Here’s proof of that in a pair of interviews Lesley Stahl of CBS’s “60 Minutes” did with him in 2008 and 2010. (I am in the clip, too, and my guessing on the timing of the current IPO pretty is spot-on — a prediction I had forgotten I made).

But the times they are a-changin’ — Facebook filed for its mega-IPO yesterday:

MORE ON THE FACEBOOK IPO:

• Facebook’s Ad Business Is a $3 Billion Mystery
• Viral Video: Farewell to the No-IPO Mark Zuckerberg
• Zuckerberg Is the Billion-Share Man: Who Owns What, Who Makes What in the Facebook IPO
• Zuckerberg Tells Investors, “We Don’t Build Services to Make Money”
• Mobile Highlighted as Key Risk Factor (and Opportunity) in Facebook Filing
• Stop All That Poking: Facebook Filing Temporarily Crashes SEC Web Site
• Zynga Accounted for 12 Percent of Facebook’s Revenue in 2011
• Facebook Has 845 Million Users
• On Its Eighth Birthday, Facebook Files to Raise $5 Billion in Massive IPO (Get Your S-1 Here!)
• Go the F**k Back to Sleep, Silicon Valley: Facebook IPO Likely to File Later Today at Earliest
• Dude, Where’s My Facebook IPO Filing? (Ashton’s on Hold!)
• The Quiet Man: Meet the Less-Known Face of the Facebook IPO, CFO David Ebersman
• Facebook Board Meeting Today for Final IPO Okays
• Facebook (Eye)PO: Tracking the Truth of the Biggest Deal of Web 2.0
• Viral Graphic: Visualizing the Facebook IPO
• Is Facebook IPO on Track for Late May?
• IPO Watch: Facebook Hiring Brunswick to Help With Comms for Expected Public Offering
• Complete Facebook coverage

In what is probably the most anticipated document ever received by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Facebook has filed to take its company public in a $5 billion initial public offering later this year.

Having endured lots of speculation around who owns exactly how much, there are now some hard numbers from the S-1 filing that hit the SEC Web site today.

Here are some details of the cap table, which is made up of both Class A and Class B shares, which carry different voting powers. Class B are the common shares.

Not surprisingly, co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg owns the most equity of any single person. His 1.1 billion Class B shares give him almost a 57 percent stake — about half of which he owns and half of which are owned by others but over which he exercises proxy voting authority.

The 27-year-old entrepreneur also holds 42.2 million Class A shares, which represents a 36.1 percent stake of that group.

Facebook’s filing said he will sell some shares in the IPO, although it doesn’t specify how many. However, it noted that most of the proceeds from the sale will go toward paying taxes on his purchase of 120 million options of Class B common stock he also has.

Peter Thiel, the PayPal founder and CEO who sold that company to eBay, owns a 2.5 percent stake, which has decreased over time from the more than 10 percent he owned as Facebook’s first angel investor. Not bad for a $500,000 investment made in 2004.

Jim Breyer of Accel Partners controls more than 201 million Class B shares, amounting to a little more than 11 percent of Facebook’s equity, having led Accel’s participation in Facebook’s $25 million Series A way back in 2006. Breyer is also a personal investor; 11.7 million shares are his, and about 190 million shares are Accel’s.

Digital Sky Technologies, the Russian investment firm, has 5.4 percent of the Class B equity, or 94.6 million shares, owing to its $200 million investment in 2009, plus an additional $500 million in 2011. DST has also been buying Facebook shares from existing shareholders, allowing some to cash out their equity. It also has 36.7 million Class A shares, or 31.4 percent.

Goldman Sachs has a sizable 66-million share slice of Class A shares, or 56.3 percent. Last year, it was involved in the $1.5 billion round that included DST.

There’s also a batch of individuals with single-digit stakes and smaller ones of note.

Dustin Moskovitz: The Facebook co-founder owns 7.6 percent of the company or 133.8 million Class B shares.

Zuckerberg’s father, Edward Zuckerberg, a dentist, was rewarded with two million Class B shares in consideration for his providing early start-up capital to his son in 2004 and 2005. He was given an option to purchase the shares, but the option expired a year after it was given to him, without his exercising it. The board of directors — minus Mark Zuckerberg — issued the 2 million shares to Glate LLC, a company controlled by the elder Zuckerberg.

There are also a few names of note who don’t appear in the filing:

Microsoft had bought a stake amounting to 1.6 percent, stemming from its $240 million investment in 2007, which included a strategic alliance for advertising. Its stake, now likely less, is not mentioned in the filing.

Eduardo Saverin, the Brazilian co-founder, also has a stake worth a few points, but he is not mentioned in its cap tables.

And other VC investors, Greylock Partners and Meritech Capital Partners, are barely mentioned as well. T. Rowe Price owns 6 million Class A shares, or 5.2 percent, as well as 12.1 million Class B shares.

The filing shows that the top five highest compensated employees are:

Mark Zuckerberg’s base salary is $500,000 a year. Effective January 1, 2013, his salary will be reduced to $1 per year. He has options to buy 120 million additional shares of the class B common stock at a strike price of six cents a share, which expires in November of 2015.

COO Sheryl Sandberg made $382,000 in salary and bonuses in 2011 and received $30.5 million in stock awards. She has options to buy 4.7 million shares, of which 3.5 million have a strike price of $10.39, and 1.2 million a strike price of $15. Sandberg already holds 1.9 million shares of Class B common shares and holds 39.3 million restricted stock units, too.

David Ebersman, the quiet CFO whom AllThingsD profiled yesterday, made $382,000 in salary and bonuses and has 2.2 million Class B shares and 7.5 million RSUs.

Mike Schroepfer, vice president of engineering, made $334,000 in salary and bonuses last year. He holds 2.1 million in Class B shares and 6.1 million RSUs.

VP and general counsel Theodore W. Ullyot also makes $275,000 per year and is eligible for a $400,000 annual retention bonus during the first five years of his employment, through 2013. He has about 1.9 million shares and exercisable options and holds 3.8 million RSUs.

Then, there are Facebook’s outside directors: Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen; Erskine Bowles, the former White House Chief of Staff under Bill Clinton; Breyer; Washington Post CEO Don Graham; Netflix CEO Reed Hastings; and Thiel. Each were paid $16,700 in fees for sitting on the board. Bowles got 601,400 shares, while Hastings got 593,400 shares.

