The popular social media management tool that just passed six million users is growing fast, CEO Ryan Holmes told me today, and needed more space for future expansion.

“We just moved in … the dust is still settling,” Holmes says. “In 2012 we went from 100 to 250 employees, and this year at a minimum we’ll close out at 350.”

HootSuite bought an old police station in Vancouver’s eastside and gave it a $1 million facelift, adding a private yoga studio, gym, and yes, the obligatory startup office nap room. Oh, and don’t forget: free beer on Fridays, on tap in the kitchen.

Here’s the new HootSuite digs, in pictures:

Note the the social media icons pillows in the lobby? HootSuite partners YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Instagram are clearly visible, plus a few others.

Image credit: HootSuite

By Farhan Thawar, VP of Engineering, 

When scaling a company, it’s the easy things that become most difficult. Whether you’re bringing on new employees, organizing team workloads, or simply trying to keep open lines of communication, bigger teams often mean bigger headaches.

In five years, Xtreme Labs has grown from an office of eight to a staff of 250.

While many companies stumble at this point, our business goals for 2013 require us to bring on 100 more people by year’s end. How did we reach this point and what will allow us to meet the growth required for 2013, you ask?

Here are three tips that every growing software company needs to consider in order to grow consistently, efficiently and effectively.

Hire fast, fire faster

This mantra comes from entrepreneur-turned-VC Mark Suster.

Interviews are a terrible predictor of performance. Candidates often test as false positives and false negatives. For example, a candidate could have the ideal skill-set for the position, but may not have put her best foot forward in a two-hour interview. When software companies ask coding questions, expect answers on whiteboards, and disqualify for giving the wrong answer, they are forgetting that most people don’t write code on whiteboards.

This scenario sets the candidate up to fail because it forces her to use a method that few engineers use in their regular workday.

The opposite may also happen: she may have mastered the interview, but is an incompatible fit in skills or culture. How do you counteract these scenarios?

Don’t drop the concept of a defined interview process altogether. Instead, recognize that interviews aren’t perfect. Ask challenging questions that try to establish how the candidate thinks, and don’t disqualify someone for giving the wrong answer.

Organize your work environment to be a good indicator of whether or not an individual is a good fit relatively quickly. This is a better predictor of performance because it uses real in-work data instead of interview data. Instead of trying to create questions that elicit a symptom of fit, build performance indicators directly into the culture and work experience. A lot of companies follow a “hire slow, fire fast” mentality, which involves an extremely rigorous interview process but often results in throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Instead of using the interview as the proxy for performance, use an internship or a few months of work experience, for valid, real-world data. Recognize that “the map is not the territory;” a great interviewee is not equivalent to a great employee.

Monotasking = efficiency

Over the past few years, it has become normal for people to do many things at the same time. Now, we’re starting to go overboard with it.

In multitasking, the time it takes to switch between tasks, also known as the context switch, becomes extremely expensive as more and more tasks are attempted simultaneously. When you examine context switching costs in aggregate, it’s clear that multitasking wastes a lot of time.

People often think the end-goal is to be the most efficient multitasker possible. They take joy and relief, in catching up on their e-mails during a meeting. However, multitasking often leads to messing two things up simultaneously. Should we be rewarding employees for this behavior?

Emphasize the idea of monotasking—doing one thing at a time.

Implement processes like pair programming that allow your engineers to monotask. Teams of two that are accountable to each other are less likely to get distracted by e-mail, the Internet and social networks. Consider organizing an open, agile team room where everyone can see what others are up to.

Don’t let the calendar dictate when to meet

It’s extremely difficult to have an effective one-on-one meeting.

People are busy and often don’t prepare properly. An effective one-on-one requires both sides to be in the right mindset and to queue up topics, requiring regular bookkeeping. However, these necessities usually don’t coincide in the real world, and the reason why is simple: A career reflection moment is unlikely to happen during a scheduled one-on-one.

When an issue arises, come together and fix it right away. Being available to host an impromptu meeting allows employees to grab you for a chat while the topic and context are fresh. It’s also possible to combine the merits of an unscheduled one-on-one with a 15 or 20-minute lag time in order for both sides to prepare properly.

As companies grow in size, coordination costs increase. As headcount increases so does the overall communication. A potential alternative to unscheduled one-on-ones is to host scheduled meetings, and cancel them if neither side needs it. At the end of the day, everyone has their own management style, and it important for managers to remain flexible when communicating with their team.

