developers. Reliance on Zynga apps for Payments revenue is also a theme."

The Zuckerberg Effect

To its credit, Facebook recognizes that its mercurial CEO is one of its biggest assets and could be one of its biggest detriments. Zuckerberg owns the single biggest majority of Facebook's post-IPO stock and hence has a great degree of control over what the company does. With that comes a fiduciary responsibility to the stockholders. We will see how well he handles that responsibility.

"As a stockholder, even a controlling stockholder, Mr. Zuckerberg is entitled to vote his shares, and shares over which he has voting control as a result of voting agreements, in his own interests, which may not always be in the interests of our stockholders generally," the report states.

"This may be the first time in history a sole founder has had this degree of enduring voting power over a company going public at such a size and valuation -- not just for the foreseeable future, but beyond the grave," Johnson said. "I'm frankly shocked to see language that would allow all of Zuckerberg's extraordinary governance rights to be transferred to his designated successor in the event of his death. That's admittedly a remote occurrence given his young age, but as an investor or Board member, I would vehemently object to that provision. It's one thing to have complete trust in Mark to run the company, quite another to entrust his appointed successor with that kind of domination as a matter of corporate governance. It has the feel more of a family dynasty business than of a modern publicly traded tech company."

The S-1 also mentions Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg specifically several times. Many of Facebook's original founders have left the company to start their own enterprises. Zuckerberg is the important pin, but Sandberg is important glue to hold the company together on a day-to-day basis. One of the biggest jobs for Sandberg will be to monitor Zuckerberg and remind him of his responsibility to the stockholders. Neither individual is going to relish that position but as Facebook grows up and goes public, it is a necessary for the C-suite to police itself.

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Mark Zuckerberg is on his way to becoming one of the richest people in the world, but when it comes to influence in the worlds of politics and business, he sits in the shadow of his chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg.

Sandberg, 43, is credited for the success of Facebook's advertising strategy. When she joined Facebook in 2008 it had 130 employees and no cash. Three years later Facebook was profitable, 2,500 people worked there and the userbase had jumped from 70 million to almost 845 million. But her career, and influence, began long before Zuckberg sought her out.

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"Don't Leave Before You Leave."

Sandberg was born in 1969 in Washington, D.C., and at the age of two her family moved to Miami, where she grew up. She is older than her two siblings, David and Michelle.

As an undergraduate at Harvard, Sandberg majored in economics and took Lawrence Summers' class in public sector economics. Her midterm and final grades were the highest in the class, and Summers ended up becoming the adviser on her senior thesis, "how economic inequality contributes to spousal abuse."

When Summers became the chief economist at the World Bank in January 1991, he recruited Sandberg, hiring her as his research assistant. After two years of working for Summers, she took a job at McKinsey & Company, and married (and later divorced) a businessman named Brian Kraff. When Summers became the Deputy Treasury Secretary in the Clinton Administration, he asked Sandberg to join as his chief of staff. She accepted.

Sandberg and Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund at the World Economic Forum, January, 2012

In Sandberg's talks about women in the workforce, she reinforces the fact that women need to stand up for themselves, and speak up.

"Sit at the table," she said in her 2010 TEDWomen Talk. "In the corporate sector - women at the top, c-level jobs, board seats - tops out at 15-16%. The numbers have not moved since 2002 and are going in the wrong direction." Those numbers look about the same in the non-profit sector. She also points out how women face harder choices between personal success and professional fulfillment. How do we change those numbers?" she asks a willing audience. "By keeping women in the workforce... Success and likeability are positively correlated for men and negatively correlated for women," says Sandberg. "And men are reaching for opportunities more than women."

