Open up your mind and say, ahh...

The day has finally come as many has long predicted and hoped: Facebook today filed its S1 registration. We’re combing through the numbers at present–we’ll update as we get a better grasp on the figures–but here are the initial highlights.

Net income for 2011 reached $1 billion in 2011, on revenue of $3.7 billion, up from $606 million on revenues of $1.97 billion in 2010. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of Facebook revenue comes from advertising–roughly $3.2 billion in ad revenue in 2011. Revenues from payments generated only $557 million; remarkably, 12% of Facebook’s revenue come from Zynga.

As many outlets had previously reported, Facebook indicated in its filling it sought to raise $5 billion, and will have the ticker “FB.”

Facebook has $3.9 billion cash on hand, and the company also revealed in its filing specific usership figures: 845 million monthly users at the end of 2011, with roughly half of those users active on a daily basis. Facebook is now seeing more than 250 million photos uploaded to the service everyday.

The filing also gave more insight into Facebook’s shareholders–the IPO Player’s Club, as we’re calling it. CEO Mark Zuckerberg owns an astounding 28.4% of Facebook. At a valuation of $100 billion, that would mean Zuck’s stake would be worth roughly under $30 billion. Other top shareholders include, of course, Peter Thiel, who stands to make about $2.2 to $2.5 billion from his shares.

In terms of salary, Zuck’s base was set at $500,000 in 2011, not including stock options or bonus. He will reduce his salary to $1 in 2013. Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg had a base salary of $300,000 in 2011.

Facebook gave more insight into its competition as well, describing Google and Google+ as one of its main competitors–more fuel for the Great Tech War of 2012. Other competition, Facebook said in its filing, came from Microsoft and Twitter, “which offer a variety of Internet products, services, content, and online advertising offerings, as well as from mobile companies and smaller Internet companies that offer products and services that may compete with specific Facebook features.” These might include startups such as Instagram and Foursquare.

In a letter to prospective investors, Zuck also took the time to tell them about the “hacker way,” harkening back to our 2007 profile on the Facebook founder.

 

The Hacker Way

As part of building a strong company, we work hard at making Facebook the best place for great people to have a big impact on the world and learn from other great people. We have cultivated a unique culture and management approach that we call the Hacker Way.

The word “hacker” has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world.

The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.

Hackers try to build the best services over the long term by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once. To support this, we have built a testing framework that at any given time can try out thousands of versions of Facebook. We have the words “Done is better than perfect” painted on our walls to remind ourselves to always keep shipping.

Hacking is also an inherently hands-on and active discipline. Instead of debating for days whether a new idea is possible or what the best way to build something is, hackers would rather just prototype something and see what works. There’s a hacker mantra that you’ll hear a lot around Facebook offices: “Code wins arguments.”

Hacker culture is also extremely open and meritocratic. Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win — not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people.

To encourage this approach, every few months we have a hackathon, where everyone builds prototypes for new ideas they have. At the end, the whole team gets together and looks at everything that has been built. Many of our most successful products came out of hackathons, including Timeline, chat, video, our mobile development framework and some of our most important infrastructure like the HipHop compiler.

To make sure all our engineers share this approach, we require all new engineers — even managers whose primary job will not be to write code — to go through a program called Bootcamp where they learn our codebase, our tools and our approach. There are a lot of folks in the industry who manage engineers and don’t want to code themselves, but the type of hands-on people we’re looking for are willing and able to go through Bootcamp.

(and it didn’t work)

…then what do you do?

Slamming your six iron into the ground, yelling at yourself, cursing out your staff, second-guessing, berating bystanders—there are plenty of ways we demonstrate our frustration that our best didn’t work this time.

But is it helpful?

Learning from a failure is critical. Connecting effort with failure at an emotional level is crippling. After all, we’ve already agreed you did your best.

Early in our careers, we’re encouraged to avoid failure, and one way we do that is by building up a set of emotions around failure, emotions we try to avoid, and emotions that we associate with the effort of people who fail. It turns out that this is precisely the opposite of the approach of people who end up succeeding.

If you believe that righteous effort leads to the shame of personal failure, you’ll seek to avoid righteous effort.

