At 10am est, the general public will be allowed to buy Facebook shares, making a bunch of people very, very rich, at least temporarily before the latest tech bubble bursts. The days of Old Economy Stephen this is not.
I suppose I should probably go on record here with a prediction: Facebook will fail in an epic way and we’ll all look back and laugh at this one day when Mark Zuckerberg is the new Myspace Tom. Of course, I’m hardly the only one who thinks this will happen, and the reasons I feel this way are numerous and frankly I’m too brain dead today to lay them all out (mainly it’s born out of my belief that a business that’s so widely hated simply cannot be sustained), but I wanted to get it out there. Needless to say, I won’t be buying any Facebook stock.
With that said, the soon-to-be-filthy-rich like shady citizenship renouncer Eduardo Saverin are already congratulating themselves and their soon-to-be-filthy-rich cohorts, on Facebook naturally.
On the eve of the Facebook public float, 8 plus year in the making, I as co-founder wanted to look back and cherish Facebook’s early beginning. Congrats to everyone involved in the project from day one till today, and I especially wanted to congratulate Mark Zukerberg on keeping tremendous stead-fast focus, however hard that was, on making the world a more open and connected place.
To further mark the occasion, Saverin posted a screenshot of Facebook in its infancy stage.
This bubble has to burst. Let’s just hope too many people don’t get burned when it all goes down in flames.
(GIF via Chris Mohney. Pic via Business Insider)