All Things Digital

Silicon Valley luminary Marc Andreessen (pictured here) has been asked to join the board of Facebook, according to several sources with knowledge of the situation.

While the arrangement is not completed yet, sources said the longtime entrepreneur has verbally agreed to accept the post to become the fourth member of the board of the Palo Alto, Calif.-based social-networking site.

Other board members include Accel Partners Jim Breyer, Founders Fund’s Peter Thiel and Facebook CEO and Founder Mark Zuckerberg. Greylock Partners David Sze also has observer status on the board.

Since he co-founded browser pioneer Netscape in the 1990s and helped usher in the Internet age, Andreessen has been an active investor and has created several successful start-ups.

His most current effort has been Ning, also based in Palo Alto, which is a white-label social-networking company that recently raised another $60 million in funding.

If Andreessen joins Facebook’s board, the move is yet another sign that the much-hyped start-up, which has undergone some growing pains over the last year, as well as garnering a $15 billion valuation, is growing up by bringing some major high-profile tech figures into its ranks.

Last night, for example, BoomTown broke the news that Google PR head Elliot Schrage had accepted a similiar job at Facebook.

That comes after Facebook hired another top Google (GOOG) exec, Sheryl Sandberg, as its COO, in March.

A while back, BoomTown suggested that Web 1.0 golden boy Andreessen–pictured here on the iconic Time magazine cover in 1996–would be a good mentor for current golden boy Zuckerberg, in a piece I did about potential execs for Facebook.

As I wrote in February:

But why not go for the man who was Zuckerberg before Zuckerberg was cool. Yes, the shiniest of Golden Geeks himself, Marc Andreessen.

I could go on and on about the similarities I find between the two, if you compared today’s Zuckerberg with the Netscape founder in the mid-1990s.

From their arrogant innocence to their visionary qualities to their enfant-terrible charm, it is almost as if they were separated at birth.

But now Andreessen is all grown up and much, much matured from when I covered him. He has become all calm and sage and he even does a very decent blog.

Plus, he has also started and run a number of start-ups after Netscape, giving him deeper managerial experience over the last dozen years.

And, best of all, Andreessen knows the pressure of being the best-thing-since-sliced-bread in the tech sector, and its inevitable downside too.

Overall, a real mentor and partner for Zuckerberg, making a perfect pair of Golden Geeks.”

Want to know about how privately held Facebook is doing from a financial point of view?

Well, just ask Mark Zuckerberg!

This afternoon, at an all-hands meeting held in a Palo Alto, Calif., theater near the social-networking site’s headquarters, the 23-year-old founder was quite voluble on that topic, outlining numbers that a more experienced CEO might think twice about unveiling to a large audience.

With an open dial-in number! Many employees, in fact, were horrified that Zuckerberg would be so blabby about such important financial information. Others loved it.

Most were simply surprised (although, to be fair, Google Co-Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin used to give a lot of detailed company info to their employees before going public, but in coordination with other execs).

“I can’t believe he was doing it,” said one. “It was really unbelievable.”

Believe it! Some highlights?

Revenue for Facebook for 2007 will be $150 million, as has been widely reported. But for 2008, Zuckerberg projected revenue to be increased to $300 million to $350 million.

More interesting was the news that Facebook would spend $200 million next year on capital expenditures, which is a whole lot of servers.

By the way, more expenses, noted chatty Mark, those employee levels would rise to more than 1,000 in 2008 from 450 now.

And Zuckerberg also said the company’s EBITDA–earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization and a number widely used by Wall Street as an indication of operating performance–would be $50 million in 2008.

That means the company would have a negative cash flow of about $150 million (EBITDA minus CapEx), rather than break even, as it does now.

But who’s counting? Zuckerberg apparently said he did not care about maintaining EBITDA anyway.

That’s because Facebook collected $300 million in investments recently from Microsoft and other investors, which pegged the valuation of the company at $15 billion.

Over the next week, I will be posting the most popular videos on BoomTown from 2007.

Here’s a video I did on a visit to Facebook’s HQ in Palo Alto, Calif., that I made in July, 2007. In it, I take a gander at the offices (complete with artistic graffiti) and chat with a passel of nice execs at the hot social-networking site like Mike Murphy, Owen Van Natta and others.

Over the next week, I will be posting the most popular videos on BoomTown from 2007.

