Facebook.com leent 100 miljoen… voor servers

Business Week schrijft over de stap van Facebook: Facebook will raise the additional funds to purchase servers, powerful computers designed to ensure the site can handle a swiftly rising number of users and the dizzying array of whiz-bang applications people add to profile pages. It will be used entirely for servers, Facebook Chief Financial Officer Gideon Yu says in an interview.

Het gaat niet om een “equity investment” maar om een lening: The company will borrow the funds without having to give up equity. Typically, when startups raise money they have to give away part of the company. But Yu, formerly chief financial officer at YouTube and a treasurer at Yahoo (YHOO), worked out a venture lending deal with TriplePoint Capital, a Menlo Park-based company that specializes in lending money to startups.

Het is niet bekend of Facebook heeft getracht om ook een echte investering op te halen. Er zouden vooralsnog geen partijen zijn die tegen de enorme waardering van het bedrijf - 15 miljard dollar - in willen stappen. Business Week over de vorm van de lening: Venture lending peaked during the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s and early part of this decade, but is making a comeback as startups use debt to pay for computer servers, telecom gear, and software. “The last thing the entrepreneur wants to do is see those precious equity dollars flowing into equipment purchases,” says TriplePoint CEO Jim Labe. “It’s a very unproductive use of equity to plow it into fixed assets.”

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