When asked about tech IPOs and bubble chatter by PBS’ Charlie Rose at an IAB event during New York’s Advertising Week, he said, tech stocks have not traded this low relative to industrial companies for 30 years.

“There’s no bubble. … There’s not even a little trace of a bubble. It’s the opposite of a bubble. We had the bubble, it was in 2000,” he said. “Everybody worries about the bubble when there is no bubble… When there is a bubble, you stop worrying about a bubble, which is what makes the bubble.”

He also told Rose that it’s more difficult to become a public company now because of increased regulation. “You need to be a strong company to be a public company,” Andreessen said. “Which is why it makes sense to wait.”

On the subject of public companies, Rose turned to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who also shared the stage, and was asked about internal morale and operations after Facebook’s botched IPO.

Sandberg reiterated the company’s sentiments about how they were disappointed and surprised about their debut but are “good at moving forward.”

“People think… all of Facebook must just be in tatters because this has been so hard… certainly people were disappointed, but Silicon Valley companies, we cycle quickly, we iterate quickly,” she said.

It being Advertising Week, Sandberg also talked about the company’s latest findings regarding the effectiveness of advertising in users’ newsfeeds.

On the user experience side, she said, the company has seen no degradation but advertisers are seeing positive results: newsfeed ads are eight times more engaging than ads in the right-hand side of the page and ad recall for newsfeed ads is ten time higher.

When asked about mobile users – clearly a big challenge for Facebook – Sandberg couched it as an opportunity for the social network, saying that mobile users are 20 percent more likely to return to the site on any given day.

During the interview, Rose observed that tech companies are increasingly encroaching into each others’ spaces and asked about the secret to success.

Andreessen said it’s in the “willingness to defer gratification.” Over and over, he said, the media write about young founders and their lack of experience and inability to build a business model. And then when the company figures it all out, he said, people call it a “fluke,” when, really, it was their determination to focus on getting the product and user experience right.  Facebok waited and is finding success, while MySpace over-monetized, he said.

For her part, Sandberg said the keys are executing and constantly innovating. “We’re more afraid of losing by standing still than [not changing],” she said.

Earlier in the interview, she echoed that theme, saying that Mark Zuckerberg talks about two ways to fail: by not hitting your plan or by being two conservative.

“Most companies fail the second way… their plans are too conservative and they hit it quarter after quarter as they slide out,” she said. “What we want to do is make sure our plans are big, bold and aggressive enough so that when we hit them, they’re big enough to achieve the kinds of goals we want to achieve.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Facebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implications
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• The evolution of the virtual goods market

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook on Wednesday updated its S-1 document to the Securities and Exchange commission for its planned initial public offering, and it’s a veritable data dump of new information about the social networking company. The good news is, we’re digging through it so you don’t have to. Here are some of the more interesting tidbits disclosed in this latest regulatory filing:

• The rent is really dang high.You think you spend a lot of money on rent? According to the new filing, Facebook’s new Menlo Park, Calif. campus is costing the company well over $1 million per month for the next 14 years (the 15 year lease began in February 2011.) The company’s monthly rent will actually go up as time goes on, from $1.175 million/month now to $1.9 million/month in 2025, because ostensibly Facebook’s revenue will grow at the same time. The company is, however, getting a million square feet of space for that money, so in context it’s not that ridiculous.
  

  Graph representing Facebook's property rent (click to enlarge)

• Facebook controls even more of its data center strategy than you think. A couple years ago, rumors started buzzing about how a Delaware-based company called Vitesse was behind the planning of Facebook’s Prineville, Oregon data center. In 2011 Facebook eventually came clean with the details of all the ins and outs of the massive data center as part of its Open Compute Project, and now it’s totally clear that from day one it has been completely in charge of the effort: Vitesse is actually a wholly-owned subsidiary of Facebook, according to the newly filed S-1 documents.
• Facebook wears the pants when it comes to Zynga. The updated filings included tons of information about Facebook’s relationship with Zynga, the social gaming giant. Even though Zynga has been asserting its own independence from Facebook, the details of the contract between the two companies shows that Zynga can never quite become a standalone business if it wants to maintain ties with the social media king. These clauses are especially key:
  

  “All Zynga Users must have a valid (e.g. real; not suspended) FB account. Zynga will require all Zynga Users to connect their Zynga account to their FB account. In addition, Zynga will require all Zynga Users to be logged-in to their FB account with an active session to use or access any Covered Zynga Game, Zynga Mobile Game or any Zynga Property” [except in limited situations.]

  and

  “Zynga Users who are not Facebook Users must create a FB account.”

  and

  “Zynga may not prompt any users on the Facebook Site to create, log-in with, register for or otherwise use Zynga Credentials on the Facebook Site.”

