Good morning. Welcome and thanks for joining us for Facebook's annual meeting of stockholders. I'm Colin Stretch, General Counsel of Facebook and Secretary of this annual meeting, which I now call to order. Let me run through today's agenda. We will first focus on the formal business set forth in the proxy statement. Mark will then spend a few minutes talking about how Facebook is doing, and then we'll have a short Q&A session. Before we begin with the formal business, I'd like to remind you to please turn off all mobile devices, and I'd like to remind you of the rules of conduct for the annual meeting that was provided to you when you entered the meeting, including the rule prohibiting photos and recording of any kind. To conduct an orderly meeting, we ask that participants abide by these rules. Thank you in advance for your cooperation.
Now let me start by introducing the members of our board of directors who are here today. Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, Marc Andreessen, Erskine Bowles, Sue Desmond-Hellmann, and Don Graham. I would also like to introduce a few other folks who are in attendance today. Alex Bender of Ernst & Young LLP, our independent registered public accounting firm, is present. Also present is Chris Vico, who has been appointed by the board to act as the Inspector of Election for this meeting and will tabulate the results of the voting. Ms. Vico has executed the oath of Inspector of Election. Turning now to the formal business of the meeting, I will first report on the notice for this meeting.
I have a copy of the notice of the meeting, together with a declaration as to the mailing and the proxy statement made available to all of Facebook's stockholders of record, determined as of the close of business on March 24th, 2014. I have a list of the stockholders entitled to vote at this meeting, which is available for inspection by any stockholder present or by any proxy holder representing a stockholder, and which list will be filed with the records of this proceeding. I'm advised by the inspector of election that the holders of shares representing at least a majority of the voting power of Facebook shares entitled to vote are present or represented by proxy here today, and a quorum is therefore present. This meeting is therefore authorized to transact business.
We have seven proposals to consider at this meeting, each of which is described in the proxy statement. First, we will address the election of our directors, each to serve until the next annual meeting or until the earlier of his or her death, resignation, or removal. Second, we will seek the ratification of the appointment of Ernst & Young LLP as our independent registered public accounting firm for the fiscal year ending December 31st, 2014. We also received five stockholder proposals that complied with the requirements of our bylaws and SEC rules and are therefore eligible to be voted on at this meeting. The first of these, proposal number three, requests a change in stockholder voting. Proposal number four is a proposal regarding lobbying expenditures. Proposal number five is a proposal regarding political contributions. Number six relates to childhood obesity and food marketing to youth.
Finally, proposal number seven is a proposal regarding an annual sustainability report. We will discuss the proposals momentarily. First, however, I remind you that the voting today is by proxy and written ballot. If you have already sent in a proxy and do not intend to change your vote, there is no need for you to cast a ballot today. Your vote will be counted automatically without any further action on your part. Any stockholder present who has not returned a proxy or who wishes to change your vote should cast a vote on the proposals to be considered at this meeting. Does any stockholder wish to cast a ballot today? If you do, and if you do not have a ballot, please raise your hand and our volunteers will bring a ballot to you. Keep your hand up until you have a ballot in hand.
As we continue to pass out the ballot, it is 11:10 A.M., and the polls are now open. You may vote at any time while the polls are open, including during our discussion of the proposals on the agenda. When you are ready to vote, please mark and sign your ballot accordingly. Once you are done, please raise your ballot in the air and our volunteers will come collect them. I will now review the proposals to be voted on by the stockholders at this meeting. Then we will take questions after we've heard of all of the proposals, including the statements by the proponents of the stockholder proposals. The first item of business is to elect our board of directors to serve until the next annual meeting or until the earlier of their death, resignation, or removal.
The director nominees are Marc Andreessen, Erskine Bowles, Susan Desmond-Hellmann, Donald Graham, Reed Hastings, Sheryl Sandberg, Peter Thiel, and Mark Zuckerberg. The qualifications of each proposed director is set forth in the proxy statement. No other director nominees have been properly submitted for election pursuant to our bylaws or SEC rules. Therefore, no other nominations may be accepted. The board of directors recommend they vote for the election of each of the nominated directors. The second item of business is to ratify the appointment of Ernst & Young LLP as our independent registered public accounting firm for the year ending December 31st, 2014. The board of directors recommends a vote for the ratification of the appointment of Ernst & Young LLP. Moving on to the five stockholder proposals. These proposals and the company's opposition statements are set forth in the proxy statement.
The board of directors recommends a vote against each of the stockholder proposals for the reasons set forth in the proxy statement. The applicable proponent of the stockholder proposals will now be permitted to make a statement in support of their respective proposals. I will call each of the proponents or their representative up one by one to the microphone in the center aisle. I would ask that each proponent of a stockholder proposal limit their statement to three minutes. Please do not include a reading of the proposal itself as the proposal and applicable stockholder positions have already been presented in the proxy statement. First, with respect to proposal number three, Ms. Clare Ciervo, representing Mr. James McRitchie and Myra Young, will make a statement.
Good morning. You can hear me great. Proposal Three, give each share an equal vote, sponsored by James McRitchie and Myra K. Young of Elk Grove, California. Resolved, shareholders request that our board take steps to adopt a recapitalization plan as soon as practicable for all outstanding stock to have one vote per share. This would include all practicable steps, including encouragement and negotiation with family shareholders, to request that they relinquish, for the common good of all shareholders, any pre-existing rights. This proposal is not intended to unnecessarily limit the board's judgment in crafting a requested change in accordance with applicable laws and existing contracts. By allowing certain stock to have more voting power than other stock, our company takes our public shareholder money but does not let us have an equal voice in our company's management. Without a voice, shareholders cannot hold management accountable.
The 2013 version of this proposal at Google won the highest votes ever for a Google shareholder proposal, 180 million yes votes. GMI Ratings, an independent investment research firm, said Facebook's complex Class B dual-class ownership structure is a major area of concern. The holders of our company's Class B common stock hold approximately 96% of the voting power, with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg personally controlling 55%. GMI said that since the beginning, Facebook's poor governance had been an unmistakable warning sign for investors to take heed. GMI was concerned that a founder and board member dumped the vast majority of his shares. Since May 2012, the total company stock sale for Facebook founding investor and board member Peter Thiel had eclipsed $1 billion. Furthermore, top executives resigned in droves since Facebook went public.
Facebook's board consisted of two inside directors, two large investors, and four more directors who either had substantial related party transactions with Facebook or were nominated to our board by Mr. Zuckerberg himself. GMI said it's hard to point to a single director who has the long-term interest of our company's independent shareholders as their first priority. GMI said the corporate governance practices of the Facebook board do not appear to be well-aligned with sustainable shareholder interests.
While directors are currently elected to one-year terms, this will revert to three-year terms should the voting power of the controlling shareholder fall below 35%, effectively offsetting the benefits of one-year terms. Directors needed only one yes vote based on our plurality voting standard, further inhibiting the ability of minority public shareholders to influence the election of directors. Facebook also lacks a committee for succession planning and the nomination of new directors. Please vote to protect shareholder value. Give each share an equal vote, proposal three. Thank you.
