Facebook’s I.P.O.: The Party Fizzles

Facebook’s I.P.O.: The Party Fizzles

 

No prizes for guessing what the stock of the day is on CNBC. On Squawk Box, the daily breakfast show, Andrew Sorkin, the Times columnist, founder of Dealbook, best-selling author, and, in his latest incarnation, would-be Matt Lauer, said he was going to a bar to watch the opening trade at 11 A.M. “We’re gonna have Red Bull and vodka,” he joked. Henry Blodget—yes, that Henry Blodget—put on his serious face and said, “Facebook is an extraordinary success story for America.”

Joe Kernan, who was also around in the late nineties, refused to put on a Mark Zuckerberg-style hoodie, which somebody had thrown onto the set. Good for him, you may say: refusing to partake in this Barnum & Bailey show. Not quite. Kernan’s hesitancy was based on a dislike of putting on an item that somebody else had worn, he explained.

Thank goodness Jim Cramer—yes, that Jim Cramer—popped up to inject a bit of skepticism and sanity. “I am just concerned that the public will get burned again,” he said shortly before Zuck himself, live from the hideous corporate campus in Menlo Park that serves as Facebook’s HQ, pressed a bell to start the day’s trading on the Nasdaq. The great man-boy was wearing his hoodie, of course, and it looked like he’d had his hair cut for the occasion, or perhaps for his twenty-eighth birthday, which was earlier this week. He didn’t say anything, but he received a nice bear hug anyway from Sheryl Sandberg, his C.E.O. and surrogate mother. From below the hastily erected stage, a scrum of geeks who were about to get rich gave him a loud cheer.

That was about that. It looked a bit like an encore by a second-tier college rock band at a sparsely attended music festival. To get across the momentousness of the occasion to their viewers, the CNBC anchors were forced to rely on words rather than pictures. “We’re witnessing a lot of American wealth getting created,” said Carl Campanile, a CNBC regular, who was on the ground in California. “It opens a new chapter, an exciting chapter, for business in this country,” offered David Faber, who was trying to get into the spirit of things from Englewood Cliffs. It was left to Melissa Lee, Faber’s co-host, to summon up a sentence fully commensurate with the occasion. “Mark Zuckerberg has accomplished the substance of the American dream,” she intoned.

In the scheme of things, it was all pretty harmless stuff, and at least some of it had the merit of being true. To those who say America is in inexorable decline, the existence of Silicon Valley, and the college-dorm-to-corporate-park success stories it generates on a fairly regular basis, is the great counter-argument. You can’t replicate Facebook in a Guangdong sweatshop. Where is the French Zuckerberg, or even the French Sandberg? And why even now, despite the rise of Mumbai, Silicon Fen, and other technology clusters, do so many innovative internet companies—Zynga, Pinterest, Instagram—start out or migrate to the Bay Area?
Sadly, none of this has any bearing on whether Facebook is worth a hundred billion dollars—roughly what it would be worth at the issue price of $38. Shortly before 11 A.M., the signs were that “FB” would open at about $45, sharply lower than many people had expected. At eleven, CNBC’s monitors were showing $42, just four dollars above the issue price—an indication that investors were balking at paying a big premium over the offer price. Fifteen minutes later, the stock still hadn’t opened. “I’m getting nervous,” Jim Cramer stammered. He wasn’t the only one. At 11:25, the Wall Street Journal reported that many traders were trying to cancel their electronic orders and having trouble doing it. “Did Nasdaq break?” Henry Blodget, who had gone back to his day job, tweeted. No, it didn’t.

At 11:30, the stock opened at $42, jumped up to $43, fell back $42—and kept falling, back to $40. “For market sentiment, this is not going to be positive,” said Simon Hobbs, the network’s resident Brit. Melissa Lee was equally crestfallen: “Forty minutes ago, I don’t think anybody thought $40,” she said. David Faber had been working the phones, and he reported that his sources had told him the stock might well fall below the issue price of $38, which would be a big embarrassment to the banks underwriting the deal, led by Morgan Stanley. “The big story is that Facebook, the social network, is now a public company,” he said. “The smaller story is that after five minutes, it’s only up six per cent.”