Successful people analytically figure out what didn’t work and redefine what their best work will be in the future. And then they get back to work.

Let the guys at ESPN do the racket throwing.

The goal isn’t to get money from a VC, just as the goal isn’t to get into Harvard. Those are stepping stones, filters that some successful people have made their way through.

If you alter your plans and your approach and your vision in order to grab that imprimatur, understand that it might get in the way of the real point of the exercise, which is to build an organization that makes a difference.

I don’t care so much how much money you raised, or who you raised it from. I care a lot about who your customers are and why (or if) they’re happy.

Groupthink is almost always a sign of trouble, and it’s particularly dangerous when it revolves around what gets funded, and why.

Hot on the heels of two recent device launches from INQ and HTC, with both companies adding Facebook integration and (in case of HTC’s Salsa and ChaCha) a physical Facebook button to their smartphones, Facebook promises many more devices to bring similar functionality this year.

“In addition to these new phones from INQ and HTC,” writes Facebook’s Charles Wu in an official blog post, “you’ll also be seeing similar deep Facebook integration on dozens of other devices over the course of this year. Some manufacturers will be highlighting Facebook as a part of their phones’ on-screen interfaces, and others will use our brand as an element of the device hardware itself.”

We’ve seen both approaches in the past, and Facebook – while shunning the thought of an official “Facebook phone” – seems to be intent on helping device manufacturers integrate Facebook with their phone’s software.

Facebook’s approach to this integration is a bit more high-key than Twitter’s, whose CEO Dick Costolo recently said that Twitter is “like water” and that “Twitter already works on every device you’re going to hear about this week.” We’re fine with either approach; we’re not sold on the concept of the “Facebook button,” but we definitely believe that the smartphones of the future must have deep social network integration.

“We believe almost anything is better when it’s social, and this year we’ll continue to invest in new technologies so you have a great Facebook experience no matter where you go,” concludes Wu.

Free isn’t always generous. Free can be a legitimate marketing strategy, an ultimately selfish way to increase sales. Once you spread your ideas (and free is the best way to do that), there are all sorts of ways to profit. But don’t be confused. Free samples and free ideas and free bonuses are not necessarily generous acts.

A generous gift comes with no transaction foreseen or anticipated. A gift is a gift, not the beginning of a transaction. When you see a Picasso painting at the Met, Picasso doesn’t get anything (he’s dead). Even his heirs don’t get anything. His art is a gift to anyone who sees it.

Giving gifts is a fairly alien endeavor. In most families, even the holidays are more about present exchange than the selfless act of actually giving a gift.

The cool part, the punchline, is that giving a gift for no reason and with no transaction contemplated is actually incredibly powerful. It changes your approach to the market, it changes your relationship with the recipient and yes, it changes you.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have successfully developed an autonomous glider that can land on a wire like a bird. The tiny glider could lead the way for highly maneuverable UAVs that could emulate many bird like flight maneuvers, including landing on a wire to recharge or flying through complex and cluttered airspace.

When pilots talk about flying like a bird, they’re usually referring to the simpler things a bird can do. Even the most difficult maneuvers for an airplane can be rather mundane for many birds. The secret to our avian role model’s abilities is their control in the near stall and post stall flight regime.

Rick Cory, a post-doctoral researcher at MIT and his PhD advisor Russ Tedrake took on the unusual project as a way of pushing the limits of robotic controls. Their goal was to find a complex maneuver in nature and see if they could develop the mathematical model behind it that would allow them to build robotic controls that could emulate the maneuver.

The result of their effort is a breakthrough in aircraft control that could lead to an entirely new way of thinking about controllable flight for airplanes.

The project started in 2005 and Tedrake, an Associate Professor in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence lab at MIT, said the first step was figuring out the complex aerodynamics that take place when a bird approaches a perch and transitions from normal, forward flight to a pin point landing in a relatively short distance.

“One of the things that birds do very well is they interact very well with complicated fluids and they handle post-stall flight conditions” Tedrake told us from England where he and Cory are attending the Farnborough International Air Show. Cory was awarded Boeing’s 2010 Engineering Student of the Year award at the airshow.