Andreessen also has 5.3 millon RSUs that vest over four years. Graham has one million RSUs. Bowles and Hastings also each have 20,000 RSUs.

MORE ON THE FACEBOOK IPO:

• Facebook’s Ad Business Is a $3 Billion Mystery
• Viral Video: Farewell to the No-IPO Mark Zuckerberg
• Zuckerberg Is the Billion-Share Man: Who Owns What, Who Makes What in the Facebook IPO
• Zuckerberg Tells Investors, “We Don’t Build Services to Make Money”
• Mobile Highlighted as Key Risk Factor (and Opportunity) in Facebook Filing
• Stop All That Poking: Facebook Filing Temporarily Crashes SEC Web Site
• Zynga Accounted for 12 Percent of Facebook’s Revenue in 2011
• Facebook Has 845 Million Users
• On Its Eighth Birthday, Facebook Files to Raise $5 Billion in Massive IPO (Get Your S-1 Here!)
• Go the F**k Back to Sleep, Silicon Valley: Facebook IPO Likely to File Later Today at Earliest
• Dude, Where’s My Facebook IPO Filing? (Ashton’s on Hold!)
• The Quiet Man: Meet the Less-Known Face of the Facebook IPO, CFO David Ebersman
• Facebook Board Meeting Today for Final IPO Okays
• Facebook (Eye)PO: Tracking the Truth of the Biggest Deal of Web 2.0
• Viral Graphic: Visualizing the Facebook IPO
• Is Facebook IPO on Track for Late May?
• IPO Watch: Facebook Hiring Brunswick to Help With Comms for Expected Public Offering
• Complete Facebook coverage

One of the loudest critiques of Facebook is that it is a profit-motivated machine built by evil geeky people who have little regard for privacy and the world around them.

Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg tried to dispel those characterizations in a long letter embedded in Facebook’s filing to go public today.

Zuckerberg, who argued that Facebook does not build things to make money, was in a bit of a pickle, because he was also trying to pitch Wall Street on Facebook being a good investment. Plus, many people don’t see the Facebook CEO as particularly sincere.

But Zuckerberg took the opportunity to talk — before Facebook has to bite its collective tongue during its mandated quiet period.

He argued that by not focusing on profits, Facebook is more useful and ultimately valuable. “We don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services,” he said.

Zuckerberg also discussed Facebook’s global political goals, which is something he and the company have traditionally been reticent about. In the past, Facebook wasn’t sure it wanted to associate itself with the toppling of governments, and was much quieter about its usage as a force of democracy than similar services like Twitter.

In today’s filing, Zuckerberg wrote that he expects governments to be more accountable and people to be more empowered because of Facebook. The “power to share” brings out voices that can’t be ignored, he said.

He also attempted to explain Facebook’s corporate culture, which he called “The Hacker Way.”

As Zuckerberg described it, “Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete.”

Here’s the letter:

LETTER FROM MARK ZUCKERBERG

Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.

We think it’s important that everyone who invests in Facebook understands what this mission means to us, how we make decisions and why we do the things we do. I will try to outline our approach in this letter.

At Facebook, we’re inspired by technologies that have revolutionized how people spread and consume information. We often talk about inventions like the printing press and the television — by simply making communication more efficient, they led to a complete transformation of many important parts of society. They gave more people a voice. They encouraged progress. They changed the way society was organized. They brought us closer together.

Today, our society has reached another tipping point. We live at a moment when the majority of people in the world have access to the internet or mobile phones — the raw tools necessary to start sharing what they’re thinking, feeling and doing with whomever they want. Facebook aspires to build the services that give people the power to share and help them once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.

There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on.

We hope to strengthen how people relate to each other.

Even if our mission sounds big, it starts small — with the relationship between two people.

Personal relationships are the fundamental unit of our society. Relationships are how we discover new ideas, understand our world and ultimately derive long-term happiness.

At Facebook, we build tools to help people connect with the people they want and share what they want, and by doing this we are extending people’s capacity to build and maintain relationships.

People sharing more — even if just with their close friends or families — creates a more open culture and leads to a better understanding of the lives and perspectives of others. We believe that this creates a greater number of stronger relationships between people, and that it helps people get exposed to a greater number of diverse perspectives.

By helping people form these connections, we hope to rewire the way people spread and consume information. We think the world’s information infrastructure should resemble the social graph — a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer, rather than the monolithic, top-down structure that has existed to date. We also believe that giving people control over what they share is a fundamental principle of this rewiring.

We have already helped more than 800 million people map out more than 100 billion connections so far, and our goal is to help this rewiring accelerate.

We hope to improve how people connect to businesses and the economy.

We think a more open and connected world will help create a stronger economy with more authentic businesses that build better products and services.

As people share more, they have access to more opinions from the people they trust about the products and services they use. This makes it easier to discover the best products and improve the quality and efficiency of their lives.

One result of making it easier to find better products is that businesses will be rewarded for building better products — ones that are personalized and designed around people. We have found that products that are “social by design” tend to be more engaging than their traditional counterparts, and we look forward to seeing more of the world’s products move in this direction.

Our developer platform has already enabled hundreds of thousands of businesses to build higher-quality and more social products. We have seen disruptive new approaches in industries like games, music and news, and we expect to see similar disruption in more industries by new approaches that are social by design.

In addition to building better products, a more open world will also encourage businesses to engage with their customers directly and authentically. More than four million businesses have Pages on Facebook that they use to have a dialogue with their customers. We expect this trend to grow as well.

We hope to change how people relate to their governments and social institutions.

We believe building tools to help people share can bring a more honest and transparent dialogue around government that could lead to more direct empowerment of people, more accountability for officials and better solutions to some of the biggest problems of our time.

By giving people the power to share, we are starting to see people make their voices heard on a different scale from what has historically been possible. These voices will increase in number and volume. They cannot be ignored. Over time, we expect governments will become more responsive to issues and concerns raised directly by all their people rather than through intermediaries controlled by a select few.

Through this process, we believe that leaders will emerge across all countries who are pro-internet and fight for the rights of their people, including the right to share what they want and the right to access all information that people want to share with them.

Finally, as more of the economy moves towards higher-quality products that are personalized, we also expect to see the emergence of new services that are social by design to address the large worldwide problems we face in job creation, education and health care. We look forward to doing what we can to help this progress.

