When Facebook's IPO became "#Fail" this past May, finger-pointing started almost immediately. But as the dust settles, it's more apparent than ever that there's plenty of blame to go around -- and investors themselves can't be spared.
Despite a compelling argument by Andrew Ross Sorkin in yesterday's New York Times, blame for the company's disastrous public offering can't be laid chiefly at Facebook CFO David Ebersman's door. Nor can it be attributed to the poor management of Mark Zuckerberg, as Forbes blogger Nathan Vardi maintains today.
For one thing, Ebersman and Zuckerberg didn't act alone. They had the backing of Morgan Stanley and other Wall Street underwriters. What was to stop these people from stepping in and setting Facebook's leadership straight?
There are other places to point the finger. High-profile investor Mark Cuban says brokers and even investors themselves must shoulder some responsbility for not doing the diligence that may have helped them resist the emotional rollercoaster that led to the inflated value and quantity of Facebook shares.
In a way, I agree with Cuban. Before the IPO, there was plenty of evidence that Facebook wasn't quite worth what the IPO pundits were quoting. Internet Evolution's Nicole Ferraro
predicted that Facebook would stumble even before the bell rang on that fateful day in May.
In the hierarchy of blame for Facebook's faceplant IPO, the role of those on the bottom rung -- the investors themselves -- must be acknowledged. Without them, the decisions made by Facebook's management, underwriters, and IPO supporters who work in the public markets couldn't have resulted in the multibillion-dollar fiasco that's made history for the wrong reasons.
There are lots of hard lessons here. It's time for everyone involved to face the truth and learn from it. If we don't, we're doomed to repeat this unpleasant exercise in greed.
Well, maybe it's both. I suppose it depends on which employees management is trying to retain. They may hope to keep execs from jumping ship, since that's a kiss of death for many firms. While they worry about these upper-echelon workers, the rank and file may be stewing, both worried and looking to jump ship, sensing trouble at the top.
One thing: I believe that if we infiltrated FB's culture right now we'd find people in a general upheaval.
Actually, I don't see rank and file being able to hold management accountable for anything at FB. They're probably too worried about keeping their jobs, as pressure at the top works its way down the organization.
It's interesting that Facebook may be in a harder position to attract talent now, b/c there have been complaints that famous companies like facebook/google/etc have been able to underpay their engineers with promises of stock options, etc.
Facebook is also known to have a culture of delivering engineering results... perhaps the rank&file will try to hold their management accountable somehow for not delivering financial results?
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Catch up on the week with one simple serving of Friday File. We've pieced together 10 interesting news bites you may have missed and put them together in bite-size morsels.
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Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The automotive website uses propensity modeling to target ads and customer registration forms, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
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