Here's Sandberg:

We don't have the need for additional financing. With our current business model, our current plans, we are profitable, on a clear path to being cash-flow positive. We're not short of money. We're doing really well financially in what is a really tough year. Every advertiser segment is growing-we're growing all over internationally. The ad products are really working for people, and they want to do more and more.

This is the first time a Facebook executive has claimed that the social network is "profitable" — a term usually reserved for companies which can show net income according to the strict GAAP standards.

Here's what Sandberg's boss, CEO Mark Zuckerberg, said last week:

Based on our first quarter results, we now believe we are on track to see our revenue grow by at least 70% this year. We just completed our fifth straight quarter of EBITDA profitability. And most importantly, we expect to achieve free cash flow profitability next year.

EBITDA stands for earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortization. It's a handy measure for Facebook, which is believed to be spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year on servers, to make its finances look better. But it's not the same thing as actual profit.

Oh, haha, she forgot a funny-sounding word! Not so funny, actually. Here's what renowned investor Warren Buffett has to say about "EBITDA profitability" in his 2000 and 2002 annual reports to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders:

References to EBITDA make us shudder — does management think the tooth fairy pays for capital expenditures? We're very suspicious of accounting methodology that is vague or unclear, since too often that means management wishes to hide something.

Trumpeting EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) is a particularly pernicious practice. Doing so implies that depreciation is not truly an expense, given that it is a "non-cash" charge. That's nonsense. In truth, depreciation is a particularly unattractive expense because the cash outlay it represents is paid up front, before the asset acquired has delivered any benefits to the business. Imagine, if you will, that at the beginning of this year a company paid all of its employees for the next ten years of their service (in the way they would lay out cash for a fixed asset to be useful for ten years). In the following nine years, compensation would be a "non-cash" expense – a reduction of a prepaid compensation asset established this year. Would anyone care to argue that the recording of the expense in years two through ten would be simply a bookkeeping formality?

Oh, and then there's Lynn Turner, the former chief accountant of the SEC, who blamed investors' reliance on EBITDA figures for financial fraud at Enron, WorldCom, and Sunbeam.

We have a suggestion for Sandberg: Try an exciting new measure of profitability we call "earnings before expenses." It was all the rage in the 1990s.

After Yu left abruptly, CEO Mark Zuckerberg trotted out the tired time-with-family cliché to explain his departure. But in the case of Facebook VP Chamath Palihapitiya, the cliché seems to be literally true, and the departure temporary. Sort of. Palihapitiya, a former AOL executive who now heads Facebook's growth initiatives, has said he plans to leave the company altogether, but was persuaded to take a four-month paternity leave instead.

A less likely rumor we've heard: That COO Sheryl Sandberg has been issuing ultimatums, that either she goes or Zuckerberg. That doesn't square with Sandberg's style. She's an experienced Washington operative and former Google executive who always works behind the scenes to get what she wants. But she does have ties to Facebook investors, including venture-capital firm Accel Partners and Elevation Partners' Marc Bodnick, who happens to be her brother-in-law. Could she quietly be spreading the word that it's time for Zuckerberg to go? And if Zuckerberg gets wind of her efforts, could her time be up?

In her haste to get the scoop, AllThingsD blogger Kara Swisher posted a version of Zuckerberg's memo which had a repeated paragraph. She's since eliminated the repeat, but we captured it:

Catch the differences? One says "will report," the other says "will be reporting." One uses treasurer Cipora Herman's last name, the other omits it. One says "we are fortunate," while the other uses the contracted form "we're." And one says Peter Currie will be "an advisor," while the other says only "advisor."

That's not the only oddity about the email. "Several versions I got of this memo had different punctuation in various places," Swisher notes in an update.

Why bother sending employees individual copies of a mass email with subtle changes throughout? There's only one reason to bother: Using the changes as tell-tale clues to identify whose copy got forwarded. That's what Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk did recently in an attempt to find leakers. Each of those changes can, in theory, serve as an identifier; assemble a series of unique identifiers, and it's possible to trace a particular version of an email to a particular employee.

