

The Facebook Offering: How It Compares - jashkenas
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/05/17/business/dealbook/how-the-facebook-offering-compares.html

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jashkenas
For the curious, this started out as a D3/SVG chart that we ended up porting
over to be 90% canvas, just for performance reasons (especially in Firefox).
There's still lots of nice ugly "if (USE_CANVAS) {" stuff in there.

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iamwil
I was going to come in here and ask just that question. Now a followup--what
was wrong with d3? was it just too slow to render? Or too slow to load?

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mericson
When the bubbles were done as SVG elements, the animation in Firefox became
_painfully_ slow. Felt like just a couple frames per second, maybe. (In
contrast, the animation was fine in WebKit-based browsers).

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daeken
Is the original available? I'd like to look into this. Thanks!

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K2h
This [1] is my hideous destruction of the graphic (sorry) to overlay world
population on the Internet with respect to time, data from some worldstats
site[2]. I propose that the proper size of a tech IPO should be normalized
(and upper bounded) against the possible global reach, which I think the % of
world population on the internet does a good job of showing.

[1] <http://i.imgur.com/HyeKf.gif> [2]
<http://www.internetworldstats.com/emarketing.htm>

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hamidpalo
Tech isn't only the internet. Microsoft and Apple both went public before the
Internet and managed to do quite well without it.

Correlation != causation. Might as well graph it against the number of World
Cup or Euro championships in that year and get a much higher correlation since
the IPOs seem to all be in an even year.

It'd be much more interesting to look at perfomance vs sector and performance
vs the index.

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lachenmayer
> Microsoft and Apple both went public before the Internet and managed to do
> quite well without it.

That's because Apple's and Microsoft's products don't (or didn't at the time
the companies went public) rely solely on the internet. A big reason why
Facebook has such a massive valuation is precisely because the population of
the internet has increased so strongly.

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marcog1
Have you taken into account Facebook being the reason a lot of people joined
the Internet?

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elemeno
I would find that a hard claim to believe.

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moreati
I find it plausible. For anything more I'd want evidence, but all I can offer
is anecdote. In the UK over the last few years most Android/not-iPhone adverts
I saw made it very clear that the phone did Facebook - implying to me that
Facebook was a major driver for people buying a smartphone.

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ggchappell
Interesting. The largest IPO in the original dotcom boom, above everything
else on the chart except Google and Facebook, is a company I don't recall ever
hearing of: Corvis Corporation.

They started in 1997 as "Nova Technologies", changed to "Corvis" in 1998, did
an IPO in 2000, and promptly took a nosedive. In 2004 they became "Broadwing
Corporation" (which I also don't recall ever hearing of), and in 2007 they
were acquired by Level 3 Communications. It's amazing how little remains of
them on the web. Except for some terse stock info, from which I got the above,
all I can find are a couple of articles from 2000 talking about how everyone
loves them.

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cosmotron
I found this interesting too. After doing some digging of my own I found this:

Corvis Corporation is the first company to make the intelligent all-optical
network a reality. Our solutions enable telecommunications service providers
to construct manageable all-optical networks that will accommodate the
continuing growth of Internet, video, voice, and other data traffic

Source:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20011103200605/http://www.corvis....](http://web.archive.org/web/20011103200605/http://www.corvis.com/display/1,1405,35,00.html)

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Zarathust
First day value change seems misleading to me. I think it represents the value
at which select shareholder can buy the initial shares issued by the company
and not the value which they are first traded at the stock market.

Consider for example linkedin, which got "issued" at around 35$ per share. The
first price to hit the stock market was around 70$. This is because the first
shares are sold to a select few at the 35$ price so there can be volume at
opening. Those people traded the shares at 70 right away.

We can conclude at least two things from this : 1-Banks will try to scam
companies during IPO by issuing shares lower than market value so that early
buyers can pocket instant profit 2-If you are not in the selected few, making
big bucks during an IPO is much more difficult than what is represented in
this graph

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arjunnarayan
You are correct. The relevant citation is this.
[http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/06/07/the-us-
ipo-...](http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/06/07/the-us-ipo-cartel/)

On average, banks take about 7% of IPO proceeds due to a Wall Street cartel of
underwriters.