Thank you. Next, with respect to proposal number four, Sister Mary Ellen Leciejewski, representing the Benedictine Sisters of Mount St. Scholastica. Sister, thank you for your attendance.
Thank you. Good morning, Mr. Zuckerberg, fellow stockholders, and members of the board. My name is Mary Ellen Leciejewski, and I'm representing the Benedictine Sisters of Mount St. Scholastica. I hereby move proposal number four, asking our company to disclose its state and federal lobbying expenditures, including indirect funding of lobbying through trade associations and support for the American Legislative Exchange Council. Transparency and accountability in corporate spending to influence public policy are in the best interest of Facebook stockholders. Lobbying is an important part of Facebook's business strategy. Facebook spent more than $10.2 million in 2012 and 2013 on federal lobbying and, according to The Wall Street Journal, hit a record for its own lobbying with $2.8 million spent for the first quarter of 2014.
Our company argues that preparing a report of its lobbying would be cumbersome to apply. Facebook is required to report its lobbying, and it has this information, so it could easily be provided to share owners in a report. Corporations can easily contribute corporate resources to trade associations or other organizations that lobby indirectly on their behalf without specific disclosure or accountability. For example, the Chamber of Commerce has spent more than $1 billion on lobbying since 1998, making it the country's largest lobbying spender. Facebook doesn't even disclose its trade association membership, not to mention its trade association payments used for lobbying. So Facebook stockholders have no way to know if Facebook belongs to the Chamber or how much of its trade association contributions are being used to lobby on its behalf. One organization that Facebook funds as a member is particularly surprising.
Facebook supports the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, which has a very partisan and conservative agenda on issues from voter rights to immigration reform. This proposal is asking for disclosure of Facebook's payments to ALEC. Our request for disclosure is simply asking Facebook to show that its lobbying is being done for the company and stockholders' best interest. Lobbying is stockholders' money that is being spent. Does our company stand behind its spending on lobbying? If it does, then why doesn't Facebook disclose its trade association memberships and lobbying? proxy advisor ISS supports this proposal. Facebook's board and its shareholders need complete disclosure to be able to evaluate the use of corporate assets for lobbying and for any risks this spending can pose. We urge shareholders to vote for this proposal. Thank you.
Thank you, Sister. With respect to proposal number five, we will again hear from Ms. Clare Ciervo, now representing NorthStar Asset Management.
Morning again. As introduced, my name is Clare, I do work for NorthStar Asset Management in Boston. We are the beneficial owners of over 55,000 shares of Facebook stock. I'm here to ask for your support of resolution number five. Facebook's mission, as we all know, is to, quote, "Give people the power to share and to make the world more open and connected." We are succeeding in this mission, our company is not just in the public eye like most companies. It has become part of the public eye. Our corporate brand and reputation are built upon the premise of sharing, our company knows firsthand the power of issues going viral.
In order to protect our brand and shareholder value within this increasingly transparent world that Facebook has helped to create, we must ensure that our political giving is connected to the company's public policy priorities, and so far, our company has failed to do so. Facebook's CEO has stated that the company will support politicians who seek to further, quote, "open and free internet," unquote. Yet the Facebook Political Action Committee has contributed to politicians seeking to censure the internet through the Stop Online Piracy Act and PROTECT IP Act. Facebook PAC contributed to three sponsors of the Stop Online Piracy Act as recently as last fall. Facebook has a progressive consumer base which supports lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights, as does Facebook's stated company values. Yet Facebook has donated 41% of PAC contributions since its inception to politicians voting against LGBT rights.
Despite Facebook's public support for the environment, our PAC funds have supported, excuse me, at least eight senators that voted just last week against moving forward with an energy savings bill. Our PAC funds have supported climate change deniers such as Senator Ted Cruz, who earlier this year stated on CNN that over, quote, "the last 15 years, there has been no recorded warming," unquote, and whose own energy plan includes repealing EPA regulations. Our PAC has also donated two years in a row to senator and potential presidential candidate Marco Rubio, who 11 days ago on ABC News said that he does not believe human activity is causing dramatic changes to our climate and that legislation aimed at climate change will destroy our economy. Facebook needs a policy to align our political giving with our brand.
If we fail to resolve the disparity between what we stand for and which politicians we attach our brand to, we run the risk of one of our 1 billion active users exposing its hypocrisy for us. We run the risk of management appearing out of touch and unaware, thereby causing shareholder value to erode. To encourage management to protect our brand and our shareholder value, we ask you to vote yes for resolution number five. Thank you so much.
Thank you. With respect to proposal number six, Sister Susan Vickers, representing the Sisters of the Holy Names.
Good morning, Mr. Zuckerberg, members of the board, and shareholders. I'm here today representing the Sisters of the Holy Names and other co-filers of proposal number six. Our organization's commitment to children's welfare motivated us to file this proposal after our request for dialogue went unanswered. The resolution calls on the board to formally assess whether the scope, scale, and pace of implementation of the company's advertising and privacy policies are sufficient to prevent material impacts on the company's finances and operations due to public concerns about childhood obesity, as well as initiatives to eliminate or restrict food marketing to youth. Obesity in youth, which has lasting health repercussions and vast economic consequences, remains a grave public health threat. In this context, carrying extensive food marketing to youth, as Facebook does, exposes the company to significant regulatory and reputational risks.
Food marketing influences children's diets and thus has been intensely scrutinized by federal agencies, Congress, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the World Health Organization. The food industry is spending an increasing proportion of its marketing dollars to advertise to young people on social media. Facebook offers marketers access to an amount of personal data from young users that is unparalleled within the universe of social media platforms, subjecting Facebook to potential additional risk from regulation as well as litigation. The company's recent actions seem to exacerbate these risks. In 2013, Facebook announced it was easing its privacy policy for 13 - 17-year-olds, enabling their posts to be visible to anyone on Facebook. Facebook has changed its policies to make clear that simply by having a Facebook account, users allow the company to use their posting and other personal data for advertising.
Finally, Facebook has indicated that it is considering opening its platforms to children ages 12 and under. We urge shareholders support for this proposal, and we reiterate our request of the company's senior management to meet with the concerned investors on this important issue. Thank you.
Thank you, sister. Finally, with respect to proposal number seven, Mr. Patrick Doherty, representing the Comptroller of the State of New York.
Mr. Chairman, fellow shareholders, my name is Patrick Doherty. I'm here today on behalf of the New York State Common Retirement Fund to introduce the fund's resolution calling on Facebook to issue annual sustainability reports examining the company's environmental, social, and governance policies and practices. Environmental, social, and governance issues can pose significant risks to U.S. businesses. Without adequate disclosure, shareholders and analysts cannot determine whether the company is managing those risks properly. The majority of Fortune 500 and S&P 500 companies already recognize the value of comprehensive sustainability reporting by regularly issuing such reports. We believe that Facebook should join in their number. Therefore, on behalf of the New York State Common Retirement Fund, holders of 313,695 Facebook shares, I submit the resolution on sustainability reporting found in your proxy materials. Thank you.
