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I've always liked the fact that anyone with a great idea, access to the Internet, and an unrelenting will can spark a world-beating company simply by standing up code on the Internet and/or leveraging the information and relationship network that is the web. That's how Facebook started, after all.

In 2005, MTV Networks considered buying Facebook for seventy-five million dollars. Yahoo! and Microsoft soon offered much more. Zuckerberg turned them all down.

Economic theory dictates that the value of a company is basically the present value of its future profits. To estimate Facebook's value through its future profits, we need to have a view on its user growth and how this will evolve in the next 10 to 50 years.

Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission - to make the world more open and connected.

Facebook is at the forefront. It's the company that can fundamentally change the way information is being exchanged and processed. It can be the basis for artificial intelligence to develop over time.

As with Google, Facebook was a place that just concentrated a lot of top talent. It's just sort of natural that those people would go on and continue to be successful.

Every successful business, even Google, Facebook, Twitter, started with a combination of manual improvements and friends of the founders using the site.

Facebook, Google, Apple, Yahoo - there's a common theme. None of these companies ever sold. By staying independent, they were able to build a great company.

I think Facebook is an extraordinarily important part of the Internet ecosystem, and having a robust presence there is a critical part of any brand (or company's) strategy.

Being a public company is really terrible for most companies. I'd say Facebook and Google have done a pretty good job of standing up to the incredible quarterly pressure to hit numbers, but most companies - and I've observed a lot now - don't do a very good job of that.