Imagine you had every strategic advantage Facebook had, *without* Zuck. A massive infrastructure, users, great name, logo recognition, ads.
You're likely 50% below profitability, if you include taxes and shit. If you went public, you would be on the pinksheets. VC's are broke and jumping from buildings.
You consult God. He can not save this flawed business model.
These childish notions of creating a gluttonous blob of users and controlling the world through an unnecessary, virtual middleman don't work, and never will.
Venture capitals give naive kids with no biz experience tools and funding to build stuff no one goes to. And even if they do, you don't know how to tax them without them revolting.
Give it up, Zuck. Dismantle this useless site, make your last facebook "PR blogging" to the users of what a great time you have and how you care about Facebook. Swallow your pride chum.
Saying you're profitable before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortization is only OK if you plan to stop borrowing money, stop paying taxes, and stop making capital expenditures.
And amortization? At least with the others, you can come up with a scenario in which they don't matter. Amortization really is just shuffling money around so the books look better. At the end of the day, there's no difference between amortizing a loan and not.
re: the capex detracting from an "otherwise profitable" company: it's a valid point but specifically in facebook's case, it's just fuzzy math. when they start obfuscating finances by including EDIBTA in their talks without the specifications of what their big ticket one time expenditures are or a strong assurance that there *won't be many more,* it's worrisome.
sheryl sandberg took lots of fun out of working at facebook; hopefully she's helping them to operate a leaner operation financially as well.
as an aside, i spend some money on facebook advertising for my company. the numbers are DISMAL. i've been waiting a few months to see what happened before i pulled the plug. think i'll go do that now.
talking about "free cash flow profitable" is even worse; facebook has large capital expenditures that would be added back to their earnings to make them "profitable"
On the other hand, large one-time capital expenditures are probably smart moves in a startup's growth phase -- even though, yes, they can result in negative earnings numbers for an otherwise profit-making and growing firm.
One more analytical step would make such a difference here: Are Facebook's capex really the difference between positive and negative net income? And are their capex really the type that are likely to pay for themselves via future growth? That would make this post something more than just backtalk aimed at an executive's obvious and essentially trivial promo-speak.
@skahammer: Exactly right. Seen a lot of yammer from Facebook over the past couple years claiming to be EBITDA profitable, but then they continue to have enormous capex. Does that mean they will write down the value of their capital assets from years past? Can't do that or they'll never get profitable.
@skahammer: I recant, because I realize I was too hard on Owen early this morning.
Backtalk at executives' obvious promo-speak certainly has its place, and I do enjoy it. Plus, EBITDA skepticism is a pretty good analytical point for one post.
Seriously though, there's a great analysis to be done here regarding which capex models a company like Facebook should follow in transitioning from the startup phase to steady growth.
Facebook employees need to FB Connect to valleywag and read these important messages. Perhaps when the bubble is done aburstin we can have "Gawker success stories".
Dude. Facebook is the bad wife you gotta leave. You want freedom. You need her out of the way. You feel apart of this dumb business because you got worthless tech stock. Please grow up and stop believing these fairy tales. You feel like you're the shit now, but your leader is a numskull.
Where do these photos keep coming from? It looks like all the Facebook senior staff had their pictures taken at a suburban Sears, in front of the "urban cool" screen.
@KatsMeow: You know every day at lunch all the senior staff gathers in playground, chilling out max and relaxing all cool and all shooting some b-ball....
@Banjo-Sea Kitten: No, see, that's what it was like when they first opened. It was all young hip people, they played Whirlyball on company outings, everybody was friendly, it was a great place to work. Then they got big and real money started rolling in and everything started to become super corporate and shitty.
At least, that's what it was like at the dot-com startup I used to work for.
@Dr. Nick: oh, I thought as much as I submitted, so to amend my statement: what with that crazy backdrop they have going for the photos, they want suckers like me to think that there are dogs and skateboards.
@Banjo-Sea Kitten: Reminds me of when my place got burglarized. Not much was taken, but I wanted to be able to file an insurance report just in case so I called the police. When the officer entered he looked around and said: "It looks like they trashed the place."
Aw, cut poor Owen some slack. Valleywag's may be pretty much reduced to Twitter crap I don't care about and Facebook schadenfreude I also don't care about, but at least it's not as bad as io9. Covering ANYTHING.
Does mteam really think that employees and the press are hare-brained?
Even a hare-brained employee (and there are many) could identify the discrepancy between a) the lie about Gideon's departure to the WSJ insinuating it a firing and b) the internal chum-chum memo saying "I will always be grateful to Gideon for his contributions"?