Our Mission and Our Business

As I said above, Facebook was not originally founded to be a company. We’ve always cared primarily about our social mission, the services we’re building and the people who use them. This is a different approach for a public company to take, so I want to explain why I think it works.

I started off by writing the first version of Facebook myself because it was something I wanted to exist. Since then, most of the ideas and code that have gone into Facebook have come from the great people we’ve attracted to our team.

Most great people care primarily about building and being a part of great things, but they also want to make money. Through the process of building a team — and also building a developer community, advertising market and investor base — I’ve developed a deep appreciation for how building a strong company with a strong economic engine and strong growth can be the best way to align many people to solve important problems.

Simply put: we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.

And we think this is a good way to build something. These days I think more and more people want to use services from companies that believe in something beyond simply maximizing profits.

By focusing on our mission and building great services, we believe we will create the most value for our shareholders and partners over the long term — and this in turn will enable us to keep attracting the best people and building more great services. We don’t wake up in the morning with the primary goal of making money, but we understand that the best way to achieve our mission is to build a strong and valuable company.

This is how we think about our IPO as well. We’re going public for our employees and our investors. We made a commitment to them when we gave them equity that we’d work hard to make it worth a lot and make it liquid, and this IPO is fulfilling our commitment. As we become a public company, we’re making a similar commitment to our new investors and we will work just as hard to fulfill it.

The Hacker Way

As part of building a strong company, we work hard at making Facebook the best place for great people to have a big impact on the world and learn from other great people. We have cultivated a unique culture and management approach that we call the Hacker Way.

The word “hacker” has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world.

The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.

Hackers try to build the best services over the long term by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once. To support this, we have built a testing framework that at any given time can try out thousands of versions of Facebook. We have the words “Done is better than perfect” painted on our walls to remind ourselves to always keep shipping.

Hacking is also an inherently hands-on and active discipline. Instead of debating for days whether a new idea is possible or what the best way to build something is, hackers would rather just prototype something and see what works. There’s a hacker mantra that you’ll hear a lot around Facebook offices: “Code wins arguments.”

Hacker culture is also extremely open and meritocratic. Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win — not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people.

To encourage this approach, every few months we have a hackathon, where everyone builds prototypes for new ideas they have. At the end, the whole team gets together and looks at everything that has been built. Many of our most successful products came out of hackathons, including Timeline, chat, video, our mobile development framework and some of our most important infrastructure like the HipHop compiler.

To make sure all our engineers share this approach, we require all new engineers — even managers whose primary job will not be to write code — to go through a program called Bootcamp where they learn our codebase, our tools and our approach. There are a lot of folks in the industry who manage engineers and don’t want to code themselves, but the type of hands-on people we’re looking for are willing and able to go through Bootcamp.

The examples above all relate to engineering, but we have distilled these principles into five core values for how we run Facebook:

Focus on Impact

If we want to have the biggest impact, the best way to do this is to make sure we always focus on solving the most important problems. It sounds simple, but we think most companies do this poorly and waste a lot of time. We expect everyone at Facebook to be good at finding the biggest problems to work on.

Move Fast

Moving fast enables us to build more things and learn faster. However, as most companies grow, they slow down too much because they’re more afraid of making mistakes than they are of losing opportunities by moving too slowly. We have a saying: “Move fast and break things.” The idea is that if you never break anything, you’re probably not moving fast enough.

Be Bold

Building great things means taking risks. This can be scary and prevents most companies from doing the bold things they should. However, in a world that’s changing so quickly, you’re guaranteed to fail if you don’t take any risks. We have another saying: “The riskiest thing is to take no risks.” We encourage everyone to make bold decisions, even if that means being wrong some of the time.

Be Open

We believe that a more open world is a better world because people with more information can make better decisions and have a greater impact. That goes for running our company as well. We work hard to make sure everyone at Facebook has access to as much information as possible about every part of the company so they can make the best decisions and have the greatest impact.

Build Social Value

Once again, Facebook exists to make the world more open and connected, and not just to build a company. We expect everyone at Facebook to focus every day on how to build real value for the world in everything they do.

Thanks for taking the time to read this letter. We believe that we have an opportunity to have an important impact on the world and build a lasting company in the process. I look forward to building something great together.

Here are the major stats on Facebook’s IPO, which it just filed: 845 million monthly users and 483 million daily users; annual revenue of $3.7 billion; $1.8 billion in annual operating income and $1 billion net income.

And the raise in the initial public offering for now? It’s $5 billion. That could go up, of course; as yet, there is no valuation listed in the S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission for the social networking giant.

Let’s just say, it will be a lot.

And here are some uh-oh stats:

A full 12 percent of Facebook’s revenue in 2011 was linked to its relationship with online gaming giant Zynga.

And overall growth is slowing too.

Said Facebook’s filing:

“We believe that our rates of user and revenue growth will decline over time. For example, our annual revenue grew 154% from 2009 to 2010 and 88% from 2010 to 2011. Historically, our user growth has been a primary driver of growth in our revenue. Our user growth and revenue growth rates will inevitably slow as we achieve higher market penetration rates, as our revenue increases to higher levels, and as we experience increased competition.”

That is still en fuego, but will be noted by many.

In case you were visiting the outer rings of Jupiter and did not hear, you might want to know that Facebook filed for an initial public offering today. It is perhaps the most eagerly anticipated of financial events in Silicon Valley in many years.

The massive social networking site — which was launched in an undergraduate dorm room at Harvard University on the first Wednesday in February 2004, exactly eight years ago — is now a global phenomenon.

Its rocket ride to the top of the Internet and in Silicon Valley has been largely due to the aggressive innovation of one very unusual founder, CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Assembling an experienced team and pushing through a series of sometimes controversial products to link friends together online, the young entrepreneur has built a service that now is challenging even search giant Google.

Zuckerberg has been slow to take the company public, although the move was inevitable.

And now, of course, it is here.