Filtering out candidates post-hire, monotasking, and impromptu meetings, are just a few of the principles we’ve used at Xtreme Labs to guide our growth while protecting our company culture.

If you’re managing a fast-growing company, we hope they come in handy for you too.

This is a guest post by entrepreneur Roman Stanek.

I love Silicon Valley. I love the venture and social infrastructure that nurtures startups. I love its drama as companies create innovative products, become attractive acquisition targets, and then decide whether to sell or go it alone. But most of all, I’m fascinated by Silicon Valley’s unique dynamics that produce a constant stream of innovation — which my good friend John Seely Brown defines as “invention implemented.”

That implementation of innovation is key because it’s what makes Silicon Valley special. It’s the fuel that creates value, drives M&A, and builds companies. It’s also the fuel that creates whole new markets and, by extension, jobs.

Honest.

I realize Silicon Valley might not exactly appear like a jobs-making machine. Even last year’s 3.6 percent employment growth rate, returning the area to job levels last seen in the dot-com era, seems sluggish to the thousands of people still looking for good jobs. I believe we’re on the threshold of far greater growth — growth that will impact more people, in more age groups, and across more industries than ever before.

Over the years, I’ve watched this area produce more jobs than elsewhere in the country — even amid our downturn — and I believe we are once again on the upward curve of a five-year cycle. That’s because Silicon Valley’s innovation generates new markets, even as old ones decline. We saw that clearly with Facebook, and the rise of the social media market. And we witnessed a similar jobs surge about 10 years, when VMware gave birth to the virtualization market.

Now I believe the entire Silicon Valley community is poised to benefit from new innovations aimed at business customers. Already, we’re seeing enormous funding rounds for companies that help businesses sift through and make sense of mountains of data, set up software-based networks, manage help desks via the Web, and communicate more easily with suppliers, partners and customers over the Internet.

Some of these startups will become successful in their own right. Some will go public. Some probably won’t make it. And a portion will be acquired by larger companies eager to deliver important innovations faster than they could with their own research and development.

I believe that, regardless of the outcome, it’s all good news for people who live and work here. Here’s why: New markets form around disruptive technologies and services that, in turn, give rise to more companies catering to these new markets. And with over 2 billion people around the world using broadband Internet (up from approximately 50 million a decade ago) many of those markets are global — creating even more demand for new employees. It’s a virtuous cycle if ever there was one.

What’s more, venture funding for business-focused startups is on the rise. Andreessen Horowitz, which manages $2.7 billion in funds, has made enterprise a big part of its investment strategy. Kleiner Perkins has said it will invest at least $200 million this year in companies targeting business customers. In fact, just about every major VC firm is now investing in the so-called enterprise space.

Related: Read analyst predictions for enterprise companies that are set to IPO in 2013.

And the best part? Long before a company can even dream of customers, it has to hire an army of highly expert developers who understand business needs and are proficient at building modern, enterprise-hardened systems that meet stringent corporate demands.  But it doesn’t stop with engineers.

Business-focused companies also need to hire experienced sales people who understand how new services work with current products. Good salespeople also have a deep understanding of customers’ industries, the problems they need to solve to better compete, and their biggest concerns. This is not the job description of someone just out of college.

All this new enterprise activity is translating into a real boom for the area — increasing local restaurant business, driving companies’ marketing efforts (have you noticed all the new billboards along 101 lately?), and spurring retail sales. The 280 and 101 highways are now populated by brand new BMWs, Mercedes-Benz and Teslas.

And maybe the best news of all?

In an area that is known for valuing youth over experience, we’ve entered a cycle of enterprise-focused innovation that holds the promise of creating jobs for everyone, regardless of age. If that promise proves true, then Silicon Valley’s economic contribution will be immeasurable.

Roman Stanek is the founder and CEO of GoodData, a company that offers a range of business intelligence software and reporting tools to help companies monetize big data. Prior to this, he was the founder of NetBeans.org, sold to Sun Microsystems, and Systinet, which was acquired by HP. Follow him on Twitter @RomanStanek.

Photo credit: Not Quite a Photographr via photopin cc

“Most things fail,” the influential and opinionated angel investor said on stage.

