Considering it went smoothly it doesn't remind me of Facebook's IPO at all. Twitter should be all the evidence you need of how hard it is to succeed selling advertising to a big audience. Snap might crush it, but I would give them a few earnings reports before comparing them to anyone.
No, it was a disaster that led to years of litigation. NASDAQ admitted it was their technical error and paid millions to settle lawsuits stemming from it.
This obsession by techies that you're leaving money on the table if your shares go up after an IPO is bizarre.
> This obsession by techies that you're leaving money on the table if your shares go up after an IPO is bizarre.
If the company gets $X/share at the beginning of the day, and bankers get $X * 1.5/share at the end of the day, that feels like a big donation to Wall Street. If I'm an investor, I'd rather the company have all the capital than 2/3rds of the capital as well. It feels like if a company would sell a portion of the offering through the traditional channels, and the remainder at market prices throughout the first couple days of trading, it might better capture investment.
It priced 2 or 3 billion dollars over the early valuation estimates (a few weeks before the $38 debut, the roadshow was floating $32 as the top number).
EDIT: I was wrong, that's just what they are selling today, not the total value of their shares. In which case, good for them!
It actually surprised me how little the founders got. Their shares are worth about $400M each. Certainly nothing to sneeze at, but usually when you're the cofounder of a 24 billion dollar company, you're a billionaire. :)
> According to Snap's latest S-1 filing with the SEC from Feb. 27, Spiegel and Murphy plan to sell 16 million shares each on Thursday. The company opened at $24, after it priced its public offering at $17 a share. It's just a small fraction of the number of shares the co-founders own in Snap Inc. Both men will still have 97,164,485 after Thursday's sale.
Oh I read the same article but I read it wrong. I thought they meant that would be the total value of the shares they hold after the IPO, not just what they are selling today. My bad.
Groupon was a totally different business. Network effect didn't really add anything or give them lock in. Customers and businesses would go wherever prices were lowest. It was always doomed, really.