More to come, as the ATD team parses the IPO filing, which is below (so join in!):

FacebookInc-20120201-S1-0

MORE ON THE FACEBOOK IPO:

• Facebook’s Ad Business Is a $3 Billion Mystery
• Viral Video: Farewell to the No-IPO Mark Zuckerberg
• Zuckerberg Is the Billion-Share Man: Who Owns What, Who Makes What in the Facebook IPO
• Zuckerberg Tells Investors, “We Don’t Build Services to Make Money”
• Mobile Highlighted as Key Risk Factor (and Opportunity) in Facebook Filing
• Stop All That Poking: Facebook Filing Temporarily Crashes SEC Web Site
• Zynga Accounted for 12 Percent of Facebook’s Revenue in 2011
• Facebook Has 845 Million Users
• On Its Eighth Birthday, Facebook Files to Raise $5 Billion in Massive IPO (Get Your S-1 Here!)
• Go the F**k Back to Sleep, Silicon Valley: Facebook IPO Likely to File Later Today at Earliest
• Dude, Where’s My Facebook IPO Filing? (Ashton’s on Hold!)
• The Quiet Man: Meet the Less-Known Face of the Facebook IPO, CFO David Ebersman
• Facebook Board Meeting Today for Final IPO Okays
• Facebook (Eye)PO: Tracking the Truth of the Biggest Deal of Web 2.0
• Viral Graphic: Visualizing the Facebook IPO
• Is Facebook IPO on Track for Late May?
• IPO Watch: Facebook Hiring Brunswick to Help With Comms for Expected Public Offering
• Complete Facebook coverage

Okay, okay, we get it: Morgan Stanley got the coveted left-hand lead position on Facebook’s blockbuster IPO filing. Goldman Sachs is there, too, but in the third-place, always-a-bridesmaid spo,t and is crying big salty tears about the injustice of it all.

It’s hard to feel badly for overpaid investment bankers, and focusing on them is kind of like endlessly discussing the lawyers who processed your mortgage, when the focus should be on the house you’re buying.

Does anyone except a few Richie Rich ZIP Codes in Manhattan care about this one deet of the initial public offering of the social networking giant?

Nope, but there is so little real news ahead of the IPO filing expected today that this is what we are chomping on this morning, as everyone awaits the big doc drop at the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Sources said it is likely to come this afternoon rather than this morning, though. And, perish the thought, all that dotting of I’s and crossing of T’s could delay it to tomorrow, even (unlikely, but mebbe!).

Sigh.

Tidbit: Facebook was actually founded the first Wednesday in February of 2004 in an undergraduate dorm room at Harvard University, like today but eight years later.

Thus, here’s a boring Facebook history timeline chart to look at:

Okay, that was really dull.

What up? The board met, the spinmeisters are at the ready and, most of all, Silicon Valley is stoked to make some more arrogant badillionaires.

Now, hopefully, we’ll get the real news about Facebook.

Namely, who’s getting the big dough in this much-anticipated Web 2.0 gambit? Co-founder and CEO and Hoodie Commander Mark Zuckerberg fer sure, but who else?

Plus all the juicy financials from Facebook, along with stats in usage, growth and just how much the company sticks it to its gaming serf — oops, partner — Zynga and others for the privilege of being on its all-powerful platform.

Me? I pay nada, like other Facebook users, for being able to show off pictures of my vacations and decline friendships from PR people I like, but still … well, you know.

Here is another Facebook financial chart that will not knock your socks off unless you are an accountant:

I am now so comatose waiting for the show to begin that I briefly began a liveblog of my activities this morning.

It went like this:

4:45 am PT: Done with AOL Q4 earnings, which were meh, but better meh than expected. AOL, if you recall, used to be Facebook and now is, um, not.

Note to Zuckerberg: Be nice to people on your way up, since you’ll meet them again on the way down.

4:46 am PT: I check the SEC site and get zip. Click, click, clickety-click over to find out the latest on Demi Moore and her fake-pot debacle.

Who knew there was synthetic cannabis and it is called K2 or Spice? Not me! According to Wikipedia: “It seems likely that synthetic cannabis can precipitate psychosis and in some cases it is prolonged.”

I decide to blame Ashton Kutcher and then wonder if he is an investor in Facebook via BFF-to-errant-celebrities-who-like-tech Ron Conway, also a Facebook investor.

Note to self: Call Ashton! That dude plays village idiots all the time, but I am not fooled by Mr. Pretty Face.

4:47 am PT: I consider email bombing Yahoo’s Jerry Yang, who is probably not so busy right now, and asking him what he thinks about the Demi Moore crisis and also Facebook’s IPO.

Remember when Yahoo was king of Silicon Valley and Yang posed in that purple VW on the cover of that magazine? Better still, remember when Yahoo was going to buy Facebook for just over $1 billion and then borked it?

Just sayin’, Mark — so, keep it reals!

4:48 am PT: I consider going out for doughnuts — and not because of any real weed need. I just would like me some glazed and sprinkled sugar treats right about now. Then, I could post the pictures of them on my Facebook page.

Sweet.

But you-know-who would file right when I left the house on the munchie run. Click, click, clickety-click over to the SEC site and I come up peanuts.

Time to check in on the Kardashians.

You get the idea — so, Facebook IPO, take me away!

MORE ON THE FACEBOOK IPO:

• Facebook’s Ad Business Is a $3 Billion Mystery
• Viral Video: Farewell to the No-IPO Mark Zuckerberg
• Zuckerberg Is the Billion-Share Man: Who Owns What, Who Makes What in the Facebook IPO
• Zuckerberg Tells Investors, “We Don’t Build Services to Make Money”
• Mobile Highlighted as Key Risk Factor (and Opportunity) in Facebook Filing
• Stop All That Poking: Facebook Filing Temporarily Crashes SEC Web Site
• Zynga Accounted for 12 Percent of Facebook’s Revenue in 2011
• Facebook Has 845 Million Users
• On Its Eighth Birthday, Facebook Files to Raise $5 Billion in Massive IPO (Get Your S-1 Here!)
• Go the F**k Back to Sleep, Silicon Valley: Facebook IPO Likely to File Later Today at Earliest
• Dude, Where’s My Facebook IPO Filing? (Ashton’s on Hold!)
• The Quiet Man: Meet the Less-Known Face of the Facebook IPO, CFO David Ebersman
• Facebook Board Meeting Today for Final IPO Okays
• Facebook (Eye)PO: Tracking the Truth of the Biggest Deal of Web 2.0
• Viral Graphic: Visualizing the Facebook IPO
• Is Facebook IPO on Track for Late May?
• IPO Watch: Facebook Hiring Brunswick to Help With Comms for Expected Public Offering
• Complete Facebook coverage

Ever heard of David Ebersman?