If Zuckerberg is really wasting time on games like this, it means that he has completely failed as a leader. It's a humbling admission that he no longer enjoys his employees' trust and confidence. And it's an insult, too — that he thinks his employees aren't smart enough to figure out what he's doing. Of course they are. It's just one more reason for him to resign immediately, before he does more damage to the company he started.

Three strikes and you're out is a good rule for baseball and startups. In the last six weeks, Zuckerberg has committed three management fouls that would have led to any normal CEO's firing.

The terms of service disaster. After Facebook revised its legalese to suggest it would keep users' information forever, even if they deleted their accounts, users got into an uproar. Rather than quickly roll out new language that satisfied their concerns, Zuckerberg introduced an absurd voting mechanism that would let Facebook user, in theory, vet future changes.

Facebook's awful redesign. After years of pursuing his own vision for Facebook and ignoring competitors' moves, Zuckerberg took his eye off the ball and grew entranced by Twitter, a message-broadcasting service which mimicked Facebook's status-update feature. He then introduced a new design for Facebook that was almost universally loathed, even among his own employees. And unlike the terms-of-service debacle, where Zuckerberg championed a user-run democracy, he told employees that they should ignore feedback from users.

Management chaos. The disgraceful, petty ouster of Facebook CFO Gideon Yu, a veteran of Yahoo and YouTube, on Tuesday, apparently prompted by a disagreement over strategy, is just the latest executive-suite blunder by Zuckerberg. He has prompted the departure of countless key employees over the past couple of years. At a time when he should be pulling the best talent in through its doors, Zuckerberg is sending it the wrong way. Facebook started with five cofounders. Zuckerberg alone remains.

Facebook first tried to claim that it fired Yu as CFO because it needed someone with public-company experience. (Never mind that Yu's resume includes Hilton, Yahoo, and Google.) Realizing the absurdity of that spin, Zuckerberg is now trotting out the line that Yu is "spending more time with his family," and trying to claim it's not a cliché.

It is understandable for a 24-year-old to be fickle, easily swayed, and vengeful. But that is the reason why we have very few 24-year-old CEOs running companies with 800 employees and hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues. The company is now conducting a search for Yu's replacement. But it ought to be looking for Zuckerberg's replacement instead.

Zuckerberg did a good job as Facebook's CEO during its startup years. He brilliantly conceived of Facebook's product, and pursued that vision unswervingly until recently. His hacker cred helped pull in likeminded engineers. When the Facebook application platform threatened to drown the site in spam, he reeled the appmakers back in, despite their howls of protest, proving he can sometimes correct his mistakes. But he has reached the limits of his abilities.

He has said that his most important job as CEO is to build the company's culture. And in that he has been an unmitigated disaster. It is a failing far worse than his three public strikes — though the depth of it is little understood outside Facebook's offices in Palo Alto. His executives are largely unhappy, consumed by infighting and backbiting while trying to accommodate a tempestuous boss's whims. Here's the Harvard man in Zuckerberg revealed: He has assembled a coterie of servants instead of building a team.

So what is Facebook's board to do? Firing him would be difficult. Zuckerberg owns 27 percent of the company and controls three of Facebook's six board seats. He could easily fight any attempt to oust him. And he is not unsalvageable. The right CEO could help Zuckerberg correct his failings and prepare him to take back the reins.

We think Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen is the one Zuckerberg needs. Already a mentor to the young entrepreneur and a Facebook board member, Andreessen has few undiscardable obligations. He has started a venture-capital fund, but that is nothing more than a few business cards to shred. Facebook could buy Andreessen's also-ran social-networking startup, Ning, to remove that excuse, using inflated shares to give him a graceful exit. His services would be worth the price. (Or Andreessen could simply return what's left of the $60 million it raised last year to investors, an honorable way to give up on a company that's going nowhere.)

