Neither we nor the selling stockholders may sell these securities until the registration statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission is effective. That figure could hit $100 billion, based on Facebook's rapid growth and the appraisals that steered investors who bought stakes while the company was still private. AP Photo/Paul Sakuma, File 
 
 Facebook Inc. filed for an initial public offering Wednesday that could value the social network between $75 billion and $100 billion, putting the company on track for one of the biggest U.S. stock-market debuts of all time. According to an industry source, the worldwide revenue generated from the sale of virtual goods increased from $2 billion in 2007 to $7 billion in 2010, and is forecasted to increase to $15 billion by 2014. The filing left a few clues that Facebook's founder, 27-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, is worried about how wealth and public scrutiny may change the company's culture. Historically, our user growth has been a primary driver of growth in our revenue. Below is the letter from founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg about Facebook’s purpose, in which he explains “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. This makes it easier to discover the best products and improve the quality and efficiency of their lives.” 
 
 Zuckerberg compares Facebook to transformative technologies like the printing press and the television, stating “Facebook aspires to build the services that give people the power to share and help them once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.” 
 
 Zuckerberg also describes Facebook’s internal mantra, known as “The Hacker Way”. The company hopes to raise as much as $10 billion when it begins selling shares this spring, said people familiar with the matter. We think it’s important that everyone who invests in Facebook understands what this mission means to us.” 
 
 Regarding business, Zuckerberg says “We think a more open and connected world will help create a stronger economy with more authentic businesses that build better products and services…As people share more, they have access to more opinions from the people they trust about the products and services they use. Most great people care primarily about building and being a part of great things, but they also want to make money. "We don't build services to make money; we make money to build better services," Mr. Zuckerberg wrote. "These days I think more and more people want to use services from companies that believe in something beyond simply maximizing profits." 68 
 
 By focusing on our mission and building great services, we believe we will create the most value for our shareholders and partners over the long term  and this in turn will enable us to keep attracting the best people and building more great services. Mr. Zuckerberg decided it made more sense for Facebook to go public and reap some financial benefit from an IPO. Facebook heads a class of Internet startups that have been going public during the past year. The word “hacker” has an unfairly negative connotation…hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration…We have the words “Done is better than perfect” painted on our walls. 69 
 
 The examples above all relate to engineering, but we have distilled these principles into five core values for how we run Facebook: 
 
 Focus on Impact 
 
 If we want to have the biggest impact, the best way to do this is to make sure we always focus on solving the most important problems. Live Chat 
 
 In just eight years, Facebook has become the world's social bazaar, where friends gossip, play games and swap 250 million photos per day. For every dollar that "FarmVille" maker Zynga gets for the virtual cows and crops it sells, for example, Facebook gets 30 cents.
– Mark Zuckerberg's little startup filed papers with the SEC today to become a publicly traded company. Some of the Facebook particulars: The company says it plans to raise $5 billion, but that figure is expected to rise to perhaps $10 billion by the time the big day arrives in the spring. (The AP thinks the stock will debut in May.) The Wall Street Journal pegs the company's potential value at between $75 billion and $100 billion. The ticker symbol will be FB, though the filing didn't specify which exchange would be used for trading, notes MarketWatch. The company reported $3.7 billion in revenue in 2011, up from about $2 billion in 2010. Analysts expected $4.3 billion, says the Journal. A Zuckerberg quote from a letter to future shareholders: "We don't build services to make money; we make money to build better services. These days I think more and more people want to use services from companies that believe in something beyond simply maximizing profits." TechCrunch has the full text here. Facebook should shatter the figures from 2004 IPO of Google, which raised $1.9 billion and valued the company at $23 billion. See the filing for yourself here.