Facebook builds Washington presence ahead of IPO

With an initial public offering set to take place in a few months, Facebook is bolstering its ties to Washington. Cecilia Kang reports:

The company has put political veterans in key executive roles and board positions. It’s also quickly built up a powerhouse Washington lobbying operation and established a political action committee to make it easy for employees to donate to candidates.

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It will need those relationships, experts say, as it tries to ward off regulations and investigations over its privacy practices — which are among the greatest risks to its unbridled growth, the company revealed this week in a federal filing for its plannedstock offering.

“They are going all out to hire people who are well-connected and buying the Rolodexes that these people bring from the government,” said Steve Stesney, a product manager at First Street, a software company that provides analysis on politics and lobbying. He said Facebook is moving more aggressively than other big Silicon Valley companies to embrace corporate America’s traditional approach to Washington.

Facebook has studied mistakes by older rivals, such as Google and Microsoft, and is responding quickly, experts say, by strategically hiring experienced Democratic and Republican operatives. The company has brought on key operatives from the past three administrations.

Last year it hired Marne Levine, who was chief of staff to Obama’s former chief economic adviser Larry Summers, as head of global public policy in Washington. General counsel Theodore Ullyot was deputy assistant to President George W. Bush. Joe Lockhart, Facebook’s vice president of communications, was President Bill Clinton’s press secretary.

And the most crucial person to Facebook after co-founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg is political veteran Sheryl Sandberg, its chief operating officer, the company said in its filing. Sandberg, who was Summers’s chief of staff when he served as Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, has increasingly become the “grown-up” face for Facebook, experts say, representing the company at high-powered government and business meetings, such as the World Economic Forum at Davos.

With 845 million users and plans to expand overseas, Facebook said it needs to have experienced political staff to defend itself in front of numerous regulators around the world.

Washington may not be the only city the social-networking company has its eye on. Fred Vogelstein writes that the company also may be looking to deepen its ties with Hollywood:

Facebook has $1 billion in cash now. It will have at least $6 billion when its IPO is complete later this year. And it’s not hard to imagine where some of that money is headed: content deals with Hollywood. Almost from the day he started Facebook, founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has talked about it as a next-generation media company. It’s no accident that two of his six board members are media executives — Netflix founder and chief executive Reed Hastings and The Washington Post Co.’s chairman and chief executive, Donald Graham.