[caffeine5150]

I think its a fundamental flaw of the public company ecosystem. Management is driven to have a very short-term, myopic view of shareholder value (i.e. stock price quarter to quarter). This was made much worse by the rise in profile of analysts in the late 90's tech boom with increased focus on short term earnings guidance. Perhaps eventually Zuckerberg will be replaced by a more market-savvy CEO. Also being public will force a giant set of obligations and priorities that has nothing to do with their offerings (shareholder proxies, disclosure, class action derivative suits, SOX compliance, investor relations) and will suck huge resources.

Being public will make FB a poorer company and service.

As a side note, I love how reporters of newly public companies quote risk factors from a 10-k and present them as some significant revelation of a skeleton in the closet. Risk factors are required disclosure and attorneys stuff them with horrible sounding proclamations that often are really just stating the obvious when you really read them. They are cheap insurance for the public company - not sure anyone declines to buy a stock based on risk factors but the company can say "I told you" in the event of certain shareholder suits.

[niels_olson]

I'm reminding of a picture of a board meeting at NeXT, and I vaguely recall Warren Buffet being mentioned, as either on the board, or giving Jobs advise. And one of Buffet's stories about getting turned onto stock trading by a guy at another firm telling him that the market in the short term is a voting machine, but in the long term, it's a weighing machine. You want to guess the right weight.

Here's the picture

http://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash4/305285_1015047964...

[SoftwareMaven]

But without those public markets, Facebook would never have gotten anywhere close to where they are today because there would have been no major investments.

Instead, we would likely have multiple, smaller networks that we have to pay for because they wouldn't be able to bootstrap to a level that advertising can cover. That would not necessarily be a worse world.