Dear Elliot Schrage:

BoomTown wins.

As Sheryl knows from experience, don’t mess with the Swish. Or Texas. Or Zohan.

Just don’t mess.

For everyone else, here is the entire memo that Facebook sent out this week from CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg to its 800-person staff about the departure of CFO Gideon Yu and the financial status of the Silicon Valley social-networking start-up, which some had been questioning.

According to the memo, there is a company Q&A tomorrow about it all too! What should I wear?

UPDATE:In a version of the memo I first posted, there was a repeated paragraph, with slight differences. This might have been a software error–several versions I got of this entire memo had different punctuation in various places.

In any case, I eliminated the extra repeated graph and I changed one part below of “we are” to “Facebook is” in brackets.

COMPANY CONFIDENTIAL–DO NOT FORWARD

Hey Everyone–

Today ends the first quarter of 2009, so I wanted to send out an update on our growth and financial progress, as well as a couple of changes we are making.

Our user growth has been extraordinary over the past year and has continued to be strong throughout Q1. We are getting very close to reaching our 200 millionth active user. This is pretty remarkable considering we just reached 100 million actives a little more than seven months ago. We have become the top site for sharing information on the web, and this gives us a good strategic position to help people share even more.

I am also pleased that our financial progress has been very strong as well. While we came into this year wondering how the recession might affect us, our financial performance in the first quarter surpassed our expectations. As other businesses around us are slowing down and cutting back, we continue to grow around the world. Our advertising products are becoming more attractive for advertisers and we have seen strong growth in both our domestic and international direct sales and online sales channels.

Even in the current economic environment, we are confident that this success will continue. Based on our first quarter results, we now believe we are on track to see our revenue grow by at least 70% this year. We just completed our fifth straight quarter of EBITDA profitability. And most importantly, we expect to achieve free cash flow profitability next year. That’s an important measure of financial success and sustainability because it means we’d be able to fund all of our operations and server purchases from the cash we generate while increasing our cash reserves in the bank. Hitting these numbers will require continued hard work, discipline and execution by everyone here at Facebook, but we are on the path to achieve these goals.

As we ramp up to take on these challenges, I want to let you know that Gideon Yu will be leaving the company. Gideon has played an important role in helping us achieve our financial success, building a strong finance team and establishing the core financial operations of our company. I will always be grateful to Gideon for his contributions to Facebook and what we are trying to accomplish. As those of you who know him know, Gideon’s family is his highest priority and it’s certainly not the usual cliché to say that he plans to take some time off to be with his wife and son. Gideon and I have often discussed that the next stage of his career will likely be as an investor, and I fully support him in this regard.

We have retained Spencer Stuart to search for a new CFO and we will be looking for someone with public company experience who can help take us to the next stage in our growth.

In the interim, the finance team will report to Cipora Herman in her capacity as Treasurer and Ted Ullyot as mteam lead. In addition, [Facebook is] fortunate that Peter Currie, the former CFO for Netscape, has agreed to serve as the advisor to Facebook until a new CFO comes on board.

As always, please feel free to reach out to me or to others on mteam if you have any questions about our finance plans or organization. I’ll discuss this more at the Q&A on Friday and I will be happy to take questions then too.

Congratulations to everyone on a great start to the year and on all the momentum you have all helped build for the rest of 2009.

Mark

Last week, the economy took a much needed breather from its toilet-circling behavior of late, with the stock market showing gains for several days running.

Who knows what today will bring, given all the volatility. But most of the big consumer-focused digital companies–I am using Yahoo (YHOO), Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Apple (AAPL) and Amazon (AMZN) as proxies for the sector–saw solid upticks over the last five days.

Yahoo shares rose close to four percent, Google was up just over five percent, Microsoft gained almost nine percent, while Amazon leaped 11.3 percent and Apple shot up 12.5 percent.

You could also feel the revelry from afar at the South by Southwest gathering that started this weekend in Austin, Texas, with lots of Web 2.0 partying and discussions of a Twitterific-Facebooktastic future.

Maybe happy days are here again, right?

Um, nope, just as when BoomTown wrote last September in a piece called: “Dear Web 2.0: It’s Still the Economy, Stupid!”

At the time, I wrote:

“Most companies in Web 2.0–despite their massive valuations over the last few years–-aren’t going to have the chance get frothy and light enough to become so poppable.

Instead, most will likely fizzle away quietly, with no exits in sight as the economy weakens and puts a vise grip on companies that cannot survive the very tough financial road ahead.”

Why? Well, because there still is no traction in sight for a true recovery and there will not be any for quite a while.

You need only to look at those big public companies and their stock market performance over the last six months, the true scoreboard, results that will iterate downward throughout the sector.

And, it has been exactly as the econalypse has advertised: Yahoo down 28.3 percent; Microsoft down almost 38 percent; Google dropping 25.2 percent; Amazon off 11.3 percent; and Apple dipping 31.6 percent.

And, of course, most expect that the next round of first-quarter earnings, coming around the end of April, to be weak overall for this group, given their reliance on consumer spending, advertising and general bonhomie that is surely lacking.

That, in turn, means few acquisitions and still no IPOs for Web 2.0 companies. Although only Facebook is likely to try for that gold ring, its prospects are still uneven at best, despite impressive audience growth at the social-networking site.

So, as I said before and will say again: It’s the economy, and Silicon Valley–as was true six months ago–is still not immune.

One bright light when it does manage to turn is that tech will likely see the first bounce, especially compared to pretty much all the other sectors of the economy.

Tech companies are relatively healthy with strong cash balance sheets and have shown a commitment to making cost cuts and layoffs that are long past due.

That’s all good. But, of course, the only thing that will send this all back into truly positive territory will be new products and innovations to introduce when the world is ready to spend again and grow.

As in: A lot more nose to the grindstone and a lot less party-hearty inanity.

GodTube, which describes itself as a Christian video-driven social-networking site, “where users find inspiration, interact, chat, share and upload” Christian video, has about 2 million users per month.

GodTube also lets churches stream sermons and other events live on its “Godcaster” subscription service.

Also, its motto is “Broadcast Him,” but GodTube also calls itself “Jesus 2.0.” Get it?

Perhaps more in the holy-grail territory, GodTube just nabbed $30 million this week in funding from GLG Partners (GLG), which is also an investor in the less-holy Glam Media site, according to paidContent.

That gives the Dallas-based GodTube a $150 million valuation, putting it right up there with other miraculous start-up valuations like yesterday’s $500 million valuation for the online ad agency Spot Runner.

Praise the VC (and, for GodTube fans, JC too)!

Here’s the North Point Church video on GodTube: