Ben Gilbert: uncertainty

Transcript context

…So, things keep moving along in the process. On May 9, Facebook files the sixth amendment to its S-1. We’re going to come back to that in a minute. Things keep going along. And mid-May, they decide that they’re going to set Friday, May 18 as the day that Facebook goes public. So the start of that week, though, there’s an inauspicious start and that’s at the beginning of the week, GM (General Motors) – that we’ve already talked about on this episode – announces that they’re going to stop all advertising on Facebook because it’s not actually working that well for them. They’ve been spending $10 million a year with Facebook. And they wanted flashier ad units. I mean, their major complaint was, “look, on all these blogs they are letting us take over the whole back page, we can slide stuff in from the sides, we can get this big header that pushes all the content down, and all we get are these crummy, little static ads on Facebook on the side.” And I don’t know if they had started newsfeed ads at that point, but either way, the ad formats on Facebook have historically been so much more limiting than the kind of arguably user-hostile things that you get across the advertising ecosystem on the web. Yup. But, you know, no matter. Ten million dollars? That’s a big account. But Facebook made $3.7 billion the past year. So a drop in the bucket, things proceed. The night before the IPO, Thursday night, Facebook holds an all-night hackathon leading up to the IPO and then in the morning, everybody’s been up all night and the whole company rings the bell for the NASDAQ remotely from California, and Zuckerberg pushes the button. Big fanfare. Then, the company is supposed to start trading. So they price the IPO the night before; they price at $38 per share, which gives Facebook a market capitalization of $104 billion at IPO. Again, unprecedented in technology history.…

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