The quotation of Facebook is now upon us, and once again the most pyrotechnic of the IPOs will take on much broader connotations than what the stock market indexes and analysts' evaluations reveal. Next week – according to some rumors – the “roadshow” by the owner of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg.
The twenty-eight year old, all curls and freckles, a native of Dobbs Ferry, a small town on the outskirts of the Big Apple overlooking the banks of the Hudson, will kick off the "journey" through which the top management of the world's largest social network will try to attract - like bees on the honey – potential investors.
The timing indicates that the quotation could be completed by the end of the month, but it is not so much the dates as the values at stake that monopolize the attention of observers: the Menlo Park company could be valued between 75 and 100 billion dollars.
Zuckerberg, meanwhile, after acquiring Instagram, is looking for some five to light the fireworks, but before uncorking the champagne he will have to clarify some doubts: what are the real growth prospects? The network now has more than 900 million users, how much will it grow in the future, and how fast? Although sales in the first quarter of 2012 grew by 45%, costs also soared, reducing the profit by 12% in March.
And there is no shortage of precedents of illustrious failures: the events of the "internal bubblet”, which ended the stock market effervescence at the end of the century, speak for themselves. Just think of the decline of Netscape or the prodigy"iVillage“, startup founded by the ambitious Candice Carpenter and Nancy Evans then launched on the lists with little success.
The writer Erik Larson remembers it thus: "for the layman - the quotation ed - it seemed magical, a company as ethereal as the air earned in the blink of an eye a value equal to more than two million dollars". Then crack. Larson continues: "the shares experienced a long and constant decline and in 2006 the company was acquired by NBC Universal for only six hundred million dollars, 8,50 per share against the 24 of the initial quotation".
And yet Candice Carpenter she wasn't naive: she understood many things that Zuckerberg, when he was still considered a "garage geek", didn't even dream of: partnerships with advertisers, the importance of an authoritative brand, the ability to address the female market. All intangible assets but which make the difference in those network startups that cannot count on high-sounding numbers to show to investors.
Nonetheless, while nobody talks about iVillage anymore, Zuckerberg has come to duet on stage with Obama and leading the largest stock market operation of all time, among those staged on the web.
“There are those who understand to what extent the internet will change work and commerce in the next millennium, those who can guess to what extent the brick and mortar can be dethroned in favor of cyberspace, and there are those who cannot,” he points out. Larson referring to iVillage's sad decline.
And then there is America: the land of great disparities, but also the one where it is not by pure chance that the publicity of an IPO is called a "roadshow", an expression that evokes the myth of the "land of opportunities ”, of the constant search for a personal path to success, part of that “Great American Novel” that so many writers – from Melville to Fitzgerald, from Salinger to McCarthy – have attempted to write.
If the Ford IPO, in the dark years of McCarthyism, wrote a part of this story, the Facebook ride - now in the hands of the SEC which has yet to give its consent to the operation - can light a candle in the darkness of the Great Recession. At least symbolically.