An aircraft, or bird, experiences a stall when the air flowing over a wing no longer smoothly follows the shape of the wing. When the airflow separates from the wing, lift is decreased dramatically, drag is increased and the aircraft/bird will stop flying and start descending or falling.

Smoke shows the turbulence behind the glider as the wing stalls near the landing point

Experiencing stalls in an airplane are a normal part of the training for a pilot, but they are generally something that is avoided during flight. The exception for some airplanes is during the final moments before landing when an airplane, like a bird, approaches the stall and then as the lift disappears, it touches down on the runway.

Unlike a bird however, an airplane usually needs a lot of room to land because the control in the near stall and post stall is limited for most airplanes. Some experienced bush pilots manage to land their airplanes in very short distances, but even then they require more room than the average bird and cannot land on a point (unless aided by the wind).

Cory and Tedrake noticed that when a bird makes an approach to land, the entire body and wings of the bird are tilted back at a much steeper angle than an airplane making a landing. Those steep angles create very turbulent airflow that is difficult to model.

Once the MIT researchers were able to model the airflow and the path needed to land on a wire, they then set about using the data to control their tiny glider. Using simple foam and off the shelf equipment, the glider used in the experiments weighs just 90 grams.

The control system allows the glider to follow a path through space that will allow it to make the perched landing. If the glider deviates from the path, cameras mounted nearby notice the deviation and through the model developed by Cory and Tedrake, corrections are made. Based on the deviation, the glider continuously checks its position and inputs are sent to the control surfaces which allow the glider to adapt the approach until the touchdown is made on the wire.

Cory says eventually this kind of control ability could lead to a wide range of applications, particularly for UAVs. Today most UAVs are limited by the same limited control as piloted aircraft. Using these new types of controls could aid search and rescue crews by providing a view point that could fly through a dense forest.

“A search and rescue aerial vehicle would be able to land on a branch of a tree and search for victims” Cory said as just one example.

In the experiments, the glider is launched 12 feet away from the wire at various speeds between 13-19 miles per hour. It is slowed down only using the drag created by the approach to stall maneuvers developed by Cory and Tedrake.

The researchers say they are continuing the research and will next be moving outside into real-world conditions. They also plan to explore the use of flapping wing vehicles as well as more typical propeller driven aircraft.

Photos/Images: MIT

I just used Amazon to build an Escape Velocity Bookshelf. You’ll recall that I’ve been very big on escape velocity (the ability to leave a situation that isn’t helpful or desired) for a little while now. It’s actually my big thing for 2010-2011 (and maybe beyond). My goal is to help people humanize business, and find their escape velocity.

In saying this, I’m talking about either adding a few bucks to your bottom line, and/or people who break out of their employee role and take on an owner’s view of the world.

To that end, here are some books that have helped me. Here’s my Escape Velocity Bookshelf (which will pop open a new window). Descriptions are below.

HOW TO GET RICH – by Felix Dennis (founder of Maxim, amongst other magazines) is a great book to give you a sense of a mindset outside that of an employee. Felix starts from poverty and becomes one of the 12 wealthiest people in the UK. It’s not that we might all aspire to be rich, but without seeing another perspective, it’s hard to think beyond where you are.

THINK AND GROW RICH – by Napoleon Hill. This is one of the first self-improvement books of the modern day, and still one of the best. You see a theme here? It’s not “rich” simply in the sense of wealthy, but again, the mindsets in the book help us see something different. Biggest takeaway in the book: the law of attraction type stuff.

RICH DAD, POOR DAD and CASHFLOW QUADRANT – by Robert Kiyosaki. Okay, these books are about getting rich, but what I got out of it was how middle class people see money, and it totally changed my view of money. One example: I used to want to pay my house off, and thought that meant that I’d own an asset. He explains why it’s still a liability, and taught me how to better understand assets.

BUSINESS STRIPPED BARE – Richard Branson. I used to think my ideas for how to build a business were crazy. Well, if I’m crazy, then so is Sir Richard. This book is the best of Branson’s books. I liked it exponentially more than the old books. My copy is written in about once every page or so with notes and ideas.

