Zynga vs Farm Ville

Friends are starting farms, restaurants, aquariums, posses of gangsters, and even neighborhoods. Not in their real analog lives, but in their digital ones. And amazingly, some are paying actual money for virtual products, like tractor fuel or guns.

Zynga
FarmVille

The company that makes the most popular of these games, such as FarmVille and Café World, is Zynga Game Network Inc., a 2-1/2 year old San Francisco startup that has been rumored as a possible initial public offering candidate. But the company, which last week sold a stake for $180 million to Digital Sky Technologies of Russia, doesn't sound like it wants to go public anytime soon. See Zynga's funding news here.

Still, as theories abound from Wall Street to Silicon Valley about what tech IPO prospects will be the hot deals of 2010, Zynga is a company to watch, even if they don't go public next year. It already has at least $100 million in revenue and is profitable, according to the company.

Zynga executives tried quash the IPO rumor a bit, noting that with the latest funding they are buying some time so they don't feel "the burning need to go" public. The cash from the DST investment was used to pay out the equity stakes of some early investors and employees, the same thing that Facebook did when it got a big cash infusion from the same investor. See Facebook news here.

"The glare of going public is a big distraction," said Vish Makhijani, Zynga's chief operating officer, in an interview. When asked if the company might try and go public next year, along with other rumored candidates like Facebook, Makhijani would only say, "It's just later than now."

Since its founding in 2007, Zynga has raised $219 million in funding, and among its early investors are Kleiner Caufield Perkins & Byers and Institutional Venture Partners.