The Sheryl Sandberg resume
Currently:
Center for Global Development - Director
Walt Disney Company - Director
Starbucks Corporation - Director
World Economic Forum 2012 - Co-chair
President's Council on Jobs & Competitiveness - Member Formerly:
Google - VP of global online sales & operations
McKinsey & Company - management consultant
Secretary of the Treasury (Lawrence H. Summers) - chief of staff Education:
Harvard Business School - 1993-1995
Harvard University - BA, Economics, 1987-1991
That was the first of three points she delivered. Second, she tells women to "make sure your partner is a real partner." At the Grace Hopper Conference, Sandberg expanded on that statement, speaking to an audience of young women. She told them that it was okay to get involved with those "crazy types" when they're young, but do not marry them. In 2004 she married her long-time best friend David Goldberg, who is also the CEO of SurveyMonkey. Together they have a five-year-old son and a two-year-old daughter.

Her third point speaks to her choice to have a family and a career. "Don't leave before you leave," she told the TED audience. Don't leave the workforce to have kids and not return because you didn't get that job you wanted before you left.

Sandberg demonstrated that first point during her time with Summers. She always made sure she was at the table, even if it meant asking others to move. In 1999, Summers became Treasury Secretary; Sandberg, at 29-years-old, became his chief of staff. "If I was making a mistake, she told me," Summers told The New Yorker. "She was totally loyal, but totally in my face."

In 2000, the Clinton Administration came to an end. Sandberg left Washington for the Silicon Valley shortly thereafter. Google had been aggressively recruiting her, and finally she accepted their offer. She joined in 2001, at a time when Google was still new and not-at-all profitable. But she joined Google for the same reason that she decided to get involved in politics: there was a bigger mission at stake. At Google, that mission was to make information more accessible and freely available. Sandberg is credited with making Google AdWords profitable. These ads don't really affect the user experience; but on the flip side, they are gathering keywords from personal data found in email exchanges.

By 2008, it was time for a change again. Zuckerberg sought out Sandberg after they ran into each other at a party in the Valley. After months of negotiations, Sandberg decided to leave Google for Facebook, whose goal was "to make the world more open and connected." It was a perfect fit.

Sandberg and Somaly Mam of the Somaly Mam Foundation, October, 2011
The Business & Culture of Facebook

Sandberg started working at Facebook in 2008, when she was 38 years old. When she joined under the title of "director," she was granted .1% of the company. That means that when Facebook begins to trade on Wall Street later this year, she will became one of the richest self-made women in the world. She just bought a house down the street from Facebook, and she's going to stay there, at least, for the time being. In 2011, Forbes listed her as the fifth most powerful woman in the world.

As an influencer, Sandberg focuses her energies on companies with broad, powerful missions. In politics, it's about the greater good; at Google, she focused on making the world's information accessible to all. And now she is at Facebook, where the goal is "to make the world more open and connected."

At Facebook, Sandberg's work not only influences politics and information-sharing, but is shaping the way humans think about communication. Because Facebook is not only a freshly minted public company, it's a culture we live in.

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Facebook shocked no one by filing an initial public offering of its shares today.

The filing was the first glimpse into the company's inner financial workings and, as expected, Facebook said it would try to raise $5 billion when the company's shares begins trading - a number that could eventually be raised to $10 billion and would ultimately value the company between $75 billion and $100 billion.

Today marks the day that Mark Zuckerberg goes from being the guy who makes world-changing technology to the guy who makes money. (He could be worth $20 billion when all is said and done). And it also means today is the day you stop being a Facebook user and become a Facebook customer.

That can mean good and bad things for you, the end user. But one thing is certain: Facebook will never be the same again.

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For starters, Facebook's success will no longer be judged by the number of users (which is expected to top a billion sometime in August). From here on out, Facebook will be judged by its share price, market cap, P/E ratio and a whole host of other Wall Street jargon. Pay no attention to Zuckerbeg's assertion that the company won't be beholden to quarterly reports: they will (just ask Jeff Bezos, who made a similar promise when Amazon went public).

And, by the way, those numbers are impressive: Facebook had revenue of $3.71 billion last year, up from $1.96 billion in 2010 and $777 million in 2009.

