[ChuckMcM]

Seems a bit snarky to me. Engineers don't price IPOs, bankers do. And because of that it reads more like

"I'm really pissed off you are now rich and I am still not rich."

or perhaps

"I thought it was going to go through the roof and so I bought some and it didn't so I lost a lot of value and now all this stuff that I'm reading makes me look stupid for having believed it in the first place."

I've mentioned elsewhere that when I read stuff like this I feel sympathy for the Author because I think they might be in a lot of pain over something and trying to work through it. Not everyone has good tools for that, sometimes just screaming at the top of your lungs makes you feel better.

As a person who lives in Silicon Valley and could easily be painted by William's broad brush strokes as someone who "has their head so far up their ass that they are eating their own bullshit" I regret to say that I've not lost (or gained) any money on Facebook stock, don't own a single share, and like a lot of people here don't own it because I didn't feel it merited a price over $30 a share. This isn't because I'm a genius and or smarter, its because I looked at the business and said, "You know I don't think it supports that valuation."

But that said, its a hell of a business. Facebook made over a BILLION dollars last quarter, that is over four billion a year at those rates. I was at Sun 10 years and it just just crested $3B on its ways "hopefully" to $5B and folks were estatic. It is pretty impressive what these Facebook folks are doing.

But what William is so upset about is its stock price. And to that I'd say why the hell do you care what the price of Facebook's stock is? What does it matter? Smarter people than you are evaluating it every day and making bets on whether its priced higher or lower than its future value, as they play that game they exchange money, it's sort of a score keeping system with them, and they have more strategies than a roulette player has ways to "beat the house."

Now if you're an executive at Facebook you care because it limits your options when it goes down, as an employee maybe it changes the model plane or boat you can buy, as an outside observer it means nothing. So why the angst?

[wkasel]

Interesting assessment. I live in Silicon Valley, I don't own a share of FB, I do trade frequently. Like you, I made an assessment. My frusteration comes mostly from reading on tech blogs what Facebook "needs to do". Techcrunch acts like they are Bloomberg or something, which goes exactly with my broad brush stroked point as you said.

It's actually the valuation I care about vs. the stock price, but people tend to understand that better, so I use that as a unit instead of valuation.

The bottom line is yes, I write pointed, and passionately, I'm not personally at a loss for FB, I'm just tired of hearing "expert opinions" even on Bloomberg.

[ChuckMcM]

Ok, I think it would be more effective for me then if you started with what you cared about and why you cared about it.

So your frustration is with blogs, written by people who are paid in proportion to how angry or scared they make their readers, using Facebook as a stalking horse to drive page views? I can certainly understand if that is the case, why not say that?

Instead you said this : "The root of this problem is core to the DNA of Silicon Valley types. "

You didn't say the people who blog about Silicon valley (heck they may not even live here) you just said "Silicon Valley Types" which covers a lot of people, many of whom like the folks who founded Y-Combinator probably don't think of themselves a collective that "These character flaws are why we (the collective known as Silicon Valley) thought that a company with piss-poor revenues could IPO at an overpriced valuation, and have the same fan fare for over-valuation as it did in the valley. "

You impeach yourself by calling Facebook's revenue 'piss poor', it isn't, and then accuse "us", those who live in Silicon valley, with 'over valuing' when in fact that was the work of a collection of banks, based primarily in New York city.

I would love to hear passionate, pointed, editorial about how bankers and journalists unknowingly (or perhaps knowingly if you are the conspiracy type) in the creation of a value perception, but its a hard case to make here. There were literally years of trades in FB you could look at from SecondMarket, and there are a number of pretty cogently written analyses of their business model and the potential of their business. The Techcrunch whine about how it's not the bubble they were hoping for, and were so sure it was, will pass. And a lot of young people who weren't here for the dot com fiasco (or at least they weren't watching it closely) could learn from clear insights about what really makes a company worth a billion dollars to investors, or worth a hundred billion.

You could do that instead, start from what you care about and bring us along as readers, telling us why you care and perhaps educating us as to why we might want to care as well. That may or may not be effective, but it certainly would be less snarky I expect.

[drumdance]

TechCrunch is entertainment, not analysis. Same goes for practically all financial media. Something tells me Warren Buffet does not watch CNBC.