Ask HN: Why does Facebook need another $500 million?

Here is ticker guy's take on it.<p>"Facebook: Looking For Bagholders: Don't let it be you."<p><a href="http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?singlepost=2337946" rel="nofollow">http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?singlepost=2337946</a>

I think that they are circumventing SEC regs on 500 of shareholders for privately held companies. GS could sell the stake to HNW but for the SEC it would appear that only GS is a shareholder.<p>So basically they get away with all the reporting requirement, Sarbanes-Oxley and what have you to tap public markets by going through GS.<p>Meanwhile GS passes off all the risk to HNW individuals and keeps some nice change for itself.<p>Frankly as a libertarian I do not see any problem with this. As long as GS does not come back looking for a bailout.

At a very modest average value of $70,000 per employee for 3000 employees, that's about 2 years' worth of salaries. That's not a lot of money for FB to spend.

They probably can do all of these things, but not at the rate that they would prefer. This funding round would allow them to speed up efforts by a significant factor.<p>I also wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the capital is actually used for construction. Every time Facebook signs a new lease, they outgrow it. This may buy a huge plot of land to build their own megacomplex.

I also believe they will use some of the new money to cash out early investors.

This seems more like a strategic investment. They're obviously partnering with Goldman Sachs for an (eventual) IPO, and the terms were probably good. Why not do it?

Let´s see when the next Web 2.0 FB challenger will come out and then the over $1.5 billion investors have plugged into FB will be gone with the wind :-)

They need it to start sending dozens of "Facebook CDs" to everyone, because that worked so well for AOL.

They're not as profitable as they like us to think. I am guessing declining game ad spend and increasing cost from new users in countries that cannot be monetized.