The good news is that happy customers (which, in this case include Facebook users and companies that advertise of Facebook) can often translate into happy shareholders. The changes, to be certain, will be subtle at first, but over the coming months and years, here's what to expect:

Wealth Inhibits Drive

Zuckerberg isn't the only Facebook employee who stands to gain life-changing wealth as a result of today's filing. Facebook hires in the past year have at least known that the company was pushing towards a public offering and they stood to profit, and employees who have been there longer may have held out in anticipation of today's announcement. About a third of Facebook's 3,000 employees could become instant millionaires on the first day shares trade.

And that could spell trouble, according to Peter Jackson. Jackson is a Silicon Valley pioneer who took Introware public during the dot-com boom. At one point, his own wealth was placed at $300 million, and many company secretaries were millionaires. Eventually, however, the firm went bankrupt.

"The parking lot used to be full from 7 a.m. until 8 p.m.," Jackson told Bloomberg News. "Right after we went public, people were showing up at nine o'clock and they were leaving at five. There were a lot more things to do once you had a lot more money."

Getting Out After Cashing Out

Facebook will also face new challenges in trying to keep many of those 3,000 workers. Lost in the comparisons to Google's 2004 IPO is that many employees who worked for years building Google into an IPO-ready company have since left, including current Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.

Indeed, one of the first parts of the IPO filing many investors turned to was the section covering its employees and talent. Potential investors at least want to know that Facebook has been able to retain employees and avoid turnover in the year or so leading up to the IPO.

Writing at CNN.com, media theorist Douglas Rushkoff says some of these factors may already be in play.

"If a company is big enough - and that means simply holding enough money - then sooner or later that money influences the rest of the company's activities," he said. "The promise of cashing in a few million dollars worth of stock options helps many a programmer make it through a late night of coding."

Meet The New Boss - Not The Same As The Old Boss

One of the reasons Facebook has been successful is that it has been able to wait out initial reactions to everything from changes in its privacy policies to big site overhauls like the introduction of Timeline.

The knee-jerk responses of the stock market, as well as the quarterly report cards that come in the form of earnings reports, may mean Facebook innovations post-IPO won't have as much time to incubate before Facebook has to make a decision on whether or not to push forward with new initiatives.

Timeline, for example, was originally announced in September but a full rollout was repeatedly delayed as Facebook tweaked it to make it more appealing to users. It was finally rolled out network-wide last month. Had it been introduced after Facebook went public, the four months it took Facebook to perfect Timeline would have stretched over, and affected, three quarterly earnings reports.

Google experienced a similar shift following its IPO. Google started to phase out its Google Labs testing ground last July, around the same time it introduced Google+ to show investors it was dealing with the Facebook threat. And remember when Google used to brag that employees got 20% of their work time to do whatever they want? Boasts like that don't fly with Wall Street investors.

"Simply becoming a multi-billion-dollar company changes the essence of its goals, activities and purpose," Rushkoff said. "Its bloodstream becomes filled with cash, and cash has its own agenda."

All That Said, You Need This To Work

The best case scenario is Facebook becomes one of those offerings in which what's good for the customer is good for the shareholder, and ultimately good for anyone who uses social media.

Last year was marked by a string of disappointing IPOs in the social media sector - disappointments, in large part because those interests didn't align as well as company executives had hoped.

People who bought deals from Groupon loved the service, but advertisers backed away when they realized it wasn't generating the repeat business they had hoped for, and that made Wall Street weary. People love playing games on Zynga so much that they can't be bothered to click onto ads and fuel the company's revenue model. LinkedIn may have been the most successful IPO in 2011 in the social media space, but that was considered underwhelming - in large part because investors are still waiting to see if Facebook will eventually become an online space for social and business networking.

A successful Facebook IPO means some restored faith in the social media space. That means more capital and more incentive for the next Zuckerberg to come along and create something earthshaking instead of finishing a degree at Harvard.

Photo courtesy of ShutterStock.

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