At 11:50, the stock hit the issue price of $38, prompting the underwriters to enter the market and prevent it falling any further. On CNBC, at least, the Facebook party was over. Out in Silicon Valley, things looked quite a bit different. We weren’t back in 1999, after all, but Facebook was, indeed, a public company—one valued at more than a hundred billion dollars. Zuckerberg was worth nearly twenty billion; Sandberg more than a billion. Eduardo Saverin, the Facebook co-founder who gave up his U.S. citizenship to avoid paying taxes on his windfall, was worth $2.7 billion. A bunch of venture capitalists, including a Russian oligarch and an Irish rock star, had made out like bandits. One of them, Roger McNamee, Bono’s business partner, popped up on the screen to say, “I’m very, very bullish about the long run.”

The insiders had done very, very well. Now we’ll see how the public investors fare.

 

 src:~http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2012/05/facebooks-ipo.html

"The thing I love about India..."

There is something about India that makes you fall in love with the chaos, buzz and inimitable energy that surrounds every corner.
Four writers tell us why it's good to be Indian...

Foodie
Ambika Muttoo

"My first reaction to this piece was, 'Good question'. Then I repeated, 'Why do I love India' in as many different tones as I could manage, hoping that one of them would kickstart some neurological magic. Either my neurons aren't exactly cooperative, or the question itself defies explanation. I suspect it's the latter. The reason why it's so hard to illustrate an answer is because love itself is hard to describe. It's every cliche in the book, because cliche's are born from the truth, aren't they? There are a couple of things I know about this inexpressible love I have for my country and they do set some sort of ball rolling. I know I can't live anywhere else in the world.

This isn't just a lofty statement, it's actually been put to practise. I've been fortunate enough to travel. I've been even more fortunate to travel to places that I love and will visit multiple times through my life. But no matter where I go, I am, and will always be a homing pigeon. I think it's got a lot to do with the food. I didn't think I consciously spoke about gastronomic yearnings until a particular experience in Prague revealed otherwise. Two very close friends: one American and one German-American, dragged me out of bed one fine morning. I lie, it was afternoon, but we had a particularly fine experience at our favourite bar, La Casa Blu, the previous night. Their mission was to surprise me with something, and this exercise took us through the winding cobblestone streets of the city. Our eventual destination made me alternately cry with joy and cry with laughter. It was a South Indian restaurant, perhaps the only South Indian restaurant in all of Prague. Apparently, I talked so fondly of food from India that they had to try it out for themselves. And shut me up, at the same time. It worked. I'm Kashmiri, but the way I see it, I came close enough.

I now have my answer as well. I love India because it allows me to be vegetarian and not feel like a minor member of the food chain. For a former carnivore, (hey, I'm Kashmiri), this is a blessing like no other. I love India because my vegetarianism isn't perceived as a 'fad' (I've been cold turkey, for lack of a better term, for four years now). It's a valid lifestyle choice, as is my choice to practise Pranic Healing and Arhatic Yoga. I am not a hippy. I'm not modish. I may sometimes be a 'healer' and meditate, but I'm also a writer, a herbivore, cocktail lover and many other things. I am myself an integral part of what is...Indian.

Warm tiding
Ira Trivedi

"Lyrical, passionate, colloquial, abstruse, rigorous, humorous, romantic, austere, playful. These are the words that come to my mind when I think of India. But the most enduring, or perhaps encapsulating, of all these words is: warmth. It is the warmth of my country that I love the most.

I moved back to India after having lived in the lap of vibrancy, New York City. There were teething problems, like there always are: living with parents, curfews, the 'haw' factor, and then the small but crucial things: laundry (dhobis never get it right), milk (the milk in India never tastes the same), AC problems (why don't we have central air-conditioning?) my green-tea latte at Starbucks, and a multitude of other irritants. At the end, though, I realised something New York was probably the loneliest city in the world, and India was the warmest, vibrant, dynamic country that I had lived in.

