Episode 16: Episode 16: Facebook's Story

Akylles Talks

Facebook Made it because founders understood their users and could scale swiftly and organically. In May 2005, TheFacebook received more money. This time investments of $12.7m from Accel and $1m from venture capitalist Jim Breyer's personal fortune. People were really paying attention now. In August, the ‘the’ was dropped, and the company officially became Facebook (the facebook.com domain cost $200,000). The following month high school students are admitted, along with employees of Microsoft and Apple. The company was now ready to move beyond its student base. Then in November, Zuckerberg took an important decision about his own life. Having taken the semester off from Harvard, he announced he was leaving entirely, returning briefly to hire some new employees. After significant investment and growing membership, Zuckerberg was ready to fully dedicate himself to running his company as a CEO rather than a programmer. Did you hear of this thing called Facebook? With Zuck at the helm full-time, Facebook continued its expansion plans. In December, Australian and New Zealand universities were included, and high schools from Mexico, the UK, and Ireland. That meant there were now 2,500 colleges and 25,000 high schools with access to Facebook. It wasn’t until September 2006 when the platform became open for everyone (well, anyone over 13 with a valid email address). Facebook had now gone fully global. We also started to see the rate of membership growth: December 2006: 12m April 2007: 20m July 2007: 30m October 2007: 50m In May 2007, Facebook opened its Marketplace, which lets users post classifieds to sell products and services. It also saw the launch of the Facebook Application Developer platform, opening the gates for developers to create their own applications and games integrated with Facebook. The platform was also looking beyond personal profiles to how businesses could use the site. By the end of 2007, over 100,000 companies had signed up, with Facebook launching Pages for Businesses to support this. Already they’re making plans to build on existing ad revenue to make advertising on the platform accessible to even the smallest of businesses. Then in 2008, we see a huge release from Facebook. April 2008 saw Facebook Chat rollout, allow us to annoy our friends and family more instantly. Essentially, the concept is no different to ZuckNet. We also see the People You May Know, Facebook Wall, and Facebook Connect released in the same year. Meanwhile, the user count continues to grow: August 2008: 100m January 2009: 150m February 2009: 175m April 2009: 200m July 2009: 250m September 2009: 300m We also saw one of the big Facebook games appear. Farmville was released in June 2009 and, despite being a rip-off of a game called Farm Town, became a huge success. By August, it had 10m daily active users. So, so much virtual corn.