Here’s my personal favorite, which I call “I Heart Mark Zuckerberg.” It is a short and–let’s just say it, shall we?–deeply uncomfortable encounter BoomTown had with the Facebook founder and CEO.

(To be fair, we caught him completely unaware when he and Accel Partners’ Jim Breyer dropped by our table at Il Fornaio in Palo Alto, Calif.)

Here’s the video:

The logical conclusion of all this iPhone mania–the inevitable descent into the land of let’s-just-go-completely-nuts.

Oh, it blends much better than I thought it would, and just on the smoothie setting (imagine puree!). Pure genius, especially when he says “iSmoke! Don’t breathe this.”

I can only imagine the level of cringe from Robert Scoble, the champion Palo Alto line-sitter at the Apple store on June 28 and 29, as seen in my video, also below, and post here.

Things got a little more interesting at the Apple Store in Palo Alto, Calif., compared to our video visit on Tuesday.

Here is my newest video on the hubbub, with a tour by blogger and publicity magnet Robert Scoble and some hellos from a few Silicon Valley legends gathered to honor the most exciting Apple tech device to come out since HyperCard (the inventor of that and a lot more early Apple software, Bill Atkinson, of course, was on line chatting it up with wiki inventor Ward Cunningham).

And, of course, Steve Jobs did show up in Palo Alto later (he lives nearby), but we missed that.

And thank iGod, because to see the One after the last few days, my head might have blown off.

(But if you still can’t get enough, see the Apple CEO’s full video interview at D5 this year here.)

So let’s help him overcome that affliction, because I feel you can’t give the enthusiastic blogger enough attention.

Seriously, Robert Scoble was first in line with his teen-aged son at the Palo Alto Apple store, spending the night to nab the iPhone and Presto’s Joe Beninato was there to capture it all for us on Thursday.

On my quest to visit all of the giant iPhones of the Bay area (on Wednesday, I paid homage to the ones in Palo Alto), I stopped by Apple’s flagship store in downtown San Francisco last night to make a video of the scene there.

It was a lot more lively than in Palo Alto, with a decent-sized clutch of folks waiting patiently along the sidewalk, including a woman dressed up as a clown (this is San Francisco, after all, and I am praying that one of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, pictured above, will be a closet Apple fanboy and also show up in full regalia).

Also, there were a disturbing amount of people who just stood outside the store and stared at the solitary giant iPhones hovering there.

I am not planning to buy the iPhone (I don’t want to switch to AT&T, given that I just switched off it for its bad coverage, and I want to wait until the phone can be upgraded for faster systems).

But I find that I do covet the giant iPhone display models, which I would wear on my back and impress all.

All told, the launch looks like it is going according to master spinmeister Steve Jobs’s brilliant marketing plan to take away all attention from Paris Hilton yammering on about her time in the pokey.

And for this gift alone, we are in his debt forever.

Here is my video on my visit to the Apple store in San Francisco last night:

Two years ago at the D5 conference in an interview onstage, I asked Steve Jobs when Apple was going to release a mobile device.

Jobs demurred, as you can see here in a snippet of this longish video of highlights below from the first four D events.

He then famously noted that he was not too good at going through “orifices,” his most perfect word to describe the uncomfortable struggles handset makers had to go through to work with the powerful and vexing cellphone companies (which Walt has dubbed “Soviet ministries”).

Obviously, the Apple CEO found his own way and will be debuting Apple’s effort Friday when the iPhone goes on sale at their stores and at AT&T outlets. You might have heard about it?

In any case, you can read four reviews from top tech reviewers, including our own Walt and also Katie Boehret, here in a roundup in John Paczkowski’s Digital Daily.

There is also a beauty pageant of pictures our Web genius Adam Tow compiled here, as well as a short Q&A with Jobs that Walt did posted in Mossblog.

And, because we like to keep adding to the pile of material, we’ll be posting this week in this column the complete video interview Walt did with Jobs recently at D5. It’s long, more than an hour, of course, but full of information.

Until then, you can see video highlights of the interview posted below, as well as in text here and as a short text excerpt in a recent tab on D5 in The Wall Street Journal.

And, also below, a short movie I did while in sunny Palo Alto yesterday, checking out the crazy scene of anticipation at the Apple store.

Um, there was none.