“The primary reason most startups fail is lack of customer acquisition at reasonable economics,” McClure continued. “There are a lot of other reasons. You might be stupid or foolish or might be unable to lead or hire or not wake up early enough, but it is likely if you are not an idiot, you will be able to get a product out the door.

“For most of the startups in the room, you are going to fucking fail.”

McClure said these words of profane wisdom in a presentation titled “Why Incubators Hate Your Startup” during Startup Grind, a conference for entrepreneurs. The word “hate” should have signaled that the talk wouldn’t be all sunshine and roses, but McClure drove home his oft-repeated point that it’s a far better thing to groom ugly ducklings than farm black swans.

McClure is known for being an iconoclastic figure even in a community filled with iconoclasts. His investment strategy is to make a large number of small investments, both inside and outside of his incubator program. He is also “bullish” on developing markets in Asia and Latin America, and today the 10 startups participating in the Mexico City accelerator program are presenting in Mountain View.

These are rather unusual words from a mentor figure, but perhaps it is a needed dose of reality. The fact is that many startups do fail, some yield small returns, and a few succeed. For 500 Startups, McClure cites these as Wildfire, which Google acquired for $350M in 2012, and TaskRabbit, which is valued at more than $100 million. Despite these odds, the wins are big wins, and McClure said that the Wildfire exit provided a 15X return that essentially paid for an entire 500 Startups class.

Which brings us to tomorrow’s demo day.

Just down the road in Mountain View, the 33 companies that participated in this fifth incubator batch will present to a room filled with investors (and a few journalists). The class is diverse, with over 57 percent based outside of the U.S. and around one-fifth containing a female founder. McClure anticipates that one-third of these companies will raise a million or more, one-third will raise $500,000 or more, and one-third will raise 250,000 or less. He said one company has already quit, and a couple “probably won’t raise enough capital to stay open much longer.”

The valuations will mostly price around $5 or $6 million, and the startups will have enough runway to operate for the next six to 18 months until the next milestone. McClure advises his portfolio companies to raise 50 percent more capital than they need and advises against raising as much money as possible as a “badge of honor.”

When pitching McClure, the first step is prove that you aren’t “fucking stupid or crazy.” From there, entrepreneurs need to display a functional product that was built with the consumer in mind.

“A lot of venture capital filtering is risk reduction through network,” he said. “A lot of people will start to pitch me and ask why they need to go through a network? I can’t identify in 30 seconds if you are fucking crazy or an idiot or something else, not that I am not.”

On Jan. 31, the incubator began accepting applications for its 2013 spring batch, requiring companies to apply via AngelList. McClure told the audience at Startup Grind that he is “materially involved in AngelList” and that all entrepreneurs, whether they are raising money or not, should have a profile in the network. 500 Startups first experimented with AngelList applications for its last batch of companies, and the partners were so impressed with the results that they made it the new standard.

500 Startups has invested in about 400 startups in the past three years, and McClure anticipates reaching the “500″ goal in the next year or two. Stay tuned tomorrow for live coverage from the demo day in Mountain View.

The beginning of a startup’s life is well-documented. There are the Redbull fueled white boarding sessions, epic all-night coding marathons, and a constant stream of pitching. But once a product is built, launched, and attracting a respectable stream of users and perhaps even investment, many entrepreneurs wonder “what now?”

Growth, for a startup, can be a complicated balancing act of acquiring users, building a team, scaling to meet demand, entering new markets, expanding marketing efforts, and developing the product itself. The Growthathon is a conference and a hackathon where a group of entrepreneurs, engineers, marketing gurus, and mentors will come together to tackle distribution and acquisition issues.

“Most startups on the market have the same pain point of finding users,”  said Ken Zi Wang, founder of FanDrop, in an interview with VentureBeat. “Many startups spend months designing and engineering their products, but struggle to find the right distribution channels before running out of cash. This is an issue that relates to companies of all sizes.”

FanDrop is Wang’s third company. He is both an organizer and a participant of the event and said there is a strong need for this type of a community, particularly with all the discussion circulating about the “Series A Crunch,” where seeded startups cannot prove their product enough to attract institutional investment. Unlike angel investors or firms that focus on early-stage, traction is an important factor for venture capitalists to consider before doling out millions.

But how do you achieve this elusive and fickle traction? This is the nut the Growthathon will try to crack.

