With a wedding ring on his finger and his company public, is Mark Zuckerberg ready to make Facebook produce more profits, not just more social connections?
His fanfare-less marriage to long-time girlfriend Priscilla Chan this weekend would seem to indicate he won’t be getting too distracted by family life. But just before Facebook IPO’d on Friday, he announced on stage that “Our mission isn’t to be a public company.”
As the young CEO enters this next phase of his life, he faces perhaps his greatest challenge yet: building something that betters our lives while still bringing home the bacon. → Read More
Just after the markets closed on its first day of public trading, Facebook amended its S-1 with a complete prospectus detailing how much stock each underwriter got to sell. Morgan Stanley, the lead-left bank, received 162.1 million shares ($6.15 billion worth) followed by J.P. Morgan with 84.8 million ($3.22 billion), and Goldman Sachs pulled down 63.1 million shares ($2.4 billion). → Read More
Mark Zuckerberg’s remote ringing of the opening bell and Facebook’s initial stock trades were a bit anti-climactic in person at the NASDAQ Marketsite in New York City, as we’ve written — NASDAQ is a digital exchange after all, so there’s not too much to see visually.
But being there was still a great opportunity to talk all things Facebook with David Kirkpatrick, the NYC-based founder of Techonomy, Fortune Magazine alum, and bestselling author of the book “The Facebook Effect — The Inside Story Of The Company That Is Connecting The World.” So we were happy to have Kirkpatrick join TechCrunch TV for an interview on the floor of the NASDAQ Marketsite. → Read More
The underwriters of Facebook’s $16 billion debut on NASDAQ fought to the finish to keep the company’s shares above last night’s final price of $38 a share. Shares closed at $38.23 today. Sources tell us that the syndicate of banks underwriting the deal have been putting in buy orders to keep its price afloat. For Facebook itself, it’s actually a great outcome as the company didn’t leave any money on the table. But bankers on the wealth-management side of the underwriters are sure to be unhappy. Plus, the company’s tepid premiere is killing the performance of tech stocks across the board.
Basically, what we hear is that the underwriters including Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs, got too pushy in the final days before the IPO about pricing. Earlier this month, the company was slated to open at a $28 to 35 price range, but that range was pushed up to $34 to 38 a share. Then Facebook priced at the very high end at $38 last night.
“The only thing keeping it at $38 are support mechanisms,” a source tells us. “There just wasn’t the institutional investor demand that people thought there would be.” They added that about 20 percent of buying orders seem to be coming from retail investors (e.g. regular people), which is “unprecedented.” → Read More
Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg received a commemorative hoodie from the NASDAQ CEO Bob Greifeld and thanked his site’s users in opening remarks recorded before he rang the NASDAQ opening bell this morning.
In his short speech which you can watch below, Zuckerberg said:
“I just want to say a few things, and then we’ll ring this bell and we’ll get back to work. Right now this all seems like a big deal. Going public is an important milestone in our history. But here’s the thing: our mission isn’t to be a public company. Our mission is to make the world more open and connected. In the past eight years, all of you out there have built the largest community in the history of the world. You’ve done amazing things that we never would have dreamed of and I can’t wait to see what you’re all going to do going forward.
So on this special day, on behalf of everyone at Facebook, I just want to say to all the people out there who use Facebook and our products, thank you. So let’s do this! [Rings bell] This is an awesome moment. Remember, stay focused and keep shipping” Watch the video here… → Read More
Why is there nothing but Facebook IPO news today, you (Facebook haters) may be asking? Well, outside of the obvious – people are obsessed, this is a historic event, it’s the biggest tech IPO over, etc., etc. – there’s another reason why all the news outlets are publishing Facebook this and Facebook that today. It’s because everyone else is holding their news for a later date….the result of which has led to a historic event of my own: inbox zero.
So this is what it’s like not being a tech blogger? → Read More
Today’s Facebook IPO is a momentous, historical occasion. It’s set to be the biggest tech IPO ever, and the third largest IPO in U.S. history, second only to Visa and General Motors. The company that was once just a glimmer in the eye of a Harvard student named Mark Zuckerberg raised over $16 billion yesterday as shares were gobbled up by hungry investors, and that $38 share price point is expected to increase as the stock starts trading around 11am today.
Do you know how much money that is? → Read More
This is awesome. At 9:30 AM ET, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted what’s bound to be a historical status update to his Facebook Timeline. The post simply reads: “Mark Zuckerberg listed a company on NASDAQ. — with Chris Cox and 4 others.” You can read the whole story right here from the engineer who rigged up the auto-post: “How Facebook Hacked The NASDAQ Button”
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Editor’s note: Some savvy Facebook engineers rigged the NASDAQ button to automatically post “Mark Zuckerberg has listed a company on NASDAQ – FB” to the CEO’s Timeline as he rung the bell to open the NASDAQ’s day of trading. David Garcia, a senior software engineer at Facebook, explains how they turned the NASDAQ on to Open Graph.
It was a normal Monday. Nothing out of the ordinary other than that Facebook was set to go public at the end of the week. Camera crews were beginning to appear and NASDAQ was coming to campus so we could ring the opening bell together. Other than that, it was like any other Monday. → Read More
Social finance site TradingView, which launched in September of last year, is rolling out a new feature just in time for the Facebook IPO (c’mon, you knew there would have to be at least one story about “just in time for the Facebook IPO” today, right?). But anyway, this one seems relevant at least: TradingView is launching interactive real-time chatting on its site, which lets users talk about stocks in a slightly more private forum than Twitter.
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Facebook will be the largest tech IPO in history today as the company and its early shareholders raise $16 billion. There is also an allotment for them to sell up to $2.4 billion more in the next 30 days. We’ve made a couple of charts to show how it compares to other historical IPOs, according to NASDAQ data. Then we also have historical price data from SecondMarket, which is a private secondary market that became popular among former Facebook employees who wanted to offload some shares.
