Facebook filed its is S-1 paperwork for an initial public offering Wednesday and for the first time the company gave a look into its revenue and where the company is going.
The company filed its S-1 paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission under the symbol "FB" for a $5 billion IPO. (See page 16 (pdf) of SEC filing doc here.)
The filing shows that Mark Zuckerberg owns 28.4 percent of the company and Facebook brought in $3.7 billion in revenue last year and about $1 billion in free cash flow.
Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz owns 7.6 percent, early investor Peter Thiel 2.5 percent and new COO Sheryl Sandberg owns 0.1 percent of the company
Digging deeper, the filing reveals that Facebook had 483 million daily active users in December 2011 and it is trying to diversify its revenue stream by decreasing its reliance on advertising.
About 85 percent of the company's revenue comes from advertising but a growing amount coming from Facebook payments. The company's advertising used to account for upwards of 98 percent of its revenue.
Facebook also listed a series of potential risks on the horizon. In its filing, Facebook highlighted about 50 risk factors for the company.
The risks center on the possibility of using some of its more than 800 million users and a potential decline in advertising.
Facebook also pointed to Google+ and Twitter as potential risks to its business.
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The filing also means Facebook will trade shares of its social-networking company in the coming months, possibly as early as May.
The S-1 is the first step a private company takes with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to sell shares on the open market.
Shares of the Menlo Park-based company will not actually go on sale Wednesday but most analysts believe shares could hit the market in May.
"So kind of an exciting day for me to be chatting with you," Randi Zuckerberg said to a marketing conference in South San Francisco.
"Something really exciting happened today ... My son started crawling."
Zuckerberg, former CMO of Facebook and older sister of Mark Zuckerberg, was visibly excited at the news of the IPO filing -- news she got in the car on the way to the conference. Zuckerberg was the keynote speaker at iStrategy today. Her son, Asher, is nine months old.
Below is raw video from tech expert Kevin Landis during an interview from the Silicon Valley bureau of CNBC.
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