Thank you. We will now provide responses to the stockholder proposals as they have already been set forth in the proxy statement. I will, however, now open up the floor for questions specifically on the proposals on our agenda. If you have a question, again, specifically relating to any of the proposals, please line up behind the microphone in the middle of the aisle. We ask again at this point that you restrict your questions to the proposals being voted on in the morning, that you limit your question or statement in support of to one minute. There will be an opportunity to ask general questions about Facebook later after the business portion of the morning. If you have a question related to the proposals but cannot get to a microphone, please raise your hand and someone will bring a microphone to you. Sir.
Yes, my name is Shelton Ehrlich. I'm a shareholder since the IPO. Thank you for making me money. I'd like to comment, as a conservative, that I found these proposals to be nonsensical. ALEC was a fine organization. Nobody objected to it until they suggested that people who vote should prove that they're citizens. The argument that the world has warmed in the past 15 years is negated by the evidence. If you look at the comparison of the models with the global temperatures, there has been no net increase in the past 15 years. No amount of argument will deny that fact. I'll have some more to say later.
Thank you. Are there any other questions relating to these specific proposals? Sir.
Yes. May I direct some questions to the board of directors? Is that proposal one, or is this not the time to do that?
Yes. If you have a question relating to the board nominees now would be the right time.
Okay. I don't know the position of the members of the board on notifying Facebook users about potential lawsuits and their position on Facebook engaging in litigation to silence critics, maybe engaging in frivolous litigation. I think that some companies in the Silicon Valley have engaged in lawsuits to silence their critics, such as Varian and some other publicized lawsuits. I was curious if they had some kind of general commitment or some kind of guiding principle to urge Facebook to avoid such lawsuits to silence other individuals.
I'm sorry, but I don't know the policy for notifying Facebook users about their account being subpoenaed in a civil lawsuit. Sometimes in litigation, in discovery, Facebook will get a subpoena. I wanted to know the legal extent to which Facebook was committed to notifying the users about their IP address and their identity being unmasked.
Thank you. The board's role is set forth in the corporate governance guidelines. It does not extend to making determinations as to the specific questions you raised. The qualifications for the directors themselves to perform the function set out in the corporate governance guidelines, in particular, providing strategic direction to the company, are set forth in the proxy statement, and we'll be voting on that basis. With respect to your specific question about the company's policy as to notifying users, as to when the contents of their account are being requested in connection with law enforcement investigations, those are set forth in our law enforcement guidelines, which you can find publicly available.
Okay.
We're gonna ask each stockholder to address one question so that others may have an opportunity. If you have general questions about that or other Facebook policies, you're certainly welcome to step to the mic during the general Q&A section, which will follow the formal business of the meeting. Thank you.
Hello. I have a question regarding proposal number three. The speaker said that, by virtue of the Class B shares and other executives have 10:1 voting rights over other shareholders, and by virtue of that, Mark himself has 55% of the voting rights. If that's true, then why are we even handing out ballots for people here to vote? Basically, Mark can decide what he wants without even counting our ballots.
Mark is As everyone knows, Mark is our founder and our CEO, and it's been his vision and leadership that has guided the company so far and been a substantial contributor to the company's success. We believe that voting structure enables the company to focus on the long term, which will continue to be a contributing factor in the company's success. With respect to stockholder voting, it's an important part of the American corporate structure, and we intend to honor it here, and we're delighted so many people came to share their views with us. Are there any other questions specifically relating to the proposals? Okay. That concludes the discussion of the proposals. We will now collect any remaining ballots.
Again, please raise your hand with your ballot in the air when you've completed your voting, and our volunteers will come around to collect them. Any other ballots that need to be collected? One. Anyone else? If you're still completing your ballot, you can raise your hand as well, and we'll hold off. Oh, got one. Okay. Anyone else? Ma'am, is she done? Yes. Okay. Almost. Hand it up. Great. Thank you. Okay, all votes have been cast on the proposals to be considered at the meeting, and as of 11:35 A.M., the polls are now closed. I will now confer with the Inspector of Election and report on the preliminary results of the voting.
The vote required to approve proposal one is a plurality of the voting power present in person or represented by proxy at this meeting, which means that the eight nominees receiving the highest number of affirmative votes will be elected to the board. Based on results as tabulated by the Inspector of Election, each of the eight nominees on the ballot received the highest number of affirmative votes cast, and therefore each of the nominees has been elected to the board of directors. The vote required to approve proposals two through seven is the majority of the voting power present in person or represented by proxy with respect to each such proposal.
Based on results as tabulated by the Inspector of Election, the proposal to ratify the appointment of Ernst & Young LLP, proposal two, has been approved by at least the requisite majority of the votes cast, and each of the stockholder proposals three through seven, has been rejected by at least the requisite majority of the votes cast. There are no other formal items of business before this meeting. Final results will be recorded as stated in the minutes of this meeting and filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on a Form 8-K within four business days. This concludes the formal part of our meeting, and the annual meeting is now adjourned.
Now, before I ask Mark to come up to the stage to share some thoughts on the company and to engage in a Q&A, I want to remind you that Mark's presentation and the Q&A that will follow may contain forward-looking statements regarding future events and the future financial performance of the company. We caution you to consider the important risk factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements in the presentation and the Q&A to follow. These risk factors are more fully detailed under the caption Risk Factors in our quarterly report on Form 10-Q, filed with the SEC on April 26th, 2014. In addition, please note that the date of this annual meeting is May 22nd, 2014, and any forward-looking statements that we make today are based on assumptions as of this date.
We undertake no obligation to update these statements as a result of new information or future events. Mark, over to you.
Thanks to all you guys for coming out today. This is an important tradition that we have, and we think it's really important that we get in front of all of our shareholders and have an opportunity to answer questions directly. I'm gonna keep my upfront comments pretty brief, so that way we can spend as much time as we can on questions and answers from you guys directly. Before we jump to that, I wanna just give an overview on how I think the last year has gone since our last shareholder meeting and give some highlights on what we're focused on and how we think the next few years are gonna go. The last year has been a pretty exciting and good one for us overall.
If 2012 was about starting to make this transition to mobile and starting to get our products ready for mobile, 2013 was really the year that our business became a mobile business. We now have more than 1 billion people using our products on mobile. That's 55% of people who use Facebook every day, use it only on mobile phones. Almost 60% of our revenue and business comes from mobile at this point. I think it's really fair to say that we've made this transition to now the majority of our business and the way that people use Facebook is on mobile, and that reflects a lot of hard work within the company, and we're really proud of that.