It would be difficult to pull Andreessen out of semi-retirement. At his companies — Netscape, Opsware, and Ning — he has preferred to let someone else hold the CEO title. But it might be good for Facebook to have a CEO who's indifferent to the job, as opposed to someone who wants it all too badly, but doesn't know how to do it.

There's an innocent explanation: His digital-music startup, Project Playlist, which recently scored a deal with EMI, has its offices in a downtown Palo Alto building shared with Facebook. But that doesn't explain why our tipster, who spotted Van Natta twice today, saw him walking from that building to another Facebook office. Could be a coincidence. Or it could be that Van Natta, who remains close to Facebook executives like Chamath Palihapitiya and Dan Rose, is up to something.

It's not clear why Yu is leaving now. He raised nearly $500 million for the company, and was looking for more. But a few things are known: Zuckerberg has repeatedly said that the company's focus is on growth rather than making money. He has made a habit of quickly cycling through executives. Former Facebook COO Owen Van Natta, who left after an apparent demotion, is a notable example.

The question is who's next? Jonathan Heiliger, a dotcom-era Internet wunderkind now in charge of Facebook's vast technical infrastructure, has long been said to be restive. COO Sheryl Sandberg, the Google veteran splashily hired last year, might be called to account if Facebook's sales don't catch up with its user growth. As the door to Facebook's executive suite keeps swinging, it seems like only a matter of time before people start asking questions about the prickly, isolated 24-year-old at the top.

Facebook has a voracious need for equipment. Because it stores photos and videos for users, as well as other data, it requires an ever-growing number of servers. The rule of thumb is roughly $1 million for every million users it signs up, according to estimates from people familiar with Facebook's computing requirements.

And the company is still not profitable. Part of the problem: While most of its revenues come from the U.S., most of its user growth has been overseas, where it is just starting to build sizeable sales operations. That explains why Yu is on the hunt for new money, even after raising more than $500 million from the likes of Microsoft and Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-Shing. It's not clear how much of that warchest is left.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg hired Yu in 2007 in part for his experience as CFO at YouTube, which financed its racks of video servers with equipment leases from TriplePoint Capital, a Silicon Valley lender. Besides the lease payments, TriplePoint also got warrants — a form of corporate stock option — in YouTube as part of the deal. It profited nicely (as did Yu) when Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2006. Leases are a relatively cheap way for startups to finance their purchases, and it's common in the Valley for warrants to be part of the deal.

TriplePoint also agreed to finance Facebook's server purchases in exchange for warrants. But when Yu negotiated for a $100 million credit line from TriplePoint last year, we hear that he refused to grant TriplePoint additional warrants.

That stinginess may now be hurting him. BusinessWeek reports that Yu has been seeking financing from Bank of America and other lenders after its line with TriplePoint expired. (Facebook has reportedly used only $60 million of its $100 million line; its expiry means that Facebook must pay down the current balance over time, but can't borrow more against it.) TriplePoint CEO Jim Labe said he hoped to keep working with Facebook. But one has to think he's in a better negotiating position than he was last year, when Facebook was still red-hot and the markets had yet to crash.

Last fall, Yu was also looking to sell shares in Facebook to investors in the Persian Gulf. But that was before the region's wealthy got socked by everything from falling oil prices to Bernie Madoff. Facebook is worth far less than the $15 billion at which Microsoft valued it when the software company invested $240 million in it in 2007 — which means Labe, or any other lender, is in a position to demand tougher terms from Facebook. Stinginess is a good trait in a beancounter-in-chief. But Yu may have overplayed his hand.

One could talk about Facebook's fast-growing headcount and farms of servers, spending on which may now have reached hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Or the difficulty it has had at producing what Zuckerberg once predicted would be a once-in-a-century shift in the business of advertising.

But the ultimate arbiter of Facebook's worth is what investors are willing to pay for a piece of it. And as Google has fallen almost two-thirds from its high last fall, Facebook's price, too, has slumped.

