Facebook shares began trading on the Nasdaq exchange this morning with an immediate jump of approximately 11 percent to a price of about $42 per share.

It’s a signal that Facebook and its bankers priced its IPO incredibly well; a large leap on the first day would have meant Facebook left money on the table. Instead, the company got the most value out of the shares it sold.

This comes after an initial delay in trading — which usually starts at 11 am ET — of nearly a half an hour, because Nasdaq continued to get last-minute orders, despite the exchange reassuring the public that it was “prepared” for today’s trading mania.

The company officially priced its shares at the high end of its target range last night, settling on $38 per share before the market opened this morning. At that price, Facebook was able to raise upward of $16 billion, a massive capital injection to the company coffers.

At the current stock price, the company is valued at $115.08 billion. That makes Zuckerberg’s stake worth $21.15 billion — for now, at least.

Compare Facebook’s debut to Internet company IPOs of the past year: Yelp traded up more than 65 percent on day one. LinkedIn popped huge on its debut, soaring with a 109 percent bump on its first day.

It’s anyone’s (and everyone’s) guess as to what the stock price will close at this afternoon, though we’ll check back in on it later in the day. Meanwhile, join the thousands of speculative posts on $FB’s closing price at this clever single-serving Web site.

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That’s an easy one: Kayak.com.

The travel search company, which has been putting off its plans to go public for more than a year and a half, is now getting ready to pull the trigger, according to sources.

The Norwalk, Conn.-based company is by default one of the prime candidates to go public because it has already filed its paperwork and has been dutifully updating its financial statements with the Securities and Exchange Commission every quarter.

A Kayak spokesperson declined to comment, but the timing is good for a number of reasons.

Not only has Facebook priced at the high end of its range, which makes investors a bit more hungry for tech stocks, but other travel companies have been warmly received by the markets over the past few months.

In December, TripAdvisor spun off from Expedia to become an independently held public company. Since then, the company’s stock has soared, trading at $41 a share, up from $27 a share. Expedia is also trading higher, up 50 percent to $41.10 a share.

Kayak could begin its roadshow as soon as Monday and may be seeking as much as $150 million at a $1 billion valuation, according to CNBC. In its original documents, it said it would raise a minimum of $50 million, which served more as a placeholder than what it was intending on raising.

As recently as last week, it updated its filing to report its first quarter earnings, announcing that it earned $4.1 million on $73.3 million. In the year-ago period, it recorded a lost of $6.9 million on revenues of $52.7 million.

Mark Zuckerberg rings the Nasdaq’s opening bell from Facebook’s Palo Alto headquarters. Shares start trading around 11 am ET.

It’s here.

Facebook, the 900-million-strong social network that knows more about us than even our closest friends, will become a publicly traded company within the next hour.

Private equity dealmakers will celebrate alongside cadres of newly minted millionaire engineers in Menlo Park, Calif., while retail investors the world around will clamor amongst themselves, tooth and claw, for the chance to share in a mere fraction of the riches.

And yet, after a year of watching tech IPOs — Zynga, Groupon, LinkedIn, Yelp — let’s all admit that it kind of borders on anticlimactic.

We know we’ll most likely see a nice pop in the share price after Mark Zuckerberg rings in the Nasdaq bell remotely from Facebook’s spanking-new HQ in Silicon Valley.

From there, like a floating jump ball up for grabs, the social networking giant’s closing stock price is anyone’s guess — and by the looks of my Twitter feed, everyone’s guess. There’s already a site dedicated to tracking what price Facebook’s stock will settle at when the markets close, a page peppered with numbers posited by the digital elite.

Today is about the money. And yet it is also more than just sitting and watching the ticker tape roll by. For the first time, Zuckerberg’s vision of making the world a more open place will finally apply to his own company.

We got our first taste of it when the company filed its S-1. It’s where we saw that more than half of Facebook’s 900 million monthly visitors are visiting the site via mobile devices, a channel in which the company has yet to figure out a coherent or viable monetization strategy.

We saw that Zuckerberg retains a tight grip on the company’s future — tighter than most CEOs, akin to the likes of Google’s co-founders — holding voting rights on 57.1 percent of Facebook’s mighty class-B shares. He is so tied to his company that he is cited as a risk factor in Facebook’s S-1, of course.

And now we’re witnessing the first defectors from Facebook’s nacent advertising strategy, as with General Motors pulling its $10 million dollars in advertising on Facebook earlier this week, citing it as an ineffective use of the company’s massive marketing budget.

What we’ll soon see is Facebook’s less-pretty public profile, so to speak, with Zuckerberg holding court over earnings calls every quarter, taking heat from investors who expect returns. We’ll be given insight into how the company plans to monetize its different products, and how they actually fare.

Just as Facebook knows so very much about each of us, we, too, will begin to learn a lot more about Facebook.

And yet, through all of this, no matter what grim forecast Wall Street projects, no matter what executive decisions or company road maps the media decries, Zuckerberg’s message is clear — so much so that he made it the poster for the pre-IPO all-night hackathon:

“Stay focused and keep hacking.”

Good luck with that.

(Images: (top) Morin Uwole/Facebook; (bottom) Victor Luu/Facebook)

Facebook employees give their CEO a standing ovation at the start of the company’s pre-IPO hackathon, which will run through the night and finish up shortly before FB shares begin trading on the Nasdaq.

