This is what they said about Google before it went public, though.
I'd really like to see that S-1, though. For a company with $100M in revenue to be asking for a $10B market valuation takes a lot of chutzpah. Typically, growth stocks will trade at something like 4x revenue. That would give FaceBook a market cap of around $400-600M.
The question to ask is not what Facebook claims it's worth, but what Facebook thinks it's worth. As in, what's the internal valuation being used for setting employee option strike prices? Methinks nowhere near $10 billion.
Aren't they required by law to set them at the price of the last investment? IIRC, that was how it worked the last time I got ISOs. It sucked when the company got a new round of funding, because it meant all new ISOs needed to have a strike price that was roughly double what the old ones were.
FaceBook's Series-A had a pre-money valuation of like $78M, which is nearly unheard of in VC circles. If they've done further rounds, it'll be even higher.
I'd really like to see that S-1, though. For a company with $100M in revenue to be asking for a $10B market valuation takes a lot of chutzpah. Typically, growth stocks will trade at something like 4x revenue. That would give FaceBook a market cap of around $400-600M.