Mark Zuckerberg Had The Chance To Sell Facebook As Early As 2004
Facebook has been around for almost 8 years now and what an amazing 8 years it has been. Growth has skyrocketed and the social network is very quickly approaching 1 Billion users, half of which who login daily.
The site launched in February 2004 and thanks to its growth out of the gate, it got the attention of companies and investors. In fact, as early as 2004, the same year Mark Zuckerberg launched the social network, he had offers to buy.
With news of the IPO happening this year and a potential $100 Billion valuation, it’s a good thing he stuck to his guns and didn’t sell. The social networking space would look vastly different from what it is today and has been a driver of innovation across other platforms.
“Facebook has had countless offers for being bought out: an unnamed investor offered $10 million in June 2004, Friendster was interested in a purchase, Google offered to buy or partner in the summer of 2004, Viacom offered $75 million in March 2005, Myspace wanted to buy in spring 2005, News Corp (Myspace’s parent company) wanted to in January 2006, Viacom came back in 2005, NBC was also interested soon after, Viacom again made an offer of $1.5 billion in 2006, Yahoo offered $1 billion in June 2006, AOL also considered $1 billion soon after, Yahoo came back again at the end of 2006, and finally Google offered $15 billion in 2007. Instead, Microsoft bought a 1.6 percent stake in Facebook for about $240 million, giving the social network a valuation of $15 billion, in October 2007.”
As Justin Timberlake said in the movie ‘The Social Network’, “You know what’s better than a Million dollars? A Billion dollars”. Well, you know what’s even better than that? 100 Billion dollars.
If you were in the same situation as Mark Zuckerberg, would you have sold Facebook at the time?
