Just one month before its planned IPO, Facebook acquired Instagram, a company that had just 13 employees and no real revenue model, for cool billion dollars. Zuckerberg was going to be him, that's for sure. I think that he has to realize he's bringing investors in as a new constituency right now, and I think he's got to show them the respect that they deserve because he's asking them for their money. Mark and his signature hoodie: He's actually showing investors he doesn't care that much he's going to be him.
One analyst slammed him for his appearance: Why should Facebook sell for more than a century of earnings at its then-current run-rate, given that most social media sites struggled to remain relevant for a fraction of a decade?įacebook's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, quickly became a punching bag for Wall Street, as he wore a hoodie and jeans to meet with analysts and investors who dressed in their very best suits. That had an eerie resemblance to the dot-com boom, where start-ups were valued based on "hits" and "eyeballs" perusing their pages on any given day.Ĭritics asked how Facebook wasn't another iteration of Friendster or Myspace, two early social media flameouts. The first page of its S-1 filing referred to the 2.7 billion "likes and comments" on the website each day. You may have seen Facebook's IPO as the ultimate sign of a bubble in technology valuations. Ordinary investors who couldn't tell the difference between an income statement and a balance sheet, and who learned to distrust their brokers after the financial crisis, were now clamoring to get shares in Wall Street's most anticipated IPO. The social networking company was the first big tech IPO since Google, and the hoopla surrounding its debut on public exchanges echoed the hysteria of the 1990s dot-com boom. In fact, shares only once ended a calendar year at a lower price than at the beginning of the year, and that was in 2008, when virtually every stock cratered in value.
It reached a closing low in the next month that followed, but after that, shares never traded at a discount to their opening price. It opened at a price 17% higher than its IPO price of $85 per share, closing with a one-day gain of 18%. (Its most significant acquisition after its IPO was YouTube, which it acquired more than two years after going public.)Īt the reduced offering price of $85 per share, Alphabet was priced at more than 100 times its 2003 earnings. The size of the offering puzzled analysts who followed the company, who suspected Alphabet would use the proceeds to buy another web business of significant size. That number refers to the eight digits that follow the decimal place in the mathematical pi - 3.14159265.Īs for the maximum amount of money it wanted to raise, it pinned the number at $2.718281828 billion, a reference to the constant "e" in mathematics. Google, which is named after a "googol," or a number equal to 1 followed by 100 zeros, chose to sell 14.159265 million shares in its IPO. Its odd corporate culture was evident in its IPO filing. The company decided to flip the script on the IPO process, choosing to sell shares through an unconventional Dutch auction.
We have also emphasized an atmosphere of creativity and challenge, which has helped us provide unbiased, accurate and free access to information for those who rely on us around the world.Ĭreativity? Challenge? Didn't they understand that investors only cared about profits? Throughout Google's evolution as a privately held company, we have managed Google differently.