Creating separate versions of the email to chase down leakers is juvenile. Mtema -- no trust for no employees shows that you can't lead. If you were true leaders, employees wouldn't leak (and leak so many versions).
Also interesting is how Sheryl seems to have steered clear out of this. She and Gideon have never gotten along. But I guess the question is, who *does* get along with Sheryl? It's well-known in her husband's social circles that not even her husband's friends like her.
The management team -- Mark, Sheryl, Elliot, Dan, etc. -- has once again, shown its lack of integrity to the whole world. Congrats on destroying the morale of the company even more, guys.
04/10/09
Imagine you had every strategic advantage Facebook had, *without* Zuck. A massive infrastructure, users, great name, logo recognition, ads.
You're likely 50% below profitability, if you include taxes and shit. If you went public, you would be on the pinksheets. VC's are broke and jumping from buildings.
You consult God. He can not save this flawed business model.
These childish notions of creating a gluttonous blob of users and controlling the world through an unnecessary, virtual middleman don't work, and never will.
Venture capitals give naive kids with no biz experience tools and funding to build stuff no one goes to. And even if they do, you don't know how to tax them without them revolting.
Give it up, Zuck. Dismantle this useless site, make your last facebook "PR blogging" to the users of what a great time you have and how you care about Facebook. Swallow your pride chum.
04/09/09
Where are the hard numbers?
Forecasting profits, in a depression?
Motherfuck?
All in all, this amounts to no sign of profit. In fact, it's a negative, because now we know they have nothing.
She should of said nothing.
04/09/09
And amortization? At least with the others, you can come up with a scenario in which they don't matter. Amortization really is just shuffling money around so the books look better. At the end of the day, there's no difference between amortizing a loan and not.
04/09/09
re: the capex detracting from an "otherwise profitable" company: it's a valid point but specifically in facebook's case, it's just fuzzy math. when they start obfuscating finances by including EDIBTA in their talks without the specifications of what their big ticket one time expenditures are or a strong assurance that there *won't be many more,* it's worrisome.
sheryl sandberg took lots of fun out of working at facebook; hopefully she's helping them to operate a leaner operation financially as well.
as an aside, i spend some money on facebook advertising for my company. the numbers are DISMAL. i've been waiting a few months to see what happened before i pulled the plug. think i'll go do that now.
04/09/09
Let's talk about net cash flow. That is what pays rent, and salaries.
04/09/09
04/09/09
04/09/09
04/09/09
One more analytical step would make such a difference here: Are Facebook's capex really the difference between positive and negative net income? And are their capex really the type that are likely to pay for themselves via future growth? That would make this post something more than just backtalk aimed at an executive's obvious and essentially trivial promo-speak.
04/09/09
04/09/09
Backtalk at executives' obvious promo-speak certainly has its place, and I do enjoy it. Plus, EBITDA skepticism is a pretty good analytical point for one post.
Seriously though, there's a great analysis to be done here regarding which capex models a company like Facebook should follow in transitioning from the startup phase to steady growth.
04/09/09
04/03/09
Dude. Facebook is the bad wife you gotta leave. You want freedom. You need her out of the way. You feel apart of this dumb business because you got worthless tech stock. Please grow up and stop believing these fairy tales. You feel like you're the shit now, but your leader is a numskull.
04/03/09
04/03/09
04/03/09
04/03/09
04/03/09
04/03/09
They're just sooooo damn cool and trendy!
04/03/09
04/03/09
04/03/09
At least, that's what it was like at the dot-com startup I used to work for.
04/03/09
04/03/09
I didn't have the nerve to tell him the truth.
04/03/09
04/02/09
Does mteam really think that employees and the press are hare-brained?
Even a hare-brained employee (and there are many) could identify the discrepancy between a) the lie about Gideon's departure to the WSJ insinuating it a firing and b) the internal chum-chum memo saying "I will always be grateful to Gideon for his contributions"?
Creating separate versions of the email to chase down leakers is juvenile. Mtema -- no trust for no employees shows that you can't lead. If you were true leaders, employees wouldn't leak (and leak so many versions).
Also interesting is how Sheryl seems to have steered clear out of this. She and Gideon have never gotten along. But I guess the question is, who *does* get along with Sheryl? It's well-known in her husband's social circles that not even her husband's friends like her.
The management team -- Mark, Sheryl, Elliot, Dan, etc. -- has once again, shown its lack of integrity to the whole world. Congrats on destroying the morale of the company even more, guys.