Aaron Ginn, the other instigator for this event, first got into “growth hacking” when the doors were about to close on his first startup. Faced with failure, he and his fellow team members hunkered down to keep their company afloat. He has turned that experience into a position as the Head of Growth at StumbleUpon and will act as a featured mentor at the Growthathon.

“Distribution is the number one challenge facing startups right now,” he said. “It is a saturated market and Silicon Valley is all about growth. As Paul Graham said, startup = growth. The difference between a startup and a small business is rapid growth, but people have forgotten that. At the Growthathon, we will want companies to know the core problem they are trying to solve, the core metrics, and what it will take to move it. We need the same diligence on the distribution side as we have on the product side.”

There are seven companies participating in the event- Fandrop, FamilyLeaf, ApartmentList, Carrot Mob, Intro, Wello, and Crowdtilt. Each will come to the event with a set of growth challenges and pose them to a group of experts. Over the course of the week, these “growth hackers” will play, experiment, and hack to achieve their goals. It will all culminate in an awards ceremony on December 15th when each team will present their progress and receive prizes, if deserving.

CrowdTilt is a startup that went through YCombinator and raised $2.1 million earlier this year. It was founded as a place where friends could pool their money together online for a specific purpose. Unlike Kickstarter and and Indiegogo which mostly feature creative and business projects, Crowdtilt focuses on enabling group experiences or shared causes. The company has been chugging along nicely, with large campaigns successfully “tilting” on the platform and a national use base. However, like with most consumer-facing startups, the more users, the better.

“We wanted to see how people unfamiliar with Crowdtilt would apply their ‘growth hacking’ skills to drive new traffic to our website,” said Marek Zareba, who deals with user acquisition at Crowdtilt. “We’re excited to listen to some out-of-the box ideas and see how quickly these teams can execute on their ideas.” 

In addition to the hackathon, the event will also feature expert talks, mentoring sessions, and networking opportunities. Wang said in the four weeks since they first had the idea, there have been tremendous displays of support and the project has grown into a “mini ecosystem.” It may not be as sexy as the excitement of getting an idea of the ground, but to build a legitimate, profitable, successful company, growth is key. Got milk?

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What is a startup? Paul Graham has a deceptively simple answer in an remarkable essay posted earlier this month: It’s a tool for generating rapid growth.

From the point of view of venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, nothing else matters. If your company is growing exponentially, it’s an attractive investment, for a whole host of reasons. If it’s not growing exponentially, VCs won’t be interested — even if it’s profitable.

So Graham suggests to companies in Y Combinator, the incubator he founded, that they pick a weekly target: Say, 7 percent growth. Every week, that is their only goal. They either hit it, in which case they’ve done everything they need to for the week, or they don’t.

Picking such a single-minded, concrete target focuses the mind and helps founders optimize their startups the same way they’d optimize code, Graham writes.

But exponential growth has a kind of magic to it, in that most people don’t have a good intuitive sense of how powerful it can be. For example, 7 percent weekly growth, week after week, translates into 33.7x annual growth. Any company that can demonstrate 33-fold annual growth is going to be an attractive target for venture capital, whether that’s growth in revenues, members, or some other metric. It’s growth like that which made Instagram such an appealing investment target (and potent threat) for Facebook. And for companies like that, VC money is like rocket fuel.

But while Graham is one of the smartest people in the investment community, and his essay is an excellent rubric for young entrepreneurs to understand the rules of the game, his approach is not the only valid way to run a startup. Another smart investor and entrepreneur, Mark Suster, lays out an alternative viewpoint in his own post, arguing that startups need to stand for more than just growth.

Suster worries that Silicon Valley’s obsession with hypergrowth is making it elitist, causing investors and other observers to ignore and undervalue companies that take a bit longer to “percolate” before they deliver real value.

And as he points out, you don’t need a gigantic, Facebook-style IPO to be a success. His two startups were both acquired for amounts that, he says, might seem small in the overall scheme of things, but which made enormous differences to the lives of everyone on the two teams. In fact, Suster writes, 98 percent of the exits for VC-backed companies are for amounts under $100 million.

I’m with Suster, who writes:

I want the definition of startup back. To be used by anybody who is willing to take the risk to quit their corporate job and go out and try and build an innovative, disruptive, tech-enabled business that tries to change the way things work in the world.