You should, and this week you will, given the self-effacing exec has been one of the prime movers behind what is expected to be the blockbuster offering of Web 2.0: Facebook’s impending IPO.

And while the social networking site’s movietastic co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and its smooth-operator COO Sheryl Sandberg have gotten a lion’s share of the attention related to the initial public offering, the former Genentech exec has been the key man in organizing the IPO itself.

The kickoff to that will be its filing, which could come as early as tomorrow morning. Whatever the valuation and raise numbers are — that’s still not clear — it will be a badillion-zillion-tons.

That has meant a lot of noise and also shuttling among investors, bankers, board and all the many other dueling constituencies to organize what will be one of the most scrutinized IPOs in tech.

And, so far, the reviews of Ebersman, 42, have been good, with most praising his lack of ego, quiet confidence, professional demeanor and, most importantly, no drama as important attributes of what has been a smooth process, considering.

“This is a three-ring circus no matter what,” said one source. “But Ebersman has made it much less so by making sure it was as steady as it could be.”

That calm tone has also made him a favorite of Zuckerberg and Sandberg, as well as key Facebook board members such as Marc Andreessen, since he arrived at the company in 2009. At Facebook, he has been in charge of its finance, facilities and information technology teams.

But Ebersman has been a lot more than that, said multiple sources, taking the key role in the IPO, but also spearheading critical long-term planning initiatives and instituting strict resource allocation systems.

That sounds dull, but regimenting Facebook has been one of the hallmarks of its growth and stability compared to many other competitors.

“He could easily be a CFO for a Fortune 10 company … but he is much more than an accountant or a deal maker, which are two flavors CFO usually come in,” said one person who is an admirer of his work. “But [Ebersman] is much more than that — really leading the charge on significant fronts related to the core of Facebook’s operations.”

Before coming to Facebook, the Brown University graduate was CFO of biotech giant Genentech, where he also held a number of other more operational positions, including being in charge of product development there. Ebersman was also a research analyst on Wall Street.

He came to Facebook’s attention via Genentech’s Art Levinson, who recommended Ebersman to the company, despite his lack of Internet experience. He replaced Gideon Yu, who left Facebook in a controversial departure.

While initially concerned that he had little digital experience, Zuckerberg, Sandberg and others were immediately convinced that Ebersman was just what they were looking for — low-key, smart and able to grok the complexity and challenges of Facebook.

“You can hire someone who knows the space or someone who is like a great athlete and can master anything,” said one person. “David is the latter.”

Ebersman has been given the ball a lot with regards to the IPO, even though all roads of decision-making essentially lead to Zuckerberg, who has been intent on not rushing to market in favor of growing the business.

Low-key was one of Zuckerberg’s main tenets of the IPO as it became more inevitable.

Thus, one of the first things Ebersman did was nix the “pitch” process by banks.

Instead, sources said, he worked with bankers individually to design an IPO that would work best for Facebook, including keeping fees low.

“It was very hands on and careful, with Ebersman crafting close relationships rather than pitting banks against each other,” said one source. “But it was also all about Facebook maintaining complete control.”

Still, Ebersman also did not veer away from a relatively traditional process — no wacky Google auction here.

“Facebook is not taking chances with this IPO and wants to make it a blue-chip event,” said another source. “Neither David nor the company thinks this is a time to be that experimental.”

But one thing is clear as the IPO machine now moves into high gear: “This is a team — specifically Mark, Sheryl and David — that is completely aligned going into this and David is the implementer they trust to make it so.”

We’ll see how it goes in what will be a busy time going forward.

One thing for sure — Ebersman, who plays bass guitar in a band in his spare time, will have little of that in orchestrating the biggest arrangement of Facebook’s life.

MORE ON THE FACEBOOK IPO:

• Facebook’s Ad Business Is a $3 Billion Mystery
• Viral Video: Farewell to the No-IPO Mark Zuckerberg
• Zuckerberg Is the Billion-Share Man: Who Owns What, Who Makes What in the Facebook IPO
• Zuckerberg Tells Investors, “We Don’t Build Services to Make Money”
• Mobile Highlighted as Key Risk Factor (and Opportunity) in Facebook Filing
• Stop All That Poking: Facebook Filing Temporarily Crashes SEC Web Site
• Zynga Accounted for 12 Percent of Facebook’s Revenue in 2011
• Facebook Has 845 Million Users
• On Its Eighth Birthday, Facebook Files to Raise $5 Billion in Massive IPO (Get Your S-1 Here!)
• Go the F**k Back to Sleep, Silicon Valley: Facebook IPO Likely to File Later Today at Earliest
• Dude, Where’s My Facebook IPO Filing? (Ashton’s on Hold!)
• The Quiet Man: Meet the Less-Known Face of the Facebook IPO, CFO David Ebersman
• Facebook Board Meeting Today for Final IPO Okays
• Facebook (Eye)PO: Tracking the Truth of the Biggest Deal of Web 2.0
• Viral Graphic: Visualizing the Facebook IPO
• Is Facebook IPO on Track for Late May?
• IPO Watch: Facebook Hiring Brunswick to Help With Comms for Expected Public Offering
• Complete Facebook coverage

According to several sources close to the situation, the Facebook board has been meeting early this afternoon at its Silicon Valley HQ to give the go-ahead to a massive initial public offering.

Facebook is expected to file regulatory documents as early as tomorrow morning for what will certainly be one of the most-watched IPOs in tech in recent years.

Sources also noted the filing could happen after markets closed tomorrow, too.

While sources said the filing time could still change even later this week, that seems unlikely, especially given the furor over every detail — including entirely meaningless ones — about the much hyped Facebook offering.

But it’s finally here and will be much scrutinized.

As I previously reported, the offering is expected to be below an overblown valuation number of $100 billion that has been widely reported and the amount being raised is also less than the $10 billion being bandied about.

I would tell you those numbers if I knew, but the offering has been locked down tight by Facebook — much different than blabbier recent IPOs from Internet companies. (Heeelllloooo, Groupon!)

That’s because Facebook management has been determined to conduct an IPO with as little drama as possible and is seeking to minimize a bubble atmosphere around the event.

(I might start liveblogging the IPO countdown right now, just to ramp up the noise and send CNBC into a frenzy.)

The board of Facebook is chaired by co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has been the most insistent about conducting the IPO with more deliberation and care.