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dm8
Its fun to see majority of IPOs in 80s were proper Engineering companies. I
was just talking to someone who is a Civil Engineer (in his 50s) and he
mentioned the same. He did comment that people in his generation built proper
engineering companies. I don't understand why do people think Internet
startups are trivial. One way we can say Internet has been game changer -
Groupon brought easier advertising mechanism for local SMBs. LinkedIn
connected professionals across the world. FB has created a virtual
interconnected world. Of course there are duds like Zynga whose biggest
achievement so far is pasting cows on the Internet. And multitude of other
companies like AirBnB who are disrupting entirely new industries. These
companies are definitely gamechangers.

However, I've seen lot of my colleagues from fields like Mechancal Engineering
or BioMedical Engineering jumped on SoLoMo wagon and mostly working on some
awful apps. I think Internet has diverted attention from real engineering to
some "shitty" startups/solutions that are in search of problem, thanks to dot
com bubble in 90s.

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jiggy2011
To be honest if I could go back and talk to myself ~2000 and I said that the
most exciting , hottest Internet company in 2012 is a website that allows
users to post text based messages to other users of the same website I would
have been somewhat disappointed.

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tocomment
That's really cool. What do the size of the circles represent? Is it the same
value as shown on the Y axis or something else?

And what do the colors of the circles mean?

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jashkenas
The size of the circles is also the I.P.O. value -- the same value shown on
the Y axis.

In the first few steps, it's not terribly useful. But once you switch to the
logarithmic scale, it's nice to keep a reference to the true (read, "linear")
relative value.

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sp332
Actually that's misleading. If the radius of the circles go up linearly, the
area/size of the circle goes up exponentially. So on the logarithmic scale,
the height changes with the log of the value but the size goes up
exponentially!

Edit: nevermind this, it's wrong.

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jashkenas
Nope. As @arscan says, in this as in most bubble charts, the value determines
the circle's area, not the radius. Otherwise it certainly would be misleading.

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Cushman
Title was: "Graphic: Compare all the Tech I.P.O.'s Since 1980 to Facebook's"

That seems strictly superior to me. Who's the editor/bot changing every
submission titles back to the article title even when it removes (sometimes
vital) context?

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jashkenas
It wasn't me. I didn't realize that HN had the ability to swap 'em out on you.

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Cushman
Yeah, they'll change 'em sometimes if the title is too linkbaity or
editorializing, usually to the title of the original article or blog post.
Recently I've seen a few titles being changed to the source title even when
the source title is completely unhelpful, leading me to wonder if someone
hasn't tried to automate the process a little too effectively.

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mkr-hn
Bubbles don't just happen overnight. It's a slow loosening of caution as
people convince themselves that a boom is unstoppable. I think people are
still shell shocked from the '00s. A few more large and successful IPOs could
change that. We won't see the next one coming until the current boom turns
into a bubble. By then we'll all be too happy with how things are going to hit
the brakes before we fall off the cliff.

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lwhi
I think it's different this time. People are aware that a bubble is an
eventuality, so this time the game is knowing when to jump ship.

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evolve2k
Sign #52 that you are in a bubble, people start using the phrase 'It's
different this time'.

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mkr-hn
[https://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&q=boom+%22Its+dif...](https://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&q=boom+%22Its+different+this+time%22)

I'm about to set the range to various booms and busts to see what people were
saying.

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1123581321
The circles should be colored to indicate performance.

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shaldengeki
I definitely feel as though the color information is being wasted; the
placement of the circles along the horizontal axes already conveys "period of
time" pretty well.

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brown9-2
I think this would be even more interesting if the "Value 3 years later"
number was incorporated into the graphic somehow.

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dchest
See page 5, especially the transition between 4 and 5.