It’s OK to build a company that stays small, has a few million dollars in revenue, and builds careers, bank accounts, and enriches client experiences.

So where’s the room for tremendous successes that don’t fit the VC patterns? For companies that haven’t hit “escape velocity” but which are still excellent businesses?

The short answer: Chin up. You don’t need venture capital to make a dent in the universe. In fact, the obsessive focus on the VC model can actually drive founders crazy.

When you start a company, you need to have some idea of what your goal is. For Y Combinator companies, that’s a weekly growth target. For your company, it might be financial independence. But it could be other things.

For my part, I’m interested in startups that are trying to change the world. Exponential growth is one kind of magic — but let’s not forget that it’s not the only kind.

Photo: Saturn V engine, courtesy NASA

But tech projects represent just one portion of Kickstarter’s funding base. Back in February Kickstarter co-founder Yancey Strickler said the company was on pace to distribute more funding than the $146 million given out each year by the National Endowment for the Arts.

I decided to take a look at all the successful projects funded since the beginning of 2012 to get a sense of  how the startup was growing.

Based on that data, Kickstarter is on pace to raise around $300 million this year, triple what it did in 2011.

For a young startup, that means serious revenue for Kickstarter, which takes 5 percent of all successfully funded projects.

The stats aren’t actually so shocking when you go back and look at Kickstarter’s growth curve from 2011. Here is a chart the company shared when it hit 1 million backers.

While gaming and tech projects have represented the majority of the company’s multi-million dollar projects, they are not the majority of funding on the platform. As Strickler wrote in a blog post, the funding breakdown for all projects is roughly:

Film — 33%
Music — 21%
Design — 11%
Art — 6%
Publishing — 5%
Games — 5%
Technology — 5%
Theater — 4%
Food — 3%
Comics — 3%
Photography — 2%
Fashion — 1%
Dance — 1%

If big name professional filmmakers and musicians take to the platform this year in the same way that game designers have, Kickstarter funding is likely to grow even faster.

If you want to rapidly grow plants at an alarmingly fast and unnatural rate, you give them Miracle-Gro. But if you want to do the same to digital media services like Ustream, you might just need to integrate with Facebook Timeline.

Just one week after launching a new Facebook Timeline app, live video streaming service Ustream has doubled the number of new user signups per day, from 10,000 to more than 20,000, the company tells VentureBeat.

The new Timeline app allows users to share any live videos they’re watching on Ustream within their Facebook Timeline. Provided they have permission, all of your Facebook friends can also watch along in real-time, which is likely to boost the level of conversation about said video in the same way it would for a room full of people crowded around a TV screen.

Ustream confirmed the major social activity increase, telling VentureBeat that it generated more than 10 million impressions of Timeline shares on Facebook during the first week the app was live. Mind you, this is traffic that otherwise didn’t exist prior to launching the Timeline integration. That’s quite an impressive boost, especially considering the higher rate of new users registering for Ustream accounts.

The company said it also plans to integrate the site’s own Social Stream — not just live video — into Facebook Timeline, which should provide an even greater boost of social activity.

And while Ustream is one of the first live video services to offer integration with Facebook’s Timeline, other video sites like Viddy and Vevo have also experienced huge growth, as VentureBeat’s Jolie O’Dell previously reported. In fact, it seems that all kinds of digital content services are experiencing the Timeline bump. Both streaming music startup Spotify and community news sharing site Digg reported rapid growth soon after launching Timeline apps.

Photo illustration: Tom Cheredar/VentureBeat

Spotify’s premium service is a paid, ad-free version of its streaming music service that lets people share playlists. The premium service has continued to grow at a healthy rate since launching to U.S. customers in July, due in part to a major partnership with social network giant Facebook. To jump-start that partnership, Spotify decided to force all new users to have a Facebook account if they wanted to join. For now, it appears that the company’s strategy is paying off.

But despite impressive growth, Spotify is also dealing with some bumps in the road. Earlier this week we reported that 200 independent music labels ended their licensing agreement with Spotify because it was hurting their digital sales. Spotify still has licensing agreements with all the major music labels, but if that were to change, it could affect the company’s growth.

Spotify is planning to announce a “new direction” for the company November 30. It’s likely that the company will go into greater detail about its growth as well as what to expect from the service in the future (perhaps a Spotify MP3 store, iPad app, or exclusive content).

