Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, like so many private company bosses, is notoriously coy when it comes to numbers. He only periodically provides updates on the all-important number of active users (250m was the last official tally). And don’t bother trying to get Mr Zuckerberg to estimate revenues (unofficial estimates are $500m for the year). But in a rare moment of candour, Mr Zuckerberg provided Bloomberg with two interesting figures.
He said that Facebook plans to expand its headcount by as much as 50 per cent this year. The recession has resulted in a surplus of talented engineers, and Facebook plans to scoop up some of these workers while they are on the market. Though the engineers at FriendFeed were gainfully employed, Facebook’s acquisition of FriendFeed two weeks ago clearly fits into Mr Zuckerberg’s bulking-up strategy.
Facebook certainly has room. Earlier this summer it moved into sprawling (and swank) new offices in Palo Alto. It also has the resources, following a $200m cash infusion from Russian investment group Digital Sky Technologies in May.
With this added muscle, Mr Zuckerberg said the goal was to expand the number of active users. Facebook is already on a tear. Earlier this month it logged 340m unique visitors, making it the fourth largest site in the world, behind only the combined properties of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. It is also growing twice as fast as its would-be rival, Twitter.
But how big could it get? A few months ago Facebook board member Marc Andreessen chimed in on Facebook’s potential size, saying Facebook is “going for 500m, maybe 1bn” users. But potentially it could reach everyone who is online, he said. “We’ll cap out at some point at the number of people who have electricity,” he said.
Now Mr Zuckerberg has offered up a more official (and more reasonable) number, saying his goal is to attract 1bn active members. That’s an enormous number, and would make Facebook the largest site in the world.
But Mr Zuckerberg’s candour only went so far. Though he felt comfortable sharing this ambitious growth target, that was as far as he would go. When it came to when, exactly, he hoped to achieve this milestone, he was characteristically mum.