I think as shareholders, we should all feel good about that. Going forward, we're, you know, we're really excited now that we have our business in a strong place to really focus on building some new mobile-first products and experiences. If the last couple years have been about getting the way that people use Facebook to work really well on mobile, now we think we can focus on some new things that will deliver more value to people over time. This has been also an interesting year of reflection for us. It's been our 10-year anniversary in terms of running the company. We started in February 2004, so we just hit our 10-year anniversary. We've accomplished a pretty crazy amount in the last 10 years.
You know, connecting, you know, more than a billion and a quarter people, building a business that we're really proud of, that's generating a lot of profits for ourselves and shareholders. When we look forward to, you know, what the next 10 years have, you know, a lot of this is gonna be about helping people connect and do more in the ways that we've already helped in the last set of years. We also wanna make sure that we have some big, audacious goals that we're trying to set forward for how we wanna change the world over this period as well.
As a company, we've primarily talked about three high-level themes for the next 10 years: connecting everyone in the world, understanding the world and kind of everything around there for people, and helping to build the knowledge economy for folks. These three themes, I'll go into in a little bit of detail, and then we'll get to Q&A. Connecting everyone I think is actually pretty straightforward, right? We've connected about 1.28 billion people so far. There's about 7 billion people in the world. We have our work cut out for us. We have a lot more to do, and we're gonna focus on doing that. There are some new challenges ahead because about two-thirds of people in the world don't even have access to the Internet.
You know, there's a natural ceiling on how much we can do just connecting people who have a data connection on their phone or computer. We're gonna keep working on that. We also have this effort that we call Internet.org, which is about making sure that everyone in the world gets access to a basic internet connection. This is a program that we're investing a lot in, and we think it's really good for the world broadly to get everyone on the internet and will also over time be good for Facebook as we can grow the number of people who are connecting through us as well. That's kind of right, if you're thinking about getting everyone onto Facebook. We also wanna deepen the way that people connect on our service.
For that, we're really focused not just on building the main Facebook service, what we call internally the big blue app, but building kind of different services and different apps that people can use on their phones for sharing and connecting in different ways. You may have used the Facebook Messenger app. More and more people are using that. More than 200 million people use this for kind of daily texting and chatting. That's growing quickly. We also have made a few acquisitions, including Instagram, which now has more than 200 million people using it for sharing photos and videos with their community, which is often a different community than people have on Facebook.
And we recently announced that we're going to acquire WhatsApp, which has more than half a billion people using it primarily for SMS, mostly outside of the U.S. and abroad, but that's growing quickly as well. Those four services, in addition to a handful of other ones that we're planning on building, will make it so that people can. We're not only gonna increase the number of people who are connecting, but also deepen how they connect through our services. Moving on to the second theme of kind of helping to understand the world.
Our hope over the next 5 - 10 years is that on Facebook, people aren't just using it to share and communicate, but also can help answer real questions and solve problems that they have in the world that you don't typically think of a social network as helping you do today. Whether, you know, you need a recommendation for a plumber to come fix your home, or you're looking to have a recommendation of a hotel to stay in when you're on vacation. There are a lot of things that it's often difficult to use web search to find answers for today, what your friends think about different things. It's not indexed by any web search engine today.
Those are things that we think you can build a social network to be able to do. We're pretty early in the journey towards doing that, and that's gonna be a multiyear voyage to get there. We think over a 5-10-year period, we can deliver a lot of value for people and ultimately shareholders by doing that. The final theme that I wanna talk about is building the knowledge economy. What we really mean by this is we think that there's this theme in the world where more people are using information to do their jobs on a day-to-day basis.
What we see in our business, which is primarily advertising, is that large companies have a lot of insights about who their customers are and can use that to market to them effectively and build personalized products and all kinds of different things. What we've found is that a large part of our business is not only serving large advertisers and customers, but also a lot of small businesses, right? We're really proud of the millions and millions of small businesses who use Facebook to be able to sell their product to people and grow and learn about their customers as well. A big part of our goal is to make it so that every small business owner has the same tools and insights about the people that they serve as large companies do.
We think that the world will be a better, and more, democratic, and stronger economic place if all small businesses have those tools. That's a big theme of what we're focused on as well. There's one more thing that I wanted to talk about before we go to Q&A, besides these three big themes for the next 10 years of connecting everyone, understanding the world, and building the knowledge economy. That's about what kind of culture I think we need to build at Facebook in order to achieve these goals over the next 10 years. We've talked a lot about this hacker culture that we have at Facebook, and what we mean by that isn't that we're hacking into things.
We think that that's a different definition of hacking that we strongly do not condone. What we mean when we say hacking is this MIT definition, which is, you know, people kind of messing around, experimenting as a way of building things, trying something, seeing what works, trying something else, tinkering a lot until you come up with something that serves people really well. That's been a really good approach for us over time, and it's helped us move really quickly and build a lot of different things. What we've found is our culture is very internally focused. When we talk about our hacker culture and our culture of building, it's all about how we do things, and it's not about the people we serve.
We have a stated goal inside our company, which is to build a culture of loving the people we serve, all the more than 1 billion people who use our services, that is as strong, if not stronger, than our internal culture of how we build things. We think we need to do that over the next 10 years in order to actually achieve these goals of helping to connect everyone and understand the world and help build the knowledge economy and the economy that we all want. We're really excited to do that. A lot of what we've started doing is just looking at the problems that people have using our services and trying to fix them.
You know, some of the problems are really basic things like content doesn't load as quickly as people want, so we focused a lot on making that go quickly. But one of the biggest themes of feedback that we hear is that people always wanna make sure they understand how they're sharing content on our service. Recently, we've taken a bunch of steps to make it a lot more clear to folks who they're sharing with and give them even more control than they've had in the past. Including just this morning, we announced that we're launching this privacy checkup for everyone on Facebook. Now when you post, we're gonna have this thing pop up that kind of suggests to you, "Hey, here's who you're sharing with.
Is this who you wanna be sharing with? Like, here are some different audiences that might be, if we think that you might be sharing more broadly than you intend to be, suggesting that maybe you share with a few fewer people, maybe just your friends. You know, this, we think it's taking our responsibility seriously to make sure that people have control over who they're sharing with. Over time, we think that that is gonna serve everyone who's using Facebook better and help us achieve the long-term goals that we have.
This is an important symbolic shift for our company, taking loving the people who we serve, as seriously as our own internal culture of building things, which we've been very proud of over the last 10 years. I just wanted to close with that. Now I guess we'll invite Sheryl and Elliot , and David up to help answer questions as well.
We will shortly open for general Q&A. We anticipate taking questions until approximately 12:15 P.M. The queue's already formed, please go ahead and line up. One moment, please. That we may answer as many questions from as many stockholders as possible, we request that you only ask one question. Before we open it up to general Q&A, we're honored to have with us the Reverend Jesse Jackson. I'd like to invite Reverend Jackson to the microphone to make a statement and ask the first question.
