The Rise Of Facebook’s Valuation From 2004-2011 [Graphic]

Monday, January 10th, 2011

Alexia Tsotsis works for TechCrunch as a writer. She attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA, majoring in Writing and Art, and moved to New York City shortly after graduation to work in the Media industry. After four years of living in New York and attending courses at New York University, she returned to Los Angeles... → Learn More

Click image to enlarge.

The panic at absurd rumors of Facebook’s demise over the weekend, coupled with the Goldman Sachs Facebook investment frenzy at the beginning of this year got us thinking; Did initial Facebook investor Peter Thiel, who invested 500K early on and still thought Facebook was undervalued at $30 billion back in September, actually make the most impressive investment call in tech history?

So artist Audrey Fukuman, our rockstar intern Rip Empson and I set out to capture what the Facebook valuation trajectory looked like. And while trudging through all the speculation on this has raised some discrepancies concerning exact valuations, (I’m seeing anything from $4.9 million to $5 million for the Thiel financing but rounded up for consistency’s sake) I did my best to capture the zeitgeist through consensus, leaning heavily on reports on TechCrunch through the ages. And there were a lot of them, I think we did about three posts dealing with the Elevation Partners investment alone.

In researching this I also borrowed heavily from the official Facebook timeline, Crunchbase, The Harvard Crimson, Vator.tv, the WSJ, the NYT, countless TechCrunch posts as well as Adam Rifkin’s answer to the “How did Mark Zuckerberg retain 26% of equity after so many rounds of financing?” question on Quora.

Hey Facebook, you’ve come a long way baby.

Assorted thumbnails /via Crunchbase, Time, WWN The Social Network, The Age and Data5.blog.de

Company: Facebook
Website: facebook.com
Launch Date: February 1, 2004
Funding: $2.34B

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original idea for the term...

Learn more

Tags:

Sponsored Ads

blog comments powered by Disqus

Sponsored Ads

Sponsored Ads

Upcoming Events

SXSW 2012

Austin, Texas

Disrupt NY 2012

New York City

Disrupt SF 2012

San Francisco, CA