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You can watch here on TechCrunch or on the NASDAQ website as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made history this morning ringing the bell to open the day’s trading on the NASDAQ from Facebook’s headquarters just before his company’s IPO. The ceremony didn’t include Zuckerberg giving a speech or any remarks. However, he did sign the NASDAQ bell’s touchscreen “To a more open and connected world”. Facebook stock won’t actually begin trading until 8am PST / 11am EST so investors will have a few more hours to salivate.
Employees have been at 1 Hacker Way in Menlo Park for an all-night hackathon that’s about to culminate with Zuck’s bell-ringing ceremony. → Read More
Facebook knows what’s best for you, sometimes before you do. That’s the meaning of a new “Likers Gonna Like” inspirational mini-poster printed by the Facebook Toronto Office. If you don’t approve of something Facebook’s doing, fine, there’s millions of other people who do. And just as with the launch of the news feed, if you hate some change to the Facebook interface, wait a few months, and you’ll probably end up Liking it too.
It’s a cavalier statement, one based on several old hip-hop songs including “In Da Club” by 50 Cent, where he raps “If [they] hate then let ‘em hate and watch the money pile up”. It’s a mentality that has gotten the company into privacy trouble. But the idea that Facebook and its visionary CEO Mark Zuckerberg should push forward with bold ideas because “Likers Gonna Like” is what’s let Facebook move faster than its older rivals, and kept it from being disrupted these last eight years. → Read More
With Facebook announcing its ballsy stock price of $38 yesterday and all eyes now on what will happen with the social network when it finally goes public today, a new trading platform in Hong Kong, 8 Securities, is seizing the moment to boost its own profile by offering customers US$200 of Facebook shares if they sign up to trade on 8 Securities’ trading platform in the next month.
The offer indirectly serves a couple of other purposes, too: it gives non-U.S. citizens a relatively easy crack at a bit of stock in the most valuable tech IPO ever, and it raises Facebook’s Asia profile even further as people continue to wonder how Facebook might finally address one of the biggest markets in the world, China.
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Tomorrow Facebook will sell shares in one of the biggest tech IPOs in history. New investors will gobble up the stock to get a piece of the global phenomenon famously started in Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room in 2004. But while owning the stock will have quantifiable value when it trades on the open market, few buyers will be able to say truthfully that they understood the value of the company just a few years ago.
Ask yourself candidly, what did you think of Facebook the first time you landed on its homepage? Where you blown away? Could you see how it would fill a gaping need in the lives of nearly a billion people? If you’re honest with yourself, and you’re not Peter Thiel, your answer is probably, “No, not really.” → Read More
If there’s something on Facebook that won’t stop pinging you with Notifications, tell it to shut up instantly with Facebook’s new granular, in-line notification controls. Hover over an alert in the Facebook.com homepage’s globe icon drop-down and click the ‘x’ for the option to turn off notifications from that app, group, event, or post you commented on. The whole drop-down has a slick new look, and you can scroll down to much older notifications too.
Previously you had to dig your way to the dedicated Notifications Settings page to make these changes, and there was no way to turn off a specific source of alerts — you had to silence all your events or all your posts. Facebook has confirmed with me that most of the changes to notifications will be rolled out to everyone by tonight, except for app alert controls which are still in testing.
As we accumulate more friends and apps, Facebook’s notifications can turn from delightful pointers to annoying distractions that interrupt our lives. These new controls mean if you want a more zen Facebook experience, you can make it so. → Read More
Facebook’s $38 share price would make its deal to buy Instagram worth nearly $1.2 billion, up from the roughly $1 billion price the company announced in April.
That’s a nice little bump, but the deal hasn’t gone through given regulatory reviews. On top of that, we don’t know the restrictions on the shares like when they vest or if they’re subject to a lock-up period. When Facebook agreed to buy Instagram, it said it would pay with $300 million in cash and 22,999,412 shares of stock. That stock is now worth nearly $874 million, creating a $1.17 billion price tag.
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Angel investor and all-around web magnate Chris Sacca wrote a quick tweet early yesterday about how it’d be cool if there was a website where people could predict where Facebook’s stock will end up at the end of its first day as a publicly traded company.
Well, ask and ye shall receive.
A programmer named James Proud answered the call, hacking together FacebookIPODayClosingPrice.com, a fun little website that keeps a running tally of people’s bets on where Facebook’s stock will close on IPO day. → Read More
Facebook shares will start trading at $38 tomorrow, the company confirmed in a release, giving it a valuation of $104.12 billion. Facebook and its early shareholders will raise just over $16 billion in tomorrow’s much anticipated IPO.
At a $104 billion valuation, Facebook is worth more than any other tech IPO candidate at the time of its offering. It also perfectly matches what Facebook shares have been trading at in secondary markets over the last several months. Google was worth $23 billion at the time of its very unusual Dutch auction IPO back in 2004. As of tomorrow Facebook will be worth about half of what Google is worth now. → Read More
Tiny sidebar and news feed ads aren’t going to cut it. If Facebook wants to live up to a $104 billion valuation it will need bold new revenue streams. An offsite ad network, big glossy news feed ads, and payments for physical goods are a few ways it could boost its average revenue per user far beyond the puny $4.34 a year it earns today.
Facebook has a tough decision to make now that’s going public. It will have to strike a new balance between the good of its users, advertisers, app developers, and investors. If it refuses to explore new business models, its share price could sink. But if it strays too far in favor of making money, Facebook could lose its addictiveness and the faith of its users. Here’s the four aces Mark Zuckerberg could have up his sleeve. → Read More
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