Of course Facebook followed the same trend as the other tech-giants. It was small and grew to a rather large (but not extremely large) company between 2008 and 2018. The difference is that Facebook only became public in 2012. I wasn’t aware and it is funny that the last company to be added turned out to be a trouble maker. The good news is that Facebook is so famous that browsing through the internet provided some indications about the early days before the IPO. What was the revenue in 2008 was my first question and I found a rough estimate although the difference between the two sources is more than 10%.
Photo by Quinn Kampschroer on Pixabay
One of the sources is Facebook itself and since we know how reliable the company is, we should take their figures at face value. Just joking – to be honest it doesn’t really matter for our 3D-graph whether the revenue back then was USD 230 or USD 280, so we take the latter. Then the profit for which another source was found. Of course it was the period of the Financial Crisis, so one won’t be surprised by a loss (USD 56 mln.). Yet it is the first red roof in all of our 3D-graph. At the same time the building is so tiny that nobody will notice. Then we had to find information about the total assets and the equity (or the total liabilities). This was harder, so we had to find a way to estimate the amounts. Starting with the Total Assets we had a look at the money coming in from investors. No loans but participations. The most important amounts coming in during 2008 were coming from Microsoft (USD 240 mln. ), Li Ka-Shing (2 x USD 60 mln.) and the European Founders Fund (USD 15 mln.). Let’s assume that earlier investments were burnt, because the revenue was still rather low. In total the acquired capital would have been USD 375 mln. but we already know about the loss of USD 56 mln. so let’s say USD 320 mln. was left as value (and the book-value of the self-developed software we have to ignore as we saw in a previous post).
Looking at 2013 and 2018, it seems like Facebook never had a lot of debts. Most of its money was coming from investors taking a share and the line of credit during the early life was really small. For simplicity we will consider the equity to be the same as the total assets in 2008.
Finally we could fill out the input-file and create the full graph with Facebook in it! It turns out the 2008 values are so low that we lost them in rounding and don’t see a building at all. The values are visible in the 3D-graph output-file, but they must be too small to visualise in X3DOM! As a result the only red roof we encountered is invisible after all. Indeed the 2013 values for Facebook are more like the 2008 ones for Amazon or Alphabet, because the company is just smaller.
Double-clicking the screenshot will open the 3D-graph in your browser. Beware: thegraph haw so many companies that zooming out is necessary to see the whole picture! Clicking the right mouse-button and moving the mouse up and down at the same time, will zoom the graph in and out. For maniputalion of this 3D-graph: Clicking left while moving the mouse will tilt the graph in different directions. Double clicking in the graph translates it and readjusts the centre at the same time. Just try it – If you don’t know how to get the normal position back, refresh the page in your browser.
Of course the AnRep3D-generator can create a larger graph by adjusting the scaling-parameter. 
To be able to create a useful graph, only Facebook was taken and the scaling was changed from 10,000 to 2,000. Now the rather small 2018 building is huge, the 2013 one is moderate and the one for 2008 is not invisible anymore!
Zooming in on the tiny spot we we see a very small building with a red roof after all. Remember: this is the only red roof to be found in this graph. The largest companies in the world seem to be large for a reason.
For more background on the 3D-graph generator, download our white-paper together with the 3D-graphs (html-format, available as zip). Or go to our website and download the free demo-package to try the 3D-graph generator yourself. New posts will be announced on Twitter: @AnRep3D and our Youtube-channel offers short explanatory movies on the 3D-graphs and the generator creating them. And of course our website anrep3d.com is still available!