• Zuck, Sheryl Sandberg, and the other execs have it pretty good. Of course, you already knew this. But the new S-1 shines a bit more light on the compensation packages of Facebook’s executive team. Mark Zuckerberg’s base salary for 2012 is $500,000 (which was shown in the initial S-1) and the new filing shows he is eligible for a semi-annual bonus of 45 percent of that salary based on his performance; COO Sheryl Sandberg’s salary is $300,000 and she is also up for the 45 percent twice yearly bonus. They each get 21 days paid vacation annually (this is on par with the rest of Facebook’s employees.)

We’ll continue to pore over the documents and will update this story with any more gems we come across. And keep checking in at GigaOM for our full Facebook IPO coverage.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Law of large numbers: the issue behind Facebook’s IPO
• Facebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implications
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout

• First up is Jive Software. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based enterprise social networking company priced its IPO at $12 per share on Monday afternoon in the run-up to a Tuesday morning stock market debut, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal. The IPO will net $160.8 million for the company, which has been received more enthusiastically by investors than had initially been projected: Jive previously projected its IPO would be priced at between $8 to $10 per share. Jive will trade on the Nasdaq exchange under the stock ticker JIVE.
• Next on deck is Zynga, which is widely expected to price its own massive stock offering at some point this week. The social gaming giant expects to make some $1 billion in its IPO, giving the whole company a valuation at around $7 billion. Zynga will trade on the Nasdaq exchange under the stock ticker ZNGA.
• Another tech company with an IPO on the near-term horizon is FusionStorm Global, which is flying a bit more under the radar. That’s perhaps due to its non-Silicon Valley address and less glitzy focus: The Waltham, Mass.-based company “provides IT solutions to enterprises and the public sector.” Either way, FusionStorm is a big company; it expects to raise $175 million in its IPO, which is slated for pricing this week. The company will list on the Nasdaq under the ticker FSTM.

Although these are indeed frothy times for web companies, this week’s IPO fervor extends beyond the tech sector. A total of 12 companies are expected to price IPOs this week according to Renaissance Capital, an investment bank that specializes in IPO research. If all those happen, that would make this the most active week for public offerings since Dec. 2007, when 13 companies came out on the stock market. One thing is certain: If everything goes as planned, the holiday celebrations of quite a few entrepreneurs and investors will be very merry indeed.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Social third-quarter 2012: analysis and outlook
• Readers weigh in: future prospects for Twitter
• Social media in Q1: commerce and discovery dominated

Sean Aggarwal, Trulia's new CFO

Trulia has hired Sean Aggarwal to serve as its first CFO and Scott Darling to serve as its first full-time general counsel. Previously, Aggarwal was VP of finance at PayPal, the payment processing arm of eBay, the publicly traded e-commerce giant. His resume also includes senior finance roles at Amazon and PepsiCo. Darling was previously general counsel at Imperva, the publicly traded data security company.

Hiring a CFO with public company experience is often one of the things a company does in the run-up to its own IPO, and Trulia has made no secret of its hope to eventually go public. Recent reports have pegged Trulia’s IPO as on track for 2012, and these new executive appointments would be in line with that timeline.

In an interview Thursday, Trulia CEO Pete Flint talked up the company’s recent growth but demurred from talking directly about IPO plans. “The growth of the company is really awesome; we’re growing super fast,” Flint said. “We certainly see the market opportunity as enormous. Whether that translates into staying private or going public, we’ll continue on our path.”

It bears mentioning that Trulia’s competitor Zillow went public this past summer, but at the moment, its stock market performance isn’t the brightest: On Thursday, its share price hit a new all-time low of $21.56, dipping close to its IPO price of $20 per share. But there are some notable differences between the two companies: Trulia hit profitable operations a year ago, while Zillow only hit profitability after its July IPO; and in the past, Flint has noted that Trulia prioritizes its engineering operations more strongly than its competitors.

When asked about the competitive landscape this week, however, Flint kept his comments general: “It’s an enormous industry and a very meaningful industry, and there will be multiple players in the marketplace. That’s a good thing for us and a good thing for the ecosystem.” And it seems that ecosystem will certainly be a space to watch in the months ahead.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Social third-quarter 2012: analysis and outlook
• Readers weigh in: future prospects for Twitter
• Social media in Q1: commerce and discovery dominated

Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook headquarters, April 2011

As the 2011 calendar year winds down, Facebook is said to now be making concrete steps toward its planned initial public offering.