Facebook is not publicly traded, but an informal market exists for its stock. Employees who have vested their stock options and others who have gotten their hand on Facebook shares sell them to wealthy investors and a handful of obscure outfits which specialize in buying private-company shares, like MTVLP and Apercen Partners.

The market price is falling fast. We've heard of shares trading for $5.50, which suggests a valuation for Facebook of around $2.3 billion, but that's the highest. There's plenty of interest for shares at prices between $2.50 and $4 — though those are distressed prices. At the low end of that range, Facebook would be worth a mere $1.3 billion — less than a tenth of the price at which Microsoft invested its $240 million last year.

Oh, how the mighty have fallen! Facebook's value has jumped dramatically with every investment, from $100 million in 2005, to $550 million in 2006, to $15 billion in 2007. The drop has been almost as sharp.

Would Zuckerberg sell his company at that price? No. He still has Microsoft's $240 million, plus $120 million from Hong Kong investor Li Ka-Shing; Facebook has arranged to lease $100 million worth of servers, which has spared the cash pile. And Microsoft is still paying Facebook large guarantees in exchange for the right to sell advertising on the site.

It's worth pointing out that Facebook's earliest investors, Accel Partners and Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, have done phenomenally well even at the $1.3 billion price, seeing a paper gain of 10 times their original investments. It's just Microsoft that's screwed, and no one will shed a tear for Bill Gates's billions.

Where Facebook runs into trouble is in raising more cash, or using its stock for additional investments. Like a homeowner whose mortgage is underwater, Facebook executives won't part with shares at a valuation of less than $15 billion; they can't afford to, lest they enrage Microsoft and other investors who put in money at that price. A disagreement over the value of Facebook's shares helped sink an acquisition of Twitter. Facebook CFO Gideon Yu's efforts to charm money from Middle Eastern sheikhs at the $15 billion valuation have also proved fruitless.

So where does Facebook go from here? Given Zuckerberg's fetish for control of his creation, it's hard to see him selling out, especially at these discounted prices. But he faces a swift uphill climb to get Facebook's value up to the fanciful heights it reached in 2007. Just one problem: Will his employees stick around for the long march?

The bad news: The company needs the cash. TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington has a detailed estimate of Facebook's expenses:

The company is likely spending well over a $1 million per month on electricity alone, say experts we’ve spoken with. Bandwidth is likely another $500,000 or more per month on top of that. The company has earmarked $100 million to buy 50,000 servers this year and next.... we’ve heard estimates that they may have spent as much as $30 million this year alone with [storage systems company NetApp]. And the icing on the cake — earmark another $15 million per year in office and datacenter rent payments.

And don’t forget those human assets. With 750 employees and growing, Facebook is spending at least another $10 million per month on payroll.

It costs a couple of hundred million dollars a year just to keep the lights on at Facebook. But the real problem is keeping up with growth, particularly storage needs. Add another $100 million or more per year for capital expenditures, and you’ve got a company that’s doing exactly the opposite of printing money.

This estimate, I freely admit, is much better than my back-of-the-envelope math. Arrington may overstate the direness of Facebook's cash position; a $100 million computer-lease deal Yu negotiated has preserved some of its capital, though that will need to be paid off down the road. The company's rosy projections for advertising, certainly, must need to be revised downward.

If Yu has come back from Dubai empty-handed, then Facebook will soon be cutting costs just like the rest of the Valley.