Thank you very much. Good morning. To you, Mark, with your special genius, we're indebted, all of us are. We owe for a lot, in particular, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation and your other principal position on progress and the NSA, we're grateful for that. Sheryl, for your book, Lean In, which we want an autographed copy of today. David and Erskine, my grandson, [Raven Homeboy] from North Carolina, Donald Graham, and other board members. I want to thank you for the opportunity to present to you today, and ask all of you to give a special moment of silence for the girls lost in Nigeria somewhere. Just today, a young woman who had been kidnapped from her mother and taken away for 10 years was found on Facebook. For that, we are grateful for this special technology.
For the girls of Nigeria, shall we give a moment of silence? Amen. I wish Dr. King and Chavez and Mandela were here today. They may never have used a mobile phone. Dr. King certainly did not. They're long witnessed the wonders of Facebook and other technology transforming our world. What they fought for and died for, the vote, the poor are now on attack. Rapid rise, access to guns has much, too much violence, hatred, and fear. I speak to you today representing the Rainbow PUSH Coalition about the need to open up a new era of growth and inclusion of African Americans, Latinos, and other people of color in Silicon Valley's technology industry. Inclusion leads to growth. When there's growth, everybody wins. Facebook is uniquely positioned to lead this new era. We will not know how good Silicon Valley can be until everybody can participate.
All we ask is that everyone plays by one set of rules and that there is an even playing field for all. It's the moral imperative. We want mutually beneficial two-way trade. We share consumer patterns together, pay taxes together. We serve in the military together to keep our nation secure. We should share in America's opportunity and growth together. There is an imbalance. Too much one-way trade, too many left out, too many gaps between the surplus and deficit cultures, just a canyon. Those left out represent money, market, talent, and location. You have technology, expertise, and resources. We can all win if we close the gaps. African American and Latino cultures will comprise a huge and fast-growing part of our-- your customer base. In a short period of time, minorities will comprise a new majority population in California.
Technology is supposed to be about inclusion, sad the patterns of exclusion remains the order of the day. Let me state some facts. Zero Blacks and Latinos in the C-suites, all too often. Tech powerhouses, including Facebook, Apple, and Google, new media companies like Twitter, have zero Blacks on their boards of directors. In the C-suites, Facebook, like Facebook, Twitter, Facebook, Apple, and far too many other companies, have zero African Americans on their boards or Latinos in their leadership positions in the C-suites. Just as women leaders are now making their headway, like Sheryl, Marissa Mayer at Yahoo, companies like Facebook must build a pipeline for an African Americans and people of color to Lean In and move up, too. Schools cost less than jails. If we can't find them, grow them. They really do exist.
Facebook and other tech firms can find us when they need consumers of technology. We can be found, the CEOs and CFOs and the lawyers and ad agents and engineers as well. We stand ready to work with you in that search to find them. We really know where they are. Rainbow PUSH Minority Inclusion Report, the debt capital markets and ranking of corporate issuers. Reports Facebook, which under David Ebersman's leadership, included several minority women and people of color in your initial IPO. For that, we are grateful.
Sir, I'd ask you to respect the questioner. Thank you.
When it comes to minority inclusion in employment, procurement, professional services, advertising and marketing, Silicon Valley has a long way to go. There are just simply too many gaps. I make this appeal to you today sincerely because I am convinced that we are a better America when all of us are involved together. These questions I leave with you today. Will Facebook voluntarily and publicly release your EEO-1 report or data on the race and gender makeup of your workforce? Will Facebook make a commitment to include Blacks and Latinos on your board of directors? Specifically, would you agree to place a bylaw and amendment similar to Apple that require an explicit and active search for women and people of color for all your board openings?
Will Facebook commit to a bylaw provision to mandate that women and people of color are included as part of your search for C-suite, C-suite level positions? Facebook commit to include the Black minority firms in all debt offerings and future financial transactions and building pipelines for education? Let me express this profound sincere thanks to you today. What you've done in 10 years is no less than a global revolution. The face of this new America is not tobacco, it's not cotton, it's not Detroit, it's high tech, it's Silicon Valley, it's you. God has blessed you in very special ways.
I think about Dr. King's work at 26, Mark, and yours at 28. How blessed you are at such a young age to have such a special genius, and therefore a burden of opportunity to lead us to higher ground. We, the government, never will, but you can, and you must. Thank you very much.
Is this on? Yeah. Reverend Jackson, it's an honor to have you here, and we thank you for your support, your appreciation of our technology, and also your very strong words on the importance of diversity. We agree with you. We have a community that's over 1.2 billion people around the world, and that's an incredibly diverse community. It is good for us and important that the people who are building Facebook represent the community we serve fully, and that means full representation of all kinds of people who have historically been underrepresented. We've taken this quite seriously. Over the past year, we've set up our first, very explicit diversity hiring and diversity program under the leadership of Maxine Williams, wave, who's here with us today.
We're in the early days of what we're doing, but I'll share a few words on where we're focusing at first and where we intend to grow. Our focus right now is really on trying to hire more people into the company as well as grow their careers. We do this in three ways. We've built a number of great partnerships, groups like the National Society of Black Engineers, the Hispanic Alumni of Georgia Tech, Grace Hopper, Girls Who Code, Management Leadership for Tomorrow. These partnerships have been great because they are really helping us get great candidates and reach out.
We set up last summer for the first time our own Facebook U, Facebook University, which is a minority and women-focused paid summer internship program, looking for candidates who don't necessarily have already the coding skills that we normally hire in, but people who we believe we can train. We had a really successful summer, getting people up to speed who had great technical skills in the areas we needed them, and we've grown the program by 60% this summer. We're also working really hard at our internal recruiting programs. We believe, as you do, that transparency is really important, and we're on a path to get there. We're looking at our numbers internally. We're seeing growth already from what we're doing, and we would like to be on a path to share them both internally and eventually externally as well.
Not EEO?
You know, where we are right now, and I think other companies you've talked to and been to their shareholder meetings have said the same thing, which is that it's really important to share those numbers internally and eventually do that externally. We're on that same path that others are on. When it comes to board candidates, when and if our board expands, we are very committed to looking broadly, including looking at candidates with diverse backgrounds.
On minority-owned firms, they participate in our IPO, and we continue to keep in touch with them, you know, for future opportunities if we have other capital leasing. We also, I know, have had some contact with you. I know Maxine and our CFO had a chance to sit down with you. In all of these things, I think we'll look to you and others, for candidates. Again, we really wanna say that we agree how important this is, and we're grateful that you're here with us today. Thank you.
Sheryl, as I Lean In, please like me on Facebook, Reverend Jackson.
I would love to. I will.
Selling your book, you sell mine, Facebook. I say this in closing. I made a little joke toward the Earth thing. The reason why I push so hard on this issue of expansion and inclusion, we didn't know how good baseball could be till everybody could play. We just really didn't know. Where we come from in the South, that is a new South now because the walls are down. People behind the walls thought they were doing right well. You couldn't have had the Carolina Panthers and the Falcons behind the cotton curtain. All the Cowboys and the Texans, you couldn't have had the whole new world has changed because walls came down. We come here today, not so much in protest, but in an appeal for partnership because we know that partnership works, and everybody's included, everybody grows. Thank you so very much.
