Facebook on Wednesday filed its S-1 form with the SEC for an Initial Public Offering.
The company is seeking to raise $5 billion.
You can check out the S-1 here.
Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has also penned a letter outlining the goals behind the company's IPO.
"Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected," he wrote. "We think it’s important that everyone who invests in Facebook understands what this mission means to us, how we make decisions and why we do the things we do."
He went on to write, in part,
Facebook aspires to build the services that give people the power to share and help them once again transform many of our core institutions and industries. [...] There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on.
Visit TechCrunch to read Zuckerberg's entire letter.
According to the S-1, the company will trade under the ticker symbol "FB."
The IPO's lead underwriters include Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs. Other underwriters are Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Barclay’s Capital, and Allen & Company.
In 2011, the company boasted $3.7 billion in revenue -- 85% of that coming from advertising -- and a net income of $1 billion. That year, Zuckerberg's base salary was $500,000. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, meanwhile, enjoyed a base salary of $300,000 in 2011.
The filing also revealed that the service now has 845 million monthly active users.
Take a look at the slideshow (below) to see a sampling of Twitter reactions to Facebook's huge announcement. Then, read on to see the best new stats Facebook revealed when it filed its S-1, as well as 9 huge risks that could threaten Facebook's success. Read on to see how you helped Facebook evolve from a Harvard doom room project to a tech juggernaut.