ESCAPE FROM CUBICLE NATION – Pamela Slim. Pam’s a friend. I think her book is a great way to plunge into thinking differently about life outside of standard employee roles. There’s lots in here and it’s definitely a great book to dip your thoughts into, if you’re still living as an employee, but thinking about whether or not you want to break out and do your own thing.

THE 4 HOUR WORK WEEK – Tim Ferriss. I should qualify this. I like Tim. I like his book. Parts of it are a bit deceptive. It’d be like reading a book by Michael Jordan where he says, “Just throw the ball in a hoop.” But, understanding lifestyle business people’s mindset certainly comes in handy, as does understanding how people outsource this and that.

THE POWER OF LESS – Leo Babauta. Leo’s book is a great way to remind us that multitasking isn’t the be-all, end-all mindset. It’s a book from someone who succeeded quite a lot, and who did it quite differently than most of us. It’s a really great book, and helps me get into a great state of mind every time I read it.

TRUST AGENTS – Me and Julien. Okay, I can’t talk about this without sounding full of myself, but I put it on the list, so let me explain why I think this is important to escape velocity. Make Your Own Game is about differentiating. Between that and several of the other lessons, Julien and I wrote the book for people thinking about achieving escape velocity, even though we didn’t label it that way.

A MILLION MILES IN A THOUSAND YEARS – Donald Miller. This book is about the importance of story. I think there’s a lot of application in it to understanding how to craft your own story. This is vital to making your own path for escape velocity.

SWITCH – Chip and Dan Heath. If Million Miles is about the importance of story, SWITCH is about the best way possible to effect change. This book is the winner for making change work. This book has helped me immeasurably.

LINCHPIN – Seth Godin. Linchpin is a book about becoming indispensable. What it does most for me is remind me that there are lots of mental land mines between me and success.

7 HABITS OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE PEOPLE – Stephen R. Covey. This book changed my life. It gave me a strong sense of realizing that I write my own story. It gave me a sense of how to organize my goals. It told me how to align my priorities. And ultimately, it taught me that you don’t do any of that just once, but over and over in a continuous way.

UNLIMITED POWER – Anthony Robbins. I re-read this a few weeks before I went out to meet Tony Robbins in California to shoot a video project with him. It reminded me about his approach to neuro linquistic programming (NLP), and it gave me a few techniques that I hadn’t used in a very long time. It’s a very tactics-minded book, but has helped me tune some of my approach, and that’s worth it.

SELF-ESTEEM – Matthew McKay. If there was one book to plug a hole in what a lot of us feel bad about, this is it. Self-Esteem by Dr. Matthew McKay has helped me more than most any other book ever written. It did a lot to help me rewrite the insides of my head and give me an internal assessment system instead of needing external validation.

THE WORLD IS FLAT – Thomas Friedman. There are a few parts of this book that changed how I understand business. The part on “value chain disaggregation” was very important to me. It’s already helped me with business decisions several times since the late 90s.

FREAKONOMICS – Steven Levitt, Stephen Dubner. This book teaches us that no matter what we think SHOULD happen, it’s all about understanding incentives. The stories are great; it’s well written. But that’s nothing. Look beyond the stories and into the mindset of incentives.

ON WRITING – Stephen King. If I had to recommend any one writing book, it’d be ON WRITING by King. Thing is, skip the first 1/2 unless you really want to know King’s biography. The rest of it? Pure gold.

So Now What?

These are books that have helped me along my path from employee to motivated employee to leader to president to business owner. There are many ways to get to the goal. You might have other books that helped you get there. You might find some of my books aren’t your type of book.

I read two or so books a week (not always to completion, but I fly a lot and don’t watch TV). I might have missed a few of my favorite books along the way, too. That said, these are a pretty good estimation of what made a difference.

Okay, there aren’t very many spiritual-ish books in this pile, but I don’t read many spiritual-ish books. I read 300 Words a Day. Between that and some private spiritual guidance, I’m all set.

So, what should YOU do with the list? See if any of those books appeal to you. If so, consider adding them to your Escape Velocity Bookshelf.