The warmth that I have come to love and cherish translates into so many things: art, fashion, food, weather, colour, and most of all, to the denizens of our nation. Nowhere else in the world have I experienced the kind of love and care that I have here, from the most ordinary of people, my 'waxing lady', the driver, the gate-keeper, the passer-by. Nowhere else have I found people to be kinder, more generous, most giving of themselves and of the little that they have. After having lived in seven countries, I have realised the importance of being surrounded by that warm energy. At times, when I miss the anonymity of the West, I try to remember the sheer warmth of my family home, of the brown smiling faces, and the energy which is more soulful and nourishing than anything else that I know, and I know that I never want to go back. This is Home. For me, India is a microcosmic necropolis of love, a sanctuary of peace, spiritual haven, a land filled with warmth and emotion that is incomparable to anywhere else in the world.

Million rainbows
Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan

"I'm writing this a day after Mumbai saw yet another set of multiple blasts in the most crowded bits of that city. I'm supposed to say why I love India, and yet, my morning paper gives me so many reasons not to.

So, here's what I like. I like that no two days are the same, and I like that lots of things stay the same even when everything around it wooshes at the speed of light. I like that I can instantly be taken back to my childhood just by the call of the kabaadi wallah down the road, and I like that kabaadi wallahs are performing a role so modern that other countries just introduced it less than a decade ago: recycling. I like that just by virtue of being Indian, most of us are not only bilingual, we can speak about three different languages.

Those are little things, things we take for granted, but ultimately, we can't explain them to anyone else. They are our quirks, and something we share across the country, and even across the globe, if we happen to meet a fellow citizen. If you think of India in a straight line, in a uni-dimensional sense, there are so many things you're not getting. Imagine, instead, the country as a prism, loads of jagged edges, but when you hold it up to just the right light, you see the reflections of a million tiny rainbows.

Can't match it
Naomi Dutta

"It was my first-ever trip abroad. As a 20-something cub reporter, I was dispatched to Cannes to cover the annual international advertising festival.

My first trip to Cannes, I spent most of my time hiding my clunky sneakers under a chair. But redemption was served to my table as I sat around in one of the many cafes on the cobbled streets of Cannes.

Yes, these seemed to be content people, but there was a huge gap in their menu of happiness. Food. Proper good food. As I stared glumly at the bland pieces of chicken on my plate, I yearned for the taste and smell of spice. I sought out our neighbours, and found a Chinese eatery where I was told dourly that the food was on the spicy side. I ate what seemed like boiled chicken in a bed of noodles, and felt that the Chinese owed us big time for Chicken Manchurian.

After 10 days of eating bags of French fries as staple fare, we were finally back at Mumbai Airport. We were herded like cattle by pot bellied constables at a crowded chaotic airport. As I stepped out, Mumbai smelled like it always does, like a garangutan gutter. The driver handed me a vada pao, and as I bit into the potato slathered with green chutney, I felt awfully sorry for my fellow human beings in Cannes. I walked away into the night in my clunky sneakers, and thought it sure tastes good to be Indian. Jai Hind!

src:~http://in.lifestyle.yahoo.com

Mumbai

"If there's a colour that defines Mumbai, it's grey. Glimpse it from the air in the daytime and you'll see a grey coastline and a grey ocean. As you touch down, you'll note the concrete and chrome towers, the shanty towns, the creeks and the roads - all grey.
But don't be fooled into believing the grey signifies dullness. On the contrary, the monochrome is the perfect foil to the city's colourful character.

From the delicate pink flamingoes that visit the Sewri mud flats in the first half of the year to the fuchsia of a Bollywood actress's garb. The sandstone colonial buildings to the blazing red flame-of-the-forest blooms. The haphazard, honking traffic to the precision of commuter trains and lunch-delivering dabbawallahs. The plushest of hotels to the most rickety of hovels. From the cosmopolitan cacophony of dialects to the rich notes of a single musical instrument at the National Centre for Performing Arts. The fanfare of the Ganesha festival to the soft prayers in the Parsi fire temples. From hungry leopards spilling out of the Borivali National Park to much-loved stray dogs. From a slow-cooked biryani to a speedily crafted vada pao. From the single bulbs of the tiny fishing boats that go out to sea in the wee hours to the flashing strobelights of the nightclubs.

To savour every part of the city, you'd have to live in Mumbai for many lifetimes. But to get a glimpse into its soul, you only need a few days and an open mind."