There's a curmudgeony piece in the Business section of the Chron today titled "Facebook must convince investors of its value" and goes on to quote one analyst who tries to compare Facebook's upcoming, mid-month IPO with those of Groupon and Zillow which have "burned" investors now that they're trading well below their IPO price. We don't claim to be stock experts, but won't people be climbing over each other to buy Facebook stock when it finally comes avilable, and isn't everyone pretty convinced of the company's value and inescapable power over us — even if there has been a little backlash in the press? This ain't no Zillow we're talking about here.

This guy even thinks it's more important than Google, in the long run.

As reported yesterday, Facebook's execs say they're going to be pricing shares between $28 and $35, putting it's total value somewhere north of $80 billion (some say the execs will target $100 billion from day 1, pricing shares even higher than that). There's always a pop on the first day of an initial offering that sends a company's value higher than what it will ultimately settle in to, but experts are suggesting that Facebook's IPO could quite possibly be the fourth-biggest overall IPO in U.S. history.

Also, as the Chron reports, when this IPO happens, sometime around May 18, 27-year-old Mark Zuckerberg stands to be worth more than $17 billion himself, making him richer than Microsoft's Steve Ballmer and Russian steel billionaire Vladimir Lisin. That'll buy a lot of growlers for chilling in Dolores Park.

[Chron]

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