Inside Fumbled Facebook Offering, by SHAYNDI RAICE, ANUPREETA DAS and GINA CHON

This is like saying that if you sold your house today and the person you sold it to could not flip it that same day for 2x what you sold it for that you would be a idiot.

Leaving money on the table for the public markets to go crazy is not in the companies best interest and certainly does not mark a successful IPO.  These writers are idiots, dangerous and should be fired.

(via siminoff)

gbattle sez:

However, you have more stakeholders in Facebook than pre-IPO investors, employees and underwriters. 900 million users invested their time & effort in creating Facebook and want/deserve some ROI.  Greed, via “fair” pricing, killed any chance of retail ROI (strange that Facebook offered more shares at a rumored lower evaluation among insiders). To continue your analogy, Facebook didn’t build or own the house alone.  It’s a coop, not a private residence.  The CFO was effectively offering 25% more land with the “property” while private independent assessment of the “property” repriced it at a 25% discount.

Leaving money on the table isn’t bad maximization of financing.  It is a matter of risk management to engineer a successful IPO to give the right signal to the market regarding value going forward.  By not managing that risk by taking a discount on fair pricing, Facebook vastly underestimated the greed of retail investors, the very stakeholders who co-developed their service.