(Photo via Facebook Product Designer Francis Luu, who has a set of pictures documenting the event.)

But before you place your order, it is my fiduciary duty to remind you all of the risks involved with this investment.

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Facebook shares will trade on the Nasdaq exchange for the first time at $38 per share on Friday morning, valuing the world’s largest social networking Web site at $ 104.12 billion.

At $38 a share, Facebook would raise $16 billion in the offering. The company could sell an additional 63 million in over-allotments if underwriters see the demand (which they probably will).

Facebook initially set its sights on a $28 to $35 price range, but the company steadily raised the target amid growing investor fervor for the largest technology compay IPO in history. Earlier this week, in an amended S-1 SEC filing, the company estimated its share price to be in the $34 to $38 range. The final share price will settle at the top of the estimated range, though not over.

Facebook’s offering debuts after a year replete with hot tech IPOs from Zynga, LinkedIn and Groupon. Facebook’s trumps every other. Google’s was the largest IPO in tech history when it raised $1.67 billion in August of 2004. Last year, Zynga raised $1 billion.

But many things about Facebook ramping up to its Nasdaq debut were far out of the norm for tech company IPOs. To kick off its traveling pitch to institutional investors last week, Facebook put together an extravagant, well-produced roadshow video complete with a full explanation of the company’s advertising business, the meat and potatoes of Facebook’s revenue engine. And in celebration of the IPO, the company will host an all-night hackathon at its Menlo Park headquarters on Thursday evening in order to ring in $FB’s debut “the hacker way.”

The mammoth IPO comes despite initial reports of investor reservations about said revenue engine, and General Motors’ ill-timed announcement earlier this week that it would pull its $10 million in ad spend that it reserves for Facebook, citing that the advertisements just weren’t working.

Shortly thereafter, Facebook increased the amount of shares offered to investors on Friday by nearly 25 percent.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg will be selling close to $1.2 billion in shares at the time of the IPO — for tax purposes, he says — though he still holds more than 580 million voting shares, maintaining a firm grip on complete control over the direction of his 8-year-old company.

It’s official: $FB has arrived.

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Facebook executives and senior bankers on the deal were holed up in a meeting discussing the price and a decision still hasn’t been made final, cautioned the person, noting that the final price could still come in a dollar higher. The company tried floating higher numbers to investors but was rebuffed, said another person familiar with the matter.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

There’s no question that every venture capitalist within 100 miles of Silicon Valley wanted to squeeze their khaki-clad selves into what had become tech’s hottest deal of late.

That would be to get a piece of the new round of funding for start-up phenom Pinterest.

But while piles of VCs and other investors tried to work every angle possible to noodge into the action, the iconoclastic CEO and co-founder Ben Silbermann decided to go big and go global by hooking up with a Tokyo-based Internet giant.

Japan’s Rakuten will invest upwards of $50 million in a $100 million round that values the social bookmarking site at $1.5 billion.

Rakuten is one of the largest online commerce companies in the world, with a flagship site Rakuten Ichiba, among others. It was founded in 1997 and had revenue of $4.7 billion in 2011.

Most important in Pinterest’s calculation was apparently the link with its CEO Hiroshi Mikitani, whose nickname is Mickey. One the richest men in Japan, Mikitani is one of the best known entrepreneurs there where he’s been described as “Richard Branson meets Jeff Bezos.”

I briefly chatted with Mikitani last night about why he decided on the Pinterest deal, in a conversation where he focused a bit on Rakuten’s famed “omotenashi” or “empowerment” philosophy. Simply put, the concept is that — unlike an Amazon — Rakuten is a facilitator of commerce, much like its shopping mall metaphor beginnings. The approach is to aid merchants rather than compete with them.

It’s a little eBay, a little Alibaba, some Etsy and even a little Amazon Web Services mixed in. It’s also a place that can move retail globally, which is presumably the attraction to it by Pinterest.

ATD: Why did Pinterest pick you?

Mikitani: We are not a venture capitalist. We got together and talked about our story and our history.

We agreed that we shared a vision of the future of Internet e-commerce.

ATD: Why make an investment?

Mikitani: When we started to talk about being involved in the round of investment, we wanted to invest as much as possible.

We were very impressed by their business model and also the management style.

ATD: What made Pinterest so attractive in comparsion to other similar companies?

Everyone is talking about social commerce and best solution to social commerce, but Pinterest really was the first to use graphics that well to connect with people.

Rarely have we seen such a powerful media and we were seeing huge traffic coming from Pinterest [to Rakuten sites]. It was much higher than anyone else.

ATD: What do you bring to the table?

Mikitani: I think there are some things we think we can do with our expertise. Ben and his team have an extremely strong commitment to make their products as attractive as possible.

But we have 40,000 stores in Japan and we can give them access to our customers and do aggregation to engage in everything. And we have sites in many other countries too.

ATD: How are you going to work together?

Mikitani: We are not going to stop them from doing dealings with other e-commerce companies. But we can have more constructive input on how to make their site more effective from e-commerce point of view.

This is a long-term arrangement and we have a strong committment and attachment to this business. We truly understand their business and respect their management.