• Facebook is borrowing money. Actually, no. Facebook's $100 million is a lease, not a loan. Facebook is on the hook for rent payments, and will have the option to buy the equipment at the end of the lease. But technically, it's not on the hook for the $100 million. That said, it's hard to imagine how, at the end of the lease, Facebook functions without the servers it's renting. What Facebook is doing with the lease is delaying the day it has to buy its servers outright.
• Facebook is borrowing money because it can't sell its equity. Henry Blodget of Silicon Alley Insider put forward this theory. In moments like these, one wonders less why the former stock analyst was barred from the securities industry. A venture lease like Facebook's usually requires an "equity kicker" — warrants to purchase stock, the corporate version of the stock options employees get. In this case, Facebook negotiated a warrant-free deal, but it's given TriplePoint warrants in the past. So Facebook's lender, TriplePoint, is betting that Facebook's equity is worth something; it wouldn't have offered it leases in the past otherwise. A warrant-free deal may not be great for TriplePoint, but it's great for Facebook.
• Facebook won't know what to do with all those servers. This is the most nonsensical theory of all. Facebook isn't renting servers for the workaday business of displaying webpages and photos. While it needs some more servers to keep up with site growth, the main reason it needs so many servers, I believe, is that it's planning to use them on the massive job of analyzing data to target advertising and content to its users.
• Gideon Yu must be an idiot. We've ribbed Yu for being a bit slick. But as YouTube's CFO, Yu negotiated the company's sale to Google for $1.65 billion. Shall we not give him some small amount of credit for knowing what he's doing?

And as for that bromide about tech companies not incurring debt? In the form of leases, they do it all the time, from landlords and hardware makers. Even startups lease their offices, and IBM, HP, Dell, Sun and others have large financing arms that help put equipment in customers' hands without money upfront. Save for the size of this deal and the name of the renter, TriplePoint's lease would have been wholly unremarkable.

There is one question that remains: How TriplePoint will come up with the money. This is reportedly the largest deal the lender has ever financed. Let's take TriplePoint at its word, though. The company's website says it has says it has "the capacity to put more than $1.5 billion to work" — curiously hedged wording. Note that TriplePoint doesn't actually say it has $1.5 billion on hand to lend. But that's TriplePoint's problem, not Facebook's.

Executive Chef

The Executive Chef is responsible for the leadership of the kitchen by managing and overseeing the activities of the entire kitchen as well as menu development and food quality through purchasing organic products, multi-cultural cuisine, kosher foods, etc. This position is also responsible for recipes including menu item presentation, lunch, corporate, and catering events. He/She is expected to maintain high standards by establishing food specifications and adhering to those specifications via recipes, portion control, presentation, safety and sanitation. This position is full-time and located in Downtown Palo Alto.

Responsibilities:

Develop, cook, and manage breakfast, lunch and dinner for employees
Directly supervise all kitchen personnel with responsibility for hiring, training, employee development, performance evaluations, and salary recommendations
Have knowledge of food and catering trends with a focus on quality, production, sanitation, food cost controls, and presentation
Develop and test recipes, techniques for food preparation, and presentation
Must have skills in cooking and preparation of a variety of foods
Possess ability to supervise and/or assign training for kitchen staff
Possess ability to plan a variety of menus on a daily basis
Possess knowledge of food supplies, equipment and services, ordering and inventory control
Ensure cost effective production of the highest quality food
Establish, manage, and maintain all vendor relationships
Consult with Facebook's Catering/Event Coordinator on a weekly basis as well as with other departments if necessary
Be accountable for the financial aspects of the F&B department ensuring a profitable operation
Other duties may be assigned
Requirements:

4-5 years experience as an Executive Chef preferred
Independent, dedicated, and a self-starter
Culinary school graduate
Bachelor's degree preferred
Previous management experience is preferred
A high level of commitment, passion, and creativity for food
Professional demeanor
Ability to work as part of a team
Ability to read, understand, follow and enforce safety/health procedures
Ability to work in a fast paced office environment
High sense of urgency
Location: Palo Alto, CA

What could be slowing investors down? Perhaps its Google's counterstrike initiative, OpenSocial. Or word of bad behavior at Facebook headquarters. Or maybe even the trouble privacy advocates are brewing in DC in an effort to limit the behavioral targeting techniques critical to Facebook's soon-to-be-launched ad network, SocialAds.

But more likely is that Facebook's funding round won't remain open for very much longer and the slow news on progress is due to Mark Zuckerberg's war on leaks inside the company. Then, too, hedge fund managers are much less chatty than venture capitalists — and word is that Facebook's valuation has priced the Valley's VCs out of this round.