Spotify, which allows people to share playlists with friends, recently partnered with Facebook to offer integration with Facebook’s new Open Graph platform. To jump-start the integration, Spotify decided to force all new users to have a Facebook account if they wanted to join the music service.

While the decision to force users to have a Facebook account was an unpopular one, we now know why Spotify was willing to do it. The service, which has over two million paying subscribers, has added about two million new users (paying and free) in less than a month because of its partnership with Facebook.

If Spotify’s growth continues, it will be the second huge success that could arguably be attributed to a partnership with Facebook — the first being social gaming startup Zynga.

In the past, Twitter has struggled to keep up with its growing user base, and in 2010 it built a data center in the Salt Lake City area to provide a long-term fix to down-time related issues. The new data center aims to avoid down-time before it happens.

Twitter will rely on Quality Technology Services (QTS) based in downtown Atlanta as the site of its new East Coast data center, according to the report. The new facility covers 990,000 square feet and is one of the largest data centers in the world.

With the boost in active users as well as a new $400 million investment round, the move for Twitter to grow its data centers comes as no surprise.

The company hopes that having celebrities join and use Google+ will help publicize the three-week-old social network, according to company e-mails obtained by CNN.

While Google+ is typically compared with Facebook, Google may instead be choosing to duplicate Twitter’s successful strategy of attracting celebrities. Twitter has proven that famous users can help a social network to grow.

In 2009, actor Ashton Kutcher and media mogul Ted Turner competed in a highly publicized race to reach a million Twitter followers. Also, the social network was instrumental in propelling late night talk show host Conan O’Brien’s career forward after he parted ways with NBC. And more recently, actor Charlie Sheen joined Twitter after being fired from CBS sitcom Two and a Half Men — gaining 500,000 followers in one day. In all three instances, the microblogging social network became more prominent in the public eye.

Yet, an identity validation process is essential if Google+ wants to leverage publicity by celebrities that join the service. Validating accounts would prevent impostors from posing as famous personalities. It could also help legitimize celebrity accounts much in the same way Twitter does by featuring a “verified” stamp of authentication.

A company spokesperson declined comment to VentureBeat about both Google+’s pursuit of celebrities and the status of verified accounts. However, it’s safe to assume that the company will start verifying celebrity Google+ accounts at some point in the near future — perhaps along with the public launch of Google+ planned for later this month.

The lack of verification may already be ruining Google’s chances of gathering high-profile celebrities. For instance, actor William Shatner had his profile removed shortly after joining. Some speculated that the lack of identity verification caused users to report the account as fake.

“My Google+ account was flagged for violating standards. Saying hello to everyone apparently is against the rules maybe I should say goodbye?” Shatner tweeted shortly after getting banned Monday. Although his account was quickly restored, the experience isn’t ideal for a new user.

Late night show host Conan O’Brien shown in the image above.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google CEO Larry Page said 550,000 devices running Google’s mobile operating system Android are activated daily during the company’s Q2 earnings call today.

The number of daily activations is steadily increasing. Just over two weeks ago, Senior Vice President of Android Andy Rubin revealed via Twitter that there were 500,000 Android devices activated each day. He also said that the rate of growth was increasing by 4.4 percent each week, which matches up with the device activation number stated in the earnings call.

If Google can maintain that growth rate, it will reach over a million daily Android device activations by October. Yet, with the growing number of Android-enabled tablets entering the market and lower costs to consumers on both smartphones and tablets, daily activations could increase much faster.

To give some perspective of how big the current activation numbers are, Google was activating about 200,000 Android devices per day in August 2010 — meaning daily Android device activations have more than doubled in less than a year.

Facebook has yet to make a statement on the current number of total users. Some speculate that the company is holding off an official announcement until reaching a billion users, but it’s just as likely that Facebook is still waiting to achieve the 750 million mark.

The last time the company made an official announcement about its user base was in July 2010 when it reached 500 million per month for the first time since being founded in 2004.

Facebook’s monthly user base was unofficially reported as being over 600 million in January 2011, according to a leaked document from Goldman Sachs intended for potential Facebook investors.

If both the TechCrunch report and the Goldman Sachs document are accurate, Facebook’s user base is growing at an estimated rate of nearly 150 million users every six months.