One notable difference, for certain, has been Zuckerberg’s patience in growing the business before taking Facebook public. Still, it is important to remember that its history has actually been very short in time — the start-up was launched as thefacebook.com from his dorm room at Harvard University in early 2004.

If you are counting, that is only eight years ago.

MORE ON THE FACEBOOK IPO:

• Facebook’s Ad Business Is a $3 Billion Mystery
• Viral Video: Farewell to the No-IPO Mark Zuckerberg
• Zuckerberg Is the Billion-Share Man: Who Owns What, Who Makes What in the Facebook IPO
• Zuckerberg Tells Investors, “We Don’t Build Services to Make Money”
• Mobile Highlighted as Key Risk Factor (and Opportunity) in Facebook Filing
• Stop All That Poking: Facebook Filing Temporarily Crashes SEC Web Site
• Zynga Accounted for 12 Percent of Facebook’s Revenue in 2011
• Facebook Has 845 Million Users
• On Its Eighth Birthday, Facebook Files to Raise $5 Billion in Massive IPO (Get Your S-1 Here!)
• Go the F**k Back to Sleep, Silicon Valley: Facebook IPO Likely to File Later Today at Earliest
• Dude, Where’s My Facebook IPO Filing? (Ashton’s on Hold!)
• The Quiet Man: Meet the Less-Known Face of the Facebook IPO, CFO David Ebersman
• Facebook Board Meeting Today for Final IPO Okays
• Facebook (Eye)PO: Tracking the Truth of the Biggest Deal of Web 2.0
• Viral Graphic: Visualizing the Facebook IPO
• Is Facebook IPO on Track for Late May?
• IPO Watch: Facebook Hiring Brunswick to Help With Comms for Expected Public Offering
• Complete Facebook coverage

Earlier today, Harvard University and New Enterprise Associates announced the Experiment Fund, aimed at making sure that future Mark Zuckerbergs and Bill Gates can stay on campus and innovate without having to head West.

The irony of the pair of legendary entrepreneurs dropping out — decades apart — of the even more legendary university to start two of tech most significant companies, Facebook and Microsoft.

No longer, apparently.

The early-stage incubator, which will award funding to four to six start-ups in amounts from $250,000 to $500,000. It will focus on seed ventures in the Cambridge, Mass. area around Harvard, which includes many other schools such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The Experiment Fund came from an idea born Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, which involved NEA. Today, SEAS Dean Cherry Murray hosted an event that unveiled the initiative.

But, while faculty members will advise for the fund, Harvard has no financial stake.

In an interview NEA’s Patrick Chung said the intent was to enable talented students to “build a company here in Boston rather than have to go elsewhere.”

NEA will have full-time staffers working on the fund, investing in a wide range of companies. It has already backed a health app company, as well as a live Internet television offering.

“There has been an envy of the left coast, certainly,” said Chung. “Now, these talented engineers don’t have to leave when they reach the boundaries of the university where the ideas are formed.”

Added Chung: “They can walk right out of class and into a place that can make those start-ups real.”

In other words, let’s hope the third time’s a charm.

Here’s the map of exactly where the Experiment Fund is and official press release:

XFund press release

Double snaps to Jesse Draper, whose kookified online interview show, “The Valley Girl Show,” managed to get a very decent interview with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.

And by decent, I mean that Draper actually elicits some very unusual just-us-girls moments from the typically unflappable Sandberg. No IPO news revealed, but this is almost better.

From experience, I am telling you it is not easy to get Sandberg to talk about leg warmers and say “I’m … like … Sheryl Sandberg” in Valley Girl speak.

I’m … like … impressed, and would now pay to see Draper take on the social networking giant’s co-founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.

Enjoy:

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, Facebook:

The internet is the most powerful tool we have for creating a more open and connected world. We can’t let poorly thought out laws get in the way of the internet’s development. Facebook opposes SOPA and PIPA, and we will continue to oppose any laws that will hurt the internet.

The world today needs political leaders who are pro-internet. We have been working with many of these folks for months on better alternatives to these current proposals. I encourage you to learn more about these issues and tell your congressmen that you want them to be pro-internet.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D., Ore.):

The Internet has become an integral part of everyday life precisely because it has been an open-to-all land of opportunity where entrepreneurs, thinkers and innovators are free to try, fail and then try again. The Internet has changed the way we communicate with each other, the way we learn about the world and the way we conduct business. It has done this by eliminating the tollgates, middle men, and other barriers to entry that have so often predetermined winners and losers in the marketplace. It has created a world where ideas, products and creative expression have an opportunity regardless of who offers them or where they originate.

Protect IP (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) are a step towards a different kind of Internet. They are a step towards an Internet in which those with money and lawyers and access to power have a greater voice than those who don’t. They are a step towards an Internet in which online innovators need lawyers as much or more than they need good ideas. And they are a step towards a world in which Americans have less of a voice to argue for a free and open Internet around the world.

Legal Team, Red Hat Software:

In a single generation, the Internet has transformed our world to such an extent that it is easy to forget its miraculous properties and take it for granted. It’s worth reminding ourselves, though, that our future economic growth depends on our ability to use the Internet to share new ideas and technology. Measures that block the freedom and openness of the Internet also hinder innovation. That poses a threat to the future success of Red Hat and other innovative companies.

The sponsors of SOPA and PIPA claim that the bills are intended to thwart web piracy. Yet, the bills overreach, and could put a website out of business after a single complaint. Web sites would vanish, and have little recourse, if they were suspected of infringing copyrights or trademarks.

The good news is that there is growing opposition from many quarters to these bills. Just this past weekend, the White House expressed serious concerns, opposing legislation — like SOPA and PIPA — that “reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.

Lanham Napier, CEO, Rackspace:

In my last blog post on SOPA and PIPA, I explained why Rackspace — along with much of the Internet community — opposes these bills in their current form. They are well-intentioned, but would do more harm than good. Their enforcement provisions could be easily evaded, and they would undermine the security and stability of the Internet.

Since then, I and other Rackers have been working with key lawmakers to fix the bills so that they will (a) actually be effective in fighting online piracy, and (b) avoid disrupting the Internet or imposing unreasonable costs on Internet users and service providers.

We at Rackspace are on the front lines of the battle against copyright infringers and other online criminals. We employ dedicated teams that take enforcement actions under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as well as our own strict Acceptable Use Policy every day. We agree that better tools are needed for this fight but SOPA and PIPA do not fit the bill.