Thank you.
Thank you, Reverend. We'll take our first question from the audience. Thank you.
Thank you. I'm neither a tax advisor, an accountant, or an attorney. I'm just one of those crazy anti-spammers who likes seeing spammers crushed. I do appreciate the $711 million judgment against Sanford Wallace. From what I've read, you've recognized that it's pretty much unenforceable or at least for a good amount of the money because he doesn't have it or he's hid it very well. I'm thinking, to be nice, you may want to forgive $200,000 of it and send him a 1099 and let the IRS harass him until the end of eternity because it is a taxable event.
Thank you. I can assure you that we've not certainly committed that it's uncollectible, and we're doing our best to collect it. More generally, I think the sentiment about keeping the site and keeping the internet secure from bad actors is one we certainly hold dear, and we have a solid crew of folks who are working on that every day.
It's just, from what I've seen of the IRS, they're probably a lot more effective than your legal team at getting money and putting people in prison.
It's a great idea. Candidly, I hadn't thought of it, and we'll take it back.
Hello, my name is Joe Shelton-Erlick. I'm a Palo Alto resident. I wanna thank Mark for raising our real estate values. My question is regarding shareholder proposals. I talked to the CFO before the meeting. I think that this company should try to get some of them kicked out by petitioning the Securities and Exchange Commission. Only one of these proposals, the number three, was germane to the company's operation, dealing with voting.
The rest are manipulations of this meeting to make political statements. The representative of the Comptroller of the State of New York spoke about sustainability. He's really here to get publicity for his boss so that he can run for a higher office. That's happened in the state of New York, and there have been some very bad governors. Thank you.
Thank you. Next question.
Hi, my name is Debra, individual shareholder from San Jose, California. My question will be, does Facebook a dividend-paying stock? If not, will Facebook consider paying dividend to their shareholder upcoming year, et cetera?
Thank you for your question, Debra. We take very seriously the work we do to ensure that we invest every dollar wisely in trying to grow the company, and that we're very careful with all uses of shareholder capital and capital that we get from operating the business. At this time, our focus really is on using the cash we have to invest in growing the business and to trying to build some of the things that Mark described during his remarks. We don't pay a dividend and don't anticipate doing so in the near future. As the company matures and grows, we look forward to having conversations about what the best use of our capital is.
Okay. Thank you.
Hi. I know Facebook does business throughout the world. My question is: To the extent legally possible, does Facebook notify its users as soon as possible about a civil, not a criminal, subpoena for their identity and information within their Facebook account? If Facebook does not notify the users as much as legally possible, I'd just like to know why that is the case.
Thank you for your question. With respect to civil litigation, our policy is that account contents are not available via civil subpoenas unless it involves the parties to the litigation. Our policy in that standpoint is that people have access to their own accounts, and if they're liable, if they're subject to a request like that in litigation, they can access their own materials. That's the policy. We seek to enforce it in courts throughout the country and throughout the world.
That means in a lawsuit against just John Does, where there's no named defendant, you would not produce any information, a subpoena arising from the such a lawsuit.
That would be our policy, we would seek to assert that position in court. It's ultimately up to the judge. If you have a specific issue, we'd certainly feel free to reach out to us, and we'll try to address it as best we can.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you.
Good morning, everyone. My name is Kerwin McKenzie, I guess it's quite a difference from last year to this year, I guess you guys are doing well. Thank you. I guess it's for Mark and Sheryl, is that right? I'm glad that you guys are opening the doors to communication. Thank you very much. My question is really about Facebook advertising. When will I be able to, like, talk to someone? If I have an issue with an ad that I posted, right now there isn't any way to talk to anyone. If I give you feedback, it's just as you accept your feedback, but there's no, and I can't talk to anyone. There's no email in, there's no phone call, there's no address. You say advertising is your big thing, so we need to talk to someone.
Well, I think we'd be happy. We have someone here who can talk to you. We'll do that right after the meeting. In general, advertising is important to us, and We have over 1 million advertisers, and so we try to provide service online, so they're able to answer questions. When not, we should speak to them. We're happy to speak to you. We'll make sure someone does.
Okay. I just hope that there's something online that we can, you know, for everybody else. Thank you, I appreciate it.
Thank you.
Yeah. After today, I guess we have people with Facebook shirts around. If you have a question about the service or advertising, just make sure that you find one of them, and then we'll definitely reach out to you and try to help you with whatever issue you're having.
Great. Thank you.
Yeah.
Hi. Hi, Dan Benton, Andor Capital. I've been a technology investor for 30 years, and I don't usually come to annual meetings, and this may be why. We own three million shares, and we're very happy. They wouldn't let me bring my bag in, so I had to write my notes on my phone. First of all, Mark Zuckerberg, I want to thank you for you and your team for absolutely building a remarkable company. We're delighted to be shareholders. Facebook's known for its aphorisms, "Done, not perfect," "Move fast and break things." We make money to make great services. We don't make great services to make money.
That aggressive thinking is what allowed you to create the online advertising business, branded business, and to do a remarkable thing in the last 12 months, which is to transition the company from desktop to mobile. You outlined three very audacious goals in your comments earlier. At F8 you said, "We're going to move fast with stable infrastructure." You've made two very sizable acquisitions this year, in dollars, but I think between the two of them, it's about 155 people. I'm sure they're great people. You've got great people too. The company celebrated its 10th anniversary this year, you celebrate your 30th birthday.
As you think about the next decade, the company has to balance innovation with risk-taking, I guess, a little bit differently than before. Could you talk about that balance and how we don't lose what we created in the last decade?
I guess one philosophy I have on running a company is that you get to choose what you emphasize, right? At the end of the day, you get what you put your time into and what you put your money behind. One thing that we've always cared about is moving fast. You know, technology companies have this interesting property where there's some things that benefit as they grow, right? Like, we have this bigger community, and that's valuable because now new people signing up can have all the people they wanna connect with or generally are already gonna be on Facebook. At the same time as the company grows, the companies actually get slower, right? What we've aimed to do is have Facebook always be very fast for the number of people that we have, right?
Right now, you know, we have less than 10,000 employees. Every other company that I can think of that serves anywhere near the number of people that we have has tens or hundreds of thousands of employees, right? One way that we move quickly is just by trying to stay lean. It's always an ongoing effort, and you have to make trade-offs in order to be able to move quickly. Historically, one of the trade-offs that we made was we tolerated some defects in the product, right?
We said, "It's okay if the product isn't 100% perfect because as long as we can move quickly and learn quickly, then we'll end up building a better product for people over time, even if today there's a flaw, some small flaws in the product." What we found over time is that now we have so many people who are building things at Facebook that when there are small issues, people then have to go back and fix those issues, and it actually ends up taking more time if you develop with these flaws than if you just did it correctly the first time.
now we're choosing to make a different set of trade-offs, and instead of move fast and break things, which typically meant move fast while allowing some flaws, what we're doing is moving fast by instead building really good, stable infrastructure on top of which we can build really quickly. 'Cause when you have good, solid infrastructure, then that allows you to move around and do different things very quickly. now our strategy for moving quickly has really been about investing upfront and building the best infrastructure and tools to enable us to develop in the industry. we think we're gonna continue to lead in that, and we think we're gonna continue to be able to move very quickly because of that.
