Facebook's 2012 IPO letter from Mark Zuckerberg (The Hacker Way)

About this letter

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder, wrote this letter for the registration statement the company filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on 1 February 2012, ahead of its initial public offering. He writes for prospective investors, to explain what the mission means to the company and how it makes decisions. Facebook then had 845 million monthly active users, and more than four million businesses kept Pages on it.

The letter begins with the printing press and television as examples of technologies that changed society, and sets out how Facebook hopes to change how people relate to each other, to businesses and to governments. Zuckerberg recalls writing the first version of Facebook himself and says the company is going public to keep a promise to employees and investors that their equity would become valuable and liquid. He then describes the company's culture, including hackathons that produced products such as Timeline and chat, and a Bootcamp every new engineer attends.

What to notice

1. 1

   He says Facebook was built for a social mission rather than set up as a company.