Gary Shapiro, President and CEO, Consumer Electronics Association:

“It is increasingly clear that bills causing collateral damage to innovation in the guise of fighting piracy are not politically viable. Now that unreasonable solutions to piracy have been shown not to work, it is time to explore reasonable ones. We urge policymakers to join CEA in support of the OPEN Act — a bicameral, bipartisan and narrowly targeted approach to fighting foreign “rogue websites.”

Paul Hortenstine, Motion Picture Association of America, which supports the bills:

The legislation targets criminals: foreign thieves who profit from pirated content and counterfeit goods. These foreign rogue websites are operating freely today while legitimate American businesses are opposing legislation that would block these criminal websites from the American market.

The Pirate Bay, a site that links visitors to pirated content and would arguably fit someone’s definition of “foreign rogue Web site”:

SOPA can’t do anything to stop TPB. Worst case we’ll change top level domain from our current .org to one of the hundreds of other names that we already also use. In countries where TPB is blocked, China and Saudi Arabia springs to mind, they block hundreds of our domain names. And did it work? Not really.

To fix the “problem of piracy” one should go to the source of the problem. The entertainment industry say they’re creating “culture” but what they really do is stuff like selling overpriced plushy dolls and making 11 year old girls become anorexic. Either from working in the factories that creates the dolls for basically no salary or by watching movies and tv shows that make them think that they’re fat.

Ben Greenman, Contributor, The New Yorker:

Dear Spanish speakers, I was only joking when I said you think we’re all protesting soup. Geez: People are so touchy on blackout days

January 18, 2012 7:44 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@bengreenman

Ben Greenman

The new apps behave similarly to the “read,” “listen” and “watch” Open Graph applications that have already rolled out in the past few months, which include the Washington Post, Spotify and Hulu. So every time your friends read an article or listen to a song, you might now learn about it on Facebook, and possibly even join them in reading or listening at the same time.

Outside developers have been furiously coding other custom actions since September; and recently, many have been waiting on Facebook, so they can make them available to users.

Facebook has invited press to an unveiling event on Wednesday evening in San Francisco — where it will launch the first batch of these apps, sources confirmed.

Facebook did not reply to requests for comment, though it did send us invitations to the event.

This may well be one of Facebook’s last big press conferences before it files to go public and enters a quiet period, during which financial regulations keep it from commenting on its products, business or criticism from competitors and analysts.

The timing of the Wednesday press event aligns with Facebook’s last public guidance on the subject. The company told developers in late December that since its Timeline profile design was being rolled out worldwide, Open Graph Actions would start being approved in January.

Currently, Facebook Timeline is available to users on an opt-in basis. At some point soon — perhaps as early as this week — Facebook will start requiring users to migrate to the new design.

That’s because Open Graph and Timeline go hand in hand; the idea is for each user’s activity across various Web sites and apps, both on and off of Facebook, to be aggregated as a visual living record of his or her life.

What kind of Actions will developers build on the Open Graph? Some examples include tracking a workout with a GPS device, completing a recipe from a cooking site, or buying an item on an e-commerce site. Those Actions could be expressed on Facebook with verbs like “run,” “cook” or “purchase.”

Along with the new verbs will surely come Facebook’s usual problems: Unanticipated incursions into user privacy, people who hate change, and profligate oversharing.

Sources said that in the lead-up to the launch, Facebook has been busy working on things like how to conjugate the verbs for the Open Graph Actions.

Facebook told developers their Actions must be “simple, genuine and non-abusive.”

To Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who is known to have studied Latin, I say: Just remember, “Veni, vidi, vici!”

Perhaps I should have saved that joke for our live coverage, which you’ll be able to find here Wednesday at about 5 p.m. PT.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

According to multiple sources, the long-anticipated public offering of Facebook is now likely to come in the third week of May.

That means that the company must file its IPO documents within the next month, given that the review by the Securities and Exchange Commission usually takes about three to four months.

That’s if there are no issues, of course, such as a turbulent market or thornier-than-usual questions from regulators that require amending the filing.

Groupon, for example, filed for its IPO in early June, but did not go public until five months later in November.

The usual caveat on the late-May timing (even though I called 143 people on this one): This IPO planning could all change, in a New York minute, to another month.

In any case, the Facebook IPO is expected to be one of the largest Web offerings ever — with some reports saying the company will be raising $10 billion on a $100 billion valuation. (The valuation and raise, sources tell me, will be much lower.)

That amount is presumably to match its huge consumer growth and revenue explosion. Users now number 800 million — a figure that is likely to hit one billion this year. And revenue, which was reportedly close to $4 billion in 2011, is expected to be higher by another third in 2012.

Facebook will need such oomph if it is to impress investors, although the social networking site’s leadership is still warning that its focus is products over dollars.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal last week, for example, co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg hedged the point, even as he sang his same familiar strategic tune of the last few years.

“The thing to take away isn’t that we don’t care [about business]. People for years were asking me why aren’t we trying to make more money,” he said. “I would say I’m trying to build a business for the long term and it was clearly the right strategy.”

While admirably I’ll-row-my-way in tone, Zuckerberg needs a public offering heft more than ever, as Facebook’s battles with rivals — most especially Google — escalate.

Just last week, the monocratically-inclined search giant ham-handedly shoved its own social networking service, Google+, into its results, in a move that could severely disadvantage Facebook.

Thus, into the Wall Street breach, to get a giant pile of dough to fight back!

But, unlike Google’s more kookified 2004 IPO, sources said Facebook’s is probably going to hew to a more traditional offering script.

That is likely to include a hefty consortium of irksome investment bankers — think firms like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley on top of the filings, and a spate of smaller ones (Allen & Co.) below, and you have the approximately accurate idea.

And, while shot-caller-in-chief Zuckerberg will be the one key voice in the IPO, the man to watch has been and will be CFO David Ebersman.

The longtime Genentech exec, who came to Facebook in 2009, has been doing all the heavy lifting in preparation for the IPO, said sources, and will continue to do so.

Facebook declined to comment (but I would too, if I were them).

That task falls to Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, 27, who built Facebook out of his Harvard College dorm room in 2004, and Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, 42, a former Google Inc. executive.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

It’s 2012 and it’s time for a brand news obsession for me besides the mishegas of Yahoo — and the winner is: Facebook’s upcoming IPO.

