Facebook is on an expansion spree lately, with the latest expansion taking place in Austin, Texas. Earlier this week, we broke the news that Facebook has opened an office in Hamburg, Germany. The move has been part of a concerted assault against StudiVZ, the German social networking site whom Facebook attempted but failed to acquire in 2008.
According to a new report from the San Jose Business Journal, Facebook is preparing to open up an office in Austin. Facebook would be investing around $3.1 million to set up operations and would be creating around 200 jobs in the region. This is a massive expansion for Facebook who at last count, had somewhere around 1,000 employees. It is being reported that Governor Rick Perry has given Facebook a $1.4 million tax incentive to establish its presence in Texas, which would also be the first major US expansion of Facebook outside of Palo Alto, California.
Sheryl Sandberg, Facebookâs COO commented that the move was targeted towards tapping the deep talent pool located around the Austin region:
Facebook continues to grow and Austin, with its deep talent pool, would allow us to hire the high-caliber employees we need to properly serve the people, advertisers and developers that rely on our service.
With over $500 million in revenue last year, Facebook is rapidly building up their team. While we don’t know the type of employees being hired at the new Austin office, we can only expect a large number of them to be developers considering the large number of new hires. Also unknown is the period over which the 200 new employees will be hired.
Hey thought this would be relevant with all the students looking for jobs.
where do I apply?
A $1.4 million tax break from the state of Texas? Isn’t this a form of socialism? I thought Texas was in favor of capitalism.
“I thought Texas was in favor of capitalism.” - You’ve obviously never been to Austin…