On Monday afternoon the Wall Street Journal published a report stating that Facebook plans to publicly list its shares on the stock market in spring 2012, specifically looking at “dates between April 2012 and June 2012.” Facebook’s CFO David Ebersman is currently in talks with investment banks angling to underwrite the IPO, but the company has not entered into any mandates yet, according to the WSJ. The IPO will reportedly value the company at more than $100 billion.

Are you surprised? You shouldn’t be. This is all in line with a number of previous reports that the social networking company’s IPO could occur around the time this coming spring when it will be forced to publicly disclose detailed financial information anyway. As we wrote this past summer:

Facebook has said it expects to have more than 500 private shareholders by the end of the 2011 calendar year. Once a private company with more than $10 million in assets exceeds 500 investors, it is required to begin filing financial reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission, much like public companies are required to do. Under this regulation, known as the 500 investor rule, Facebook will likely be forced to begin filing financial reports with the SEC by April 30, 2012.

Meanwhile, Facebook’s top brass has not been shy about the company’s plan to eventually hold an IPO. In an interview earlier this month on the television program Charlie Rose, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said an IPO would serve as a reward to his employees. He also acknowledged that a liquidity event — typically either an IPO or a sale — is a trade-off that companies make when they take on venture capital:

You know, we’ve made this implicit promise to our investors and to our employees that by compensating them with equity and by giving them equity, that at some point we’re going to make that equity worth something publicly and liquidly, in a liquid way.

That’s why, as much as people may worry about what Facebook will become once it’s under the microscope of public market investors, a big IPO like the one it is said to be planning is practically a given for a company that has raised more than $2.3 billion from investors. Its price is just too high for the majority of potential acquirers out there. Now, I still say that it’s in the realm of possibility that Microsoft could make Facebook an offer it can’t refuse; but chances are, the Facebook IPO buzz will become a reality at some point soon.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout
• Social third-quarter 2012: analysis and outlook

According to a report published Tuesday in the Financial Times, an IPO is in the cards for Gilt Groupe, and at this point it’s just a matter of timing. The FT quotes Gilt Groupe CEO Kevin Ryan as saying:

“We are certainly plenty big enough to go public. The question is, is it the right time, do you want to spend the time on that? We’d look at the process in 2012… I think it’s entirely possible that in 2013, depending on the markets and depending on how things are going, that we would look to go public.”

But if and when Gilt holds an IPO, should it really be seen as a big tech industry story? For me, covering Gilt Groupe brings up the same questions I had when the tech press was gaga over the Groupon IPO a couple weeks ago. Yes, both companies have raised hundreds of millions of dollars from the same kind of venture capital firms known for backing the tech industry’s most rigorously engineering-focused firms.

But only five percent of Groupon’s total employees work in technology; the bulk of its human resources go toward efforts such as sales, editorial and customer service. Gilt hasn’t published a breakdown of exactly how its workforce is deployed, and it does seem to have a strong engineering team and culture as evidenced by its “Technologie” blog and hackathons — but it’s ultimately a discount retailer. The fact is, Walmart has a very solid IT team too, but the tech press does not typically cover all the ups and downs of its stock price.

Of course Gilt and Groupon could very well grow to become more tech-centric in the same way that Amazon has evolved over time. But right now, should they really be put into the same category as the Facebooks, Microsofts and Googles of the world?

I don’t know the answer, but I think it’s worth some critical thought and discussion. As more straight consumer products and retail companies become savvy to the web and mobile technology, it will be interesting to see how the lines continue to blur around what we think of as a “tech company.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Facebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implications
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout

Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman

Six of Yelp’s top executives and investors cashed out $36.8 million worth of Yelp stock during the company’s most recent funding round, according to a filing the company made Thursday indicating that it soon plans to go public.

The biggest cash outs were made by CEO Jeremy Stoppelman and board chairman Max Levchin, who each sold approximately $15 million of stock in connection with the Series E raise.

Also at that time, COO Geoff Donaker received $3.9 million; VP of sales Jed Nachman and former CFO Vlado Herman each netted around $1 million; and general counsel Laurence Wilson cashed out about $691,000 worth of stock in the company.