The move, which will happen in the next four to eight weeks, follows the quick growth the company has seen since it launched in 2005. Box.net raised $48 million in its most recent round of funding. At the time, Levie said Box.net would use the funding to double its sales and engineering teams. The current, cramped office in Palo Alto is located next to electronics retailer Fry’s.

“We were basically sitting on top of each other,” one Box.net employee said.

Box.net currently has 6 million users. Some 60,000 businesses employ its cloud-storage software, including 73 percent of Fortune 500 companies. That figure is up from around 66 percent in February.

The company provides businesses with a way to store and share files securely over the web. The files are uploaded to remote servers where anyone with permission can access them. Employees can also edit the files through Box.net’s web-based interface and leave comments and notes.

Box.net has also been pushing its cloud-storage application to mobile devices — particularly the iPhone operating system and Google’s mobile operating system, Android. As of January, the Box.net application was downloaded more than 250,000 times on the iPad. The company launched the Android application in the fourth quarter of 2010 and already has 70,000 downloads. Box.net is working with Samsung specifically to further develop its application on Android tablets like the Samsung Galaxy Tab.

From January to May 2011, the site has seen a 37 percent increase in unique visitors (13.7 million to 18.8 million) and a 25 percent increase in page views (999 million to 1.228 billion), according to Reddit General Manager Erik Martin (a.k.a. Hueypriest), who added that the average time a person stays on the site remained an impressive 15.5 minutes.

Martin said he attributes the steady growth to members of the Reddit community scoring mainstream news attention and the creation of new sub-Reddit communities, which are sub-categories of the main site that focus on a specific topic.

Condé Nast, which owns the site, also made good on its earlier pledge to give Reddit the resources it needed to manage the insane growth. The post announced that three new programmers have been hired to join the team: Logan Hanks from Google, Keith Mitchell from Oracle and recent graduate Brian Simpson.

“Thank you to everyone in the reddit community who made these new hires possible — be it in the form of submissions, community moderation, brand sponsorship, t-shirt-ownership, adblock-not-doing, sponsored-link-buying, or reddit-gold-subscribing, Martin wrote. “It’s a very exciting time here at reddit HQ, and we are extremely grateful for your support.”

With the addition of the new programmers, Reddit’s engineer staff now has a total of five employees, which seems luxurious compared to earlier in the year when the departure of Mike Schiraldi left the site with only one.

Since Facebook is the number one social network in the world and one of the world’s most-visited sites, it’s important to keep a close eye on it to get a broader view of the social Web. Its explosive user growth has been on the rise for years, but now we could be seeing that type of growth stop and be replaced with small gains each month instead.

Facebook’s losses in May were notable. The number of users on the site declined in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Norway, and Russia. In the U.S. alone, the site lost 6 million users, dropping from 155.2 million to 149.2 million, during May. Canada dropped 1.52 million users, while the UK, Norway, and Russia all dropped more than 100,000 users.

Inside Facebook’s Eric Eldon said each country’s user base generally stops growing when it reaches 50 percent penetration. “By the time Facebook reaches around 50 percent of the total population in a given country (plus or minus, depending on internet access rates in that country), growth generally slows to a halt,” Eldon wrote.

The company is still adding users, but most are coming from developing countries where Facebook had a late start such as Mexico, Brazil, India, and the Philippines. Most prominently, Mexico and Brazil added about 1.9 million users each.

Facebook’s slowing growth could be attributed to growing privacy concerns, such as its facial recognition software, which has drawn the eye of European privacy regulators. It also could simply be a matter of users being prompted by friends and family to check out the service but later deleting their accounts because they weren’t getting much out of it.

From personal experience, I have a few friends in the U.S. who have deactivated or deleted their Facebook profiles because they felt they were losing too much time while browsing the site, preventing them from getting work and personal projects done.

Other interesting stats include more than 381 million total check-ins accounting for every country (including North Korea) as well as a check-in from space. California also appears to have the most fit Foursquare users, being the top state for gym check-ins.

Foursquare has shown no signs of slowing down. Reports surfacing today claim that the company is looking for its next round of funding at a valuation of $250 million, which would equate to around $40 million in funds if you consider its last $21 million round was at a valuation of $120 million.

Foursquare, based in New York City and founded in 2009 currently has more than 40 employees in its hometown and a new engineering office it’s opening in San Francisco.