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arscan
Yeah, the real value of this chart from my perspective is the transition from
slides 3-4 (watching things go up the first day) and then slides 4-5 (watching
some stuff bubble up, and others fall off a cliff). So I found myself just
cycling back and forth through slides 3-5 to get a feel for the data. The
obvious cool thing to watch is the early-2000's dotcom waterfall.

Nice job. Could probably have represented things slightly better given what
you are trying to get across (using colors & ball sizes), but cool
nonetheless.

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metamatt
I actually think the transition from 3 to 5 (directly) is more interesting
than the one from 4 to 5. Well, they're both interesting, so it's cool the
visualization supports both.

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rattray
What I'd really like to see would be trails going off into the future --
rather than just a +/-% for the +3yr mark, why not just show the whole story
for each company (perhaps only when you hover over it to avoid clutter). This
would make the current color-coding much more useful -- each trail would be
the color of the company's IPO year.

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run4yourlives
Witness the trends... and tell me the bubble isn't about to burst.

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sp332
Facebook's IPO will be bigger because they put off their IPO as long as
possible. In fact they got special dispensation from the SEC to delay the IPO
even longer. So comparing FB in 2012 to Google in 2004 is not really useful.

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jlgreco
Google IPO'd six years after they were founded, Facebook waited 8 years. The
comparison is not _that_ unwarranted I think.

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TommyDANGerous
Glad to see Google blowing everyone out of the water.

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vasco
Actually Amazon and Yahoo and others have much more impressive "after 3 years"
returns

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ajross
Those are both terrible metrics. They're sensitive to IPO timing, for a start.
Facebook is going public very (!) late, it's already achieved market dominance
and very significant revenue. Contrast Microsoft, which went up before Windows
3.0, when they were mostly a software supplier to IBM (their other offerings
were distant second place products to market leaders like Wordperfect or
Lotus).

And "after 3 years" misses a lot of detail too. Apple looks pretty good in
that metric. But their "after 12 years" numbers are a disaster. And of course
"after 30 years" looks to be pretty fantastic for them.

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neilk
I'd just like to point out that you are chastising them for going public
_after_ obtaining reliable revenues for several years. This used to be the
minimum requirement for going public.

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ajross
Who's chastising anyone? All I said was that they were "late", which is
undeniably true. And I tend to agree with you ethically, though that "used to
be" leans heavily on "used". Since the PC revolution in the 80's, almost no
tech companies have gone public with multi-year profitability.

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moe
I do appreciate the bubbly themed chart.

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lwhi
I think this IPO will signal the beginning of the latest tech bubble reaching
maximum capacity. I can't imagine how a valuation as big as this, held against
a revenue stream that's nowhere near as tangible, could possibly create
meaningful growth for shareholders. Unless Facebook decides to find more
ingenious ways to sell the data we provide.

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EternalFury
It will fertilize the valley and help more tangible start-ups spring up. If
all those new millionaires don't move to foreign countries to avoid paying
taxes, that is.

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pnathan
I notice bands in time with these IPOs. Very interesting. We're in the middle
of another band it seems like.

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pcrh
You might be noticing the lack of IPOs following the 2001 bubble burst as well
as the 2007-8 financial crisis. Since these are unrelated, these "bands" might
not be a general trend.

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celticjames
Between slide 4 and 5 there's one tiny bubble that blows up into a big giant
bubble and a small one on the left that sinks a little. They are Yahoo, up
3,590%, and Apple, down 25%. They should do a follow up to see how they are
doing today.

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jc123
Nice. Suggestion for next time is to have the names of the other large circles
when you tap on them.

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ddon
Works great on an iPad.

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vibrunazo
I was surprised it works great on my 3.2 android tablet with firefox as well.
Everything works perfectly, great job.

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mpolun
It would be interesting to have a "where are they now?" slide to see how many
of those companies are still around and still worth anything. And on a log
scale apple, google and microsoft shouldn't blow everyone else too far out of
the water.