My name is Ben Avidor, I'm from Oakland, California. I'm actually here to alert the investors about e-trading, which keeps the price of the share down forever. E-trading is equivalent to using sports enhancement drugs for athletes, which is not allowed because it's not fair to others. E-trading is like an enhancement for those people who use it puts others in a very tenuous situation of not being able to compete. My observation is that the stocks should have been about $100-$150 today, the electronic trading constantly sucks out the profit within seconds. It goes up and down, yoyoing up and down, you will never make it beyond a certain number as long as that system is being used, it's not fair to most investors.
I have an envelope here for Miss Sandberg, if it's okay to give it to her.
Sir, why don't you give it to one of the volunteers wearing the Facebook shirt? Yeah, there. We'll make sure she gets it. Thank you.
Thank you for listening.
Hello. My name is Bragi. I'm an Investigator of Artificial Intelligence based in Palo Alto. I have a question to Mark regarding how Facebook will maintain leading position in the next decade. I'm very worrying about that, Facebook might be displaced by Google+, if Google has correct artificial intelligence before Facebook does. Because artificial intelligence allows the understanding the pictures and the videos in a way that kind of rivals humans. If Google crack that first, basically they can implement that in the Google+ so that users of Google+ could benefit from the orders of magnitude, better connections between people.
So far, Google has been leading at putting a lot of resources into acquiring the talents in artificial intelligence, and which I believe that Facebook is lagging behind them a lot. I want to ask Mark, what kind of proposals or road maps do you have regarding jumping forward and get a lead over Google in correcting artificial intelligence?
Well, I mean, it's an interesting question on a, on a number of fronts. I mean, certainly different technology platform breakthroughs present business challenges. The most recent one that we saw was mobile. You know, what we've seen in a lot of companies throughout the history of the technology industry is a lot of companies don't survive these big platform transitions, right? If you look at, for example, Microsoft, which is certainly doing well and surviving, but their operating system business from Windows didn't really continue the way that they wanted when people transitioned to using phones and tablets. Certainly, other technology breakthroughs in the future will bring other challenges. A lot of the question that we have is what are those big technology breakthroughs gonna be?
AI is interesting in that people have been saying that real AI is about to come for a very long time. When it certainly comes, it's going to be a quite a disruptive thing. What we see is that there are specific applications that are much more useful that will probably come before what you and I would consider kind of a fully artificially in-intelligent entity. We employ a lot of these different things today. You know, one of the things that we do is, you know, people upload and share a lot of photos on Facebook, one thing that people do is they wanna tag people in their photos so that way, you know, I can go see, you know, all the photos of David, right?
You know, all the photos that have me and my wife in them, for example. You can do that very easily when you know who are in the photos. We've been working on building really good algorithms and tools to help people tag the photos that they want. You know, certainly something like that, it solves what you would consider a big human intelligence problem, and vision is one of the things that makes us human, is that we can identify people and recognize patterns. It's not full AI, it's one of the important problems that the benchmark for that universities and different organizations use to measure how well different teams are doing at that. I think we actually do quite well at that.
We're recruiting a lot of the best people in the world, including one of the leaders in AI, Yann LeCun from NYU. A bunch of folks have joined us from top universities and other top companies. This is one area that we're actually investing quite heavily in, although I would be skeptical that we will see true AI within the near term. I think there will be other technological breakthroughs before that.
Great. Thank you, Mark.
If you wanna apply to join our team, anyone with a Facebook, I'm serious. Anyone with a Facebook T-shirt.
Much appreciated. Hi, John Lin, individual investor. First I'd like to commend Sheryl Sandberg and Facebook for not agreeing to participate in the anti-poaching collusion pact that was led by Apple along with Google, Adobe, et cetera. I think this is a very dangerous thing that was discovered, which has led to the growth of Silicon Valley in general, the free flow of tech talent. Congratulations on hiring John Lagerling from Google to Facebook on the mobile business side. Secondly, just want to wish Mark a happy belated birthday and hope that you now being over 30 years old and officially over the hill, that you can continue to lead Facebook for decades to come. Welcome to the club.
On a more serious note, in the past year, there's been a lot of media coverage on the growing income inequality and gentrification of San Francisco and Silicon Valley, most symbolized in the protest against Facebook and Google buses. I'd like to know how Facebook has been proactively engaging in the San Francisco Bay Area community, as well as other geographies it has a corporate presence in to be a better corporate citizen. Working in the tech industry here in Silicon Valley, I am growing increasingly concerned about the perception of the industry turning a blind eye and let them eat cake attitude that is being painted.
Why don't I take that? We take our responsibilities as a company and as a part of a community really seriously. We're a part With more than 1 billion people around the world, we're a part of lots of different communities geographically. Here in the Bay Area, we have several homes. We have lots of people who work for us in San Francisco proper. We have an active community right near our headquarters in Menlo Park, in Menlo Park in East Palo Alto, and we have lots of people who live all around the Bay Area. For us, being a good citizen is really not just about San Francisco. It's really about integrating in all of those communities.
We've started pretty aggressively working first and foremost in the community that's closest to us in Menlo Park, in East Palo Alto. We have, you know, we have active relationships with the city and with the local school district. In fact, there has been funding local community groups through I think it's almost half a million dollar community fund that we've had in Palo Alto, East Palo Alto, Menlo Park. In moving further north in Redwood City, we've been doing a lot of work already with the school district there. We will be doing more with the city and the community as well. We have an active team. I think Susan Gonzales is one of the people who leads that team. She's here today.
Susan, if you wanna raise your hand so that people can see that you're here, and she can go on, you know, at quite length in some of the detail that we do. San Francisco obviously is really, really important. We work very closely with the mayor, with the supervisors, to make sure people understand the contributions that we make. Frankly, we've been somewhat surprised by the response to an activity of the shuttle buses that we actually think are positive environmentally, are actually good for reducing congestion. In fact, some of the surveys that have been done really demonstrate that the population as a whole really appreciates that.
Because we do have an active presence with so many workers who are there, people work very closely with community groups. We have a close relationship with the Mission Economic Development Agency. We've been focusing on issues related to digital literacy. We've been doing a lot of work with nonprofit groups in San Francisco and around the world. I know I'm going on long. We're doing lots of things. We will do more. And I think if you've heard people talk about Facebook, as you hear Mark describe our vision, our vision really is one of building community, and we wanna do that not only on the side of virtual communities, but also physical communities, and our employees are very engaged in that.
Thank you.