Thus, I shall endeavor to scoop all deets great and small about the social networking site’s moving on up to a deluxe public company in the Wall Street sky, which is expected in the spring of this year.

From bankers battling for purchase to who’s selling what to the delightful back and forth with regulators to Google’s lobbing the inevitable screaming meanies at its rival during Facebook’s quiet period, this is going to be a good one.

And CEO and Co-founder Mark Zuckerberg — and his hoodie — are back in the brightest of spotlights!

Speaking of the need for PR, one of the unsung but critical parts of any company’s public offering process is the hiring of an outside communications firm to handle the deluge of media, rumors and other breathless attention Facebook is sure to get.

It’s a highly specific job, given the reporters a company will be dealing with — in this case, sharp-elbowed Wall Street reporters — are usually different than the ones the Silicon Valley start-up has mostly dealt with (the geeks!).

And the expected winner of that thankless job is likely to go to the Brunswick Group, which describes itself as an “international corporate communications partnership that helps businesses and other organizations address critical communications challenges.”

In other words: Will be putting out the endless wildfires sure to rage around tech’s hottest IPO since Google.

Brunswick is among a small group of high-powered strategic communications firms that compete for such high-profile IPO jobs, as well as mergers and acquisitions and other corporate battling.

Others include Sard Verbinnen & Co. (it has worked for Groupon board and Alibaba Group); Joele Frank, Wilkinson Brimmer Katcher (it has toiled for Hewlett-Packard) and Kekst and Company (now cat-wrangling the Yahoo drama).

It’s probably not a surprise that Brunswick won the deal, since it has worked with Facebook in the past, including on its controversial private offering with Goldman Sachs a year ago.

No surprise, everyone declined comment.

Thus, let the Hunger, oops, PR games begin!

The 66-year-old chief executive of Washington Post Co. also shares a lot more with one of those friends: Facebook Inc. founder Mark Zuckerberg.

The two men — separated by 39 years — have formed an unlikely relationship bridging two vastly different media worlds. Introduced through a college friend of Mr. Zuckerberg in 2005, each now serves as a mentor to the other.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Experian Hitwise reports that “Facebook” was the most popular search term on the Web this year, accounting for an enormous 3.1 percent of all searches. Add in related queries like “facebook.com” and “www.facebook.com,” and Mark Zuckerberg’s company accounted for four of the year’s Top 10 searches.

If this surprises you, it’s because you’ve never looked at this kind of query data before. Punching the name of a Web site into a search engine — either intentionally, or by accident, because you’ve confused the URL bar with the search bar on your browser — is a time-honored Internet tradition. Many moons ago, for instance, “AOL” and its cousins used to show up at the top of these lists.

As it is, the rest of the Top 10 is filled out by big, relatively ancient Web brands. Which again might give you some clue as to what’s going on here — people probably really aren’t searching for “YouTube,” and “MySpace” and “eBay” and “Yahoo” — they just can’t figure out how to get there. That’s a distinction with a difference.

Important sidenote raised by Greg Sterling: None of Experian’s Top 10 entrants show up on the “top” lists that services like Google, Bing and AOL provide.

You might be surprised that what Ireland has to say about regulating Facebook privacy is terribly important — but it actually is. Because Facebook’s international headquarters are in Dublin, this local commission oversees Facebook’s compliance in all regions other than the U.S. and Canada.

Facebook agreed to make changes in time for a follow-up Irish Data Protection Commission audit in July 2012. As presented in a Facebook Europe blog post, they include:

• Creating additional notifications explaining photo tagging using facial recognition (which has been a particularly contentious feature in Europe)
• Reducing data retention and logging for people who are not logged into Facebook (so-called “logged-out cookies” and alleged “shadow profiles” of non-members have been another reason for recent outcry)
• Telling users more about how to control when their information is given to Facebook platform applications

As compared to Facebook’s recent settlement with the American Federal Trade Commission, the Irish audit seems to be about more up-to-date privacy issues (much of the FTC stuff dated back to 2009). The FTC settlement is also a longer-term arrangement, with Facebook agreeing to 20 years of privacy audits. And Mark Zuckerberg didn’t give Ireland a formal apology, admitting to making “a bunch of mistakes.”

(Image copyright Peter Gerken and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons license)

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Remember when Fortune magazine wrote in September that Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg had reportedly bagged a bison as part of a “personal challenge” to eat only what he had killed?

Well, proof of that is hard to miss, now that the ginormous mounted head of said dead bison has been hung on the wall of a Facebook conference room used by the social networking site’s COO Sheryl Sandberg.

Zuckerberg placed it there recently as a prank, to surprise his top exec with the installation of the very hairy bison when she was away from Facebook’s Silicon Valley HQ.

And surprised she was when she got back and was faced with the creature, which pretty much takes up the whole room, as you can see above and below.

(And, let me just say on a personal level, like a digital version of the “Murder She Wrote” lady, solving the mystery of this geek-on-bison killing is a whole lot more satisfying than getting a pile of internal Yahoo memos.)

The bison has now been nicknamed Billy and also sports a Facebook-branded baseball cap and occasional hoodie — natch! (My suggestion if you want to use a dead beast metaphor most effectively here would be to clad it all in Google swag.)

While he never confirmed it, Zuckerberg had teased the crowd about the possibility of his hunting prowess at the f8 developers conference this fall in his keynote speech, displaying his Facebook page that had a picture of what he had tagged “Bison Burgers.”

In fact, it’s been quite a lot of bison for the famous entrepreneur since he felled the majestic beast. According to Wikipedia, bison usually weigh 700 to 2,200 pounds, but can be as much as 3,800 pounds. That’s a lot of burgers!

To get them, Zuckerberg learned the most humane approach and then shot the beast in California, after obtaining a hunting license and, presumably, a very big gun.

Clearly, he was serious when he told Fortune in May that “the only meat I’m eating is from animals I’ve killed myself.” Among the early victims, which grew in size, were a lobster, a chicken, a pig and a goat.

At this time, the Winklevii are still roaming the plains — and it would be illegal and just plain mean on Zuckerberg’s part to frag them any more than he already has.

So, he went for the bison, the next biggest beast in his cross-hairs.

Its head will be moved to Facebook’s new headquarters today along with the rest of the company, who will now work in spacious new digs.

Which, I am told, could easily fit a herd of elephants — but let’s not go there.