LinkedIn to File for IPO Today | Hacker News Reader

LinkedIn to File for IPO Today

thenextweb.com

90 pointstchae21 comments

You could link to the original source, which is cited in the first line of this article.

http://kara.allthingsd.com/20110127/here-comes-another-web-i...

Better yet, link to the SEC where, eventually, the S-1 will be published in its entirety: http://sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CI...

RSS feed: http://sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CI...

Does anyone else not like LinkedIn at all? It is a website that I actively don't want to use but feel enormously pressured by peers to be on.

I mean, I can't even tell these people to fuck off like I can with my friends that want me to be on Facebook.

I am on LinkedIn, and I don't actively use it. The only active user I met once was a recruiter of creatives. She logged into LinkedIn and we saw her private inbox. Filled with hundreds of messages about people in her industry who were looking for someone or looking to hire someone. I was amazed, we were amazed (this was 2006). She gave us one really good tip - almost all the job postings on LinkedIn are posted with the name of the hiring manager. That is why job searching on LinkedIn is better (even if they aren't posting the hiring managers' name now in 2011).

At a bar a month ago, I met someone who asked if I knew a friend of his who used to work for my company. Quick search of the LinkedIn app and found him. LinkedIn is gold for finding out where someone in the technology industry is now working. Especially if you have connections who have hundreds of connections.

I signed up for LinkedIn probably 4 years ago or so, and all it's really done for me since is notify me by email when all the business school grads I've ever met discover LinkedIn.

They won't let me log in, the recover/change password feature doesn't work, and all my emails to them go to /dev/null.

I'm scared by how much data they'd have on my life and it being out of my control how they use it.

>While LinkedIn’s move is unconfirmed, Kara Swisher has a reliable track record in such matters. There’s little more to say about this report at the moment, but we’ll be watching what happens once the New York stock exchange closes today.

NYSE? Isn't it more likely that LinkedIn would debut on NASDAQ?

Not as much lately. SolarWinds also IPO'd on the NYSE.

They filed: http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/27/linkedin-files-for-ipo/

The title is misleading. The article says "as soon as today".

Has anyone ever purchased stocks early on for a startup that went IPO? Is this a wise thing to do?

"Has anyone ever purchased stocks early on for a startup that went IPO? Is this a wise thing to do?"

There is a lot of academic research on this that you should look at.

Links and elaborate?

I don't know of anything offhand, I just know that it's been extensively studied. One of the terms you might want to search for is "first day pop." If you read through a few of those papers then you should be able to find most of the other important metrics as well.

For a company like LinkedIn with relatively weak fundamentals, one would expect the executives to purposely underprice the stock in order to generate a big first day pop because they are looking for an exit. So if I had money to invest, I'd probably buy at the opening bell and sell at noon. But don't take that as investment advice.

The "first day pop" is largely unavailable to the average person. You're right that underwriters price the IPO for this phenomenon, but it is to entice their clients to buy. The pop is from outsiders (you) buying from insiders.

If you're not dealing in big money, you won't be buying from the underwriter at the IPO price, you'll be buying at the higher price (if you put in a market order), or not at all (if you put in a limit order near the offering price).

That's not to say that investing in an IPO is a bad long-run decision.

You can still buy as soon as the market opens though, as long as you're fine paying a few bucks over the insider price.

> one would expect the executives to purposely underprice the stock in order to generate a big first day pop because they are looking for an exit.

The executives typically are locked not being able to sell on the first day of trading. It also looks bad if they do sell.

It's the investment bankers that want to see a stock shoot up on the first day of trading. It's their clients who are the most likely to hold the stock for an hour and then sell it.

Off topic: I've always been surprised by LinkedIn's success, though it seems that's a problem with my perception as a freelance web developer.

I can see their value to those looking for salaried jobs, but I'd be interested to hear if/how people in a similar situation to me find LinkedIn useful.

Awesome, I hope Linkedin's rise creates the opportunity for a nextgen upstart to emerge. There's a lot to improve on Linkedin's model (admittedly a very good one). Get to work!

What do you think could be improved?

I'm not who you were asking, but snappier performance.

And reward people for good use of the site. Share your contact list with your contacts? You get some free InMail credits. Complete profile? Some more. etc.

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