Good afternoon. My name is Greg Coladonato. I'm a local resident and individual investor. I'd like to thank Mark, the senior executives, and the board for the strong stance you've taken in favor of user privacy at those times when the federal government, at those times when the federal surveillance agencies seem to have gone too far. Thank you, Mr. Jackson. Just this morning, the U.S. House of Representatives passed something called the USA FREEDOM Act. I'd like to ask if you have an opinion on that. In my own research, looking at different representatives' opinions, I found only one representative who posted an essay to Facebook, who didn't vote for this act and his reasonings why not. I'd like to also know why more Congress people don't do this.
If there's anything to follow on, Mark, your point about a better world and a more open, you know, a more democratic world, is there anything Facebook or third parties can be doing to foster legislators to share their reasoning for how they voted on bills? I'm especially interested in this because I'm actually running for the state assembly for this district. I have pledged to do that where I could be elected, and I think all electeds should do this as well. Thank you.
I'll follow up. We are already over time, so I'm gonna try to be brief, and I think we're probably gonna have to cut off a number of questions. We're actually pretty disappointed in the USA FREEDOM Act. It actually got some amendments at the end that expanded the scope of permissible government intrusion and the breadth of government requests. We've been part of what's called a coalition that's called the Reform Government Surveillance, a coalition of companies, Microsoft, Google, Apple, others, that have been really calling for improved transparency of government requests, limited access to government, by government to private user data, avoiding conflicts between governments where we often get caught in the middle, and greater accountability within government.
It's been really frustrating to us how challenging it has been to get other to get government officials to be supportive. We understand that there's a balance between national security and privacy. We think the dial has been turned much too far towards security and with much too little respect for individual privacy and security of individual data. I think Mark's been pretty outspoken about that.
As Elliot said, we are over time. We'll have time for two more questions.
My name is Hal Husley. I live in Los Altos Hills, I thank you for having the meeting closer to my house. Anyway, being serious, I'm ex-Air Force and ex-IBM as a Booz Allen, I bill people for my advice and time. This is an awkward question, I'll throw it out to you. My thought was you should consider having a committee with some people on the board and some of your management to explore boycotting Israel. I say that only because.
Okay. Please be respectful. Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Thank you. Okay.
Thank you for your contribution. We have time for only one more question, unfortunately.
My name is Rose [Gaxadder]. I own 12,000 shares of Facebook. I'm on my own. Facebook made history in my life, or I made history because of Facebook. I do not use Facebook for anything, except I have seen pictures of my relatives through their cell phone. Anyway, my son came home one day, he live in San Fran, and he said, "Mom, I want you to invest in Facebook, in the secondary market." I said, "Where's that?" He said, "I'll fill up the form for you." I said, "What's the minimum?" "$100K." "Oh, that's a lot," I said. Not only that it's $100K, when he placed his order, he asked for $250,000.
I said, "Oh my gosh." I said, "I'm gonna be in trouble." I pulled out money from my on my house, which my husband had set up for me. My husband died of cancer four years ago. He's an engineer of Northrop Grumman, who had encouraged me to go to invest in stock market. He had guided me when he was alive, I had become braver. Anyway, my son did not buy the first offer that he wants to buy at that $250,000. I was so pleased. I went back to the bank and deposited that money. Six months after, on March 28, 2011, he said, "Mom, I'm going to place an order for Facebook again." I said, "Okay.
How much?" "$100K." He did, he bought. On November 2011, he said, "I'm going to buy some more because I want you to stay more in the stock market than real estate or because my husband has rental houses and apartments." I said, "Okay." He bought some more of his, I think $100, almost $110,000. I was underwater for over two years. Not only that, I become braver. Fidelity representative had offered me a 50 or 60 free trade if I put $50,000 on my account. I said, "I'm not a day trader, and I don't think I'll use all of that, but I'll take it." I did.
On your IPO, I also asked Fidelity when they get my $50,000, said, "I want also to have 1,000 shares when you get distributions from companies for you." You know, I think they get that, institutional investors. Anyway, on your IPO, I received two calls. The senior account executive with Fidelity at Sunnyvale left a message on my machine, but I did not get any. The second call, my daughter, who's a teacher, said, "Mom, I want you to buy me 100 shares Facebook no matter what price." I said, "Okay." I did. From your IPO, which you started at $38, I think, it went up to $45. I started buying. I bought it at $40 and a quarter.
I bought it at $5, blah, blah, until you went down to I got 1,000 shares when it was under $19, yeah, under $20. I became braver and saw some other stuff. I bought 500 shares at the $19.35. When it went to $19, I think that's your lowest point, or under $19, I bought 250. I heard that stock of Facebook is going down. It's gonna go to $15. I did not tell any of my friends or relatives that I am under, that I own Facebook, and I am underwater. Anyway, I bought 250, and I'm waiting for the $15. It never happened.
I want to congratulate all of you that you had worked so hard to pull up your stock because you pulled me up underwater. Fidelity senior account executive told me, "Why did you spend so much money?" He said, when they, I asked them to wire money for me to New York twice, said, "You are putting money in a company you don't even know where it will go." Which is true. Now he told me that, "You know that you are the only few Fidelity investors I know that have this many Facebook stocks." Said, "No, I do not." My reason is that my husband, who passed away, had real estate that was sold. I want to see whether I make money or lose money, real estate or Facebook. I did that.
For over two years, I did not sell any because I am underwater. I'm a long-term investor. Anyway, on your IPO, May 18, 2012, you, Mark, and Sheryl had been invited to be the guest of Mr. Charlie Rose. There was an interview. I don't know how I get it. He had Tumblr CEO, PayPal CEO, and the third one was Mark that was interviewed. He asked you, Charlie Rose asked you, "What do you want to do with Facebook? What's your mission?" "I want to connect the world." I think these were the words, something like that is your answer. The fourth one that was interviewed by Charlie Rose is Marc Andreessen. I know Marc Andreessen had Netscape and so forth.
Ma'am, Can you wind it down, or do you have a question for the panel?
Okay.
The story's great, and we certainly appreciate your confidence in the company.
On your company stockholders meeting last year, your stock was $24. I asked you then, "Is $24 a buy?" "How low?" You said, my answer was, "No, we don't know. We don't have a crystal ball." Today, your stock is $60. Is it a buy?
That's an excellent question.
I think this is your story is a great way to end because, one, we appreciate your faith in us. I think more importantly, we believe we have a responsibility to every shareholder, the ones who are kind enough to join us today, but also the ones all over the world who invest in us and to the people who use our product every day. Our responsibility is very simple and very clear, but we think very important, which is we wanna build a product that helps connect the world. We wanna offer a product every day that gives the people who use it real value, whether it's the Reverend Jackson's point of someone finding someone who's been gone for 10 years or the simple everyday things that make a birthday a special occasion or help you keep in touch with your friends.
In order to do that, we have to build a great business. We are long-term thinkers. We don't promise anything in the short run, but we promise that we are going to work hard every single day to build a product that people use and build a business that enables us to grow. Thank you all for being here.