The stock sales were all made to Elevation Partners, according to the filing, which reads: “In connection with the Series E Financing in February 2010, we were also party to a series of stock transfer agreements with affiliates of Elevation Partners and many of our stockholders, including one of our directors and certain of our executive officers.” The Series E round itself brought in $25 million for Yelp.

It is not unusual for executives and founders to cash out some stock holdings before the company’s main liquidity event (typically either a sale or an IPO.) And to be clear, Yelp’s top brass did not directly pocket any of the Series E funding; they simply sold portions of their own stock to outside investors eager to have bigger stakes of the company. Even so, the size of Stoppelman’s and Levchin’s pre-IPO stock sales could raise a few eyebrows — particularly among Yelp’s rank-and-file employees who have yet to cash out their stock holdings.

Here is a screenshot of the relevant portion of the S-1 (click to enlarge):

Photo of Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman courtesy of Flickr user jdlasica.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Social 2013: The enterprise strikes back
• Crowdfunding’s rapid growth and future opportunity
• Startup growth and the new recruiting ecosystem

The filing reveals that Yelp pulls in solid top line sales, but has yet to turn a profit at the bottom line. The company made $47.7 million in net revenue in 2010 and reported a net loss of $9.56 million for the year.

But despite the lack of profits, Yelp has one major thing going for it that public company investors like to see: healthy growth. The company’s net revenue for the first nine months of 2011 was $58.4 million, representing 80 percent growth from the first nine months of 2010. Its losses are apparently narrowing, as Yelp’s net loss for the first nine months of 2011 was $7.6 million, compared to the $8.45 million net loss it had during the same period in 2010.

Headcount-wise, Yelp runs a relatively tight ship: The seven-year-old company has 892 employees worldwide.

For years now, Yelp has been vocal about its plans to go public, and has recently made moves indicating that its public offering was imminent. Earlier this summer the company hired Rob Krolik to serve as its chief financial officer; Krolik’s resume includes time as the CFO of Shopping.com where he led the company through its initial public offering and subsequent sale to eBay. As we reported at that time, companies often hire IPO-savvy CFOs in the months leading up to their own stock market debuts.

Investment banks Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Jefferies, Allen & Company, and Oppenheimer & Company are all underwriting the Yelp IPO.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout
• Social third-quarter 2012: analysis and outlook

Groupon has set the final price for its impending initial public offering on Friday at $20 per share, AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher first reported, followed by other news outlets . That’s higher then the Chicago-based daily deal website’s previous estimated per share price of $16 to $18.

The rumored share price will give Groupon an overall market capitalization of $12.6 billion, well above the projections some Wall Street analysts have made of the company’s value. And as Scott Austin from the Wall Street Journal put it: the valuation is nearly half of Google’s $24.6 billion at IPO.

But of course, the beauty of the stock market is that ultimately the larger investing public decides how much a company is worth — regardless of what the experts say. Tomorrow could be a very interesting day for people in both the tech and financial spheres.

Groupon is only offering 34.5 million shares in its IPO, which is just 5.4 percent of the company’s 637.3 million shares outstanding. At $20 per share, the company will raise $680 million.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Facebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implications
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout

Here are the facts: The pioneering daily deals website will trade under the ticker symbol “GRPN” on the Nasdaq stock exchange. Groupon has said in regulatory filings it will price its stock between $16 to $18 per share, giving the company a market capitalization of between $10.1 billion to $11.4 billion. Now, reports say that the actual IPO price may be a dollar or two higher than that range, given the strong demand for the stock.

Analysts say: Don’t believe the hype

But some analysts say that Groupon’s financial fundamentals don’t justify such a high valuation. Trefis, a website that calculates company valuations electronically, projects that Groupon is currently worth $7.9 billion, and should have a share price of $12.84 — nothing to sneeze at, of course, but well below both the official and rumored IPO targets. In order to be valued at $11.4 billion with an $18 share price, Trefis says, Groupon will need to grow its North American subscriber base at a much faster rate than it is currently on track to do.

Flesh-and-blood analysts are also skeptical of Groupon’s IPO valuation. Kenneth Sena, an analyst for investment bank Evercore Partners, has pegged Groupon’s central value at $9 billion; Henry Blodget, who had a (somewhat notorious) career as a Wall Street analyst before founding the Business Insider website, has placed Groupon’s central value at $7.5 billion.

First day jitters ahead

None of these estimates will sway Groupon from going public — or, for that matter, stop investors from participating enthusiastically in the IPO. No one denies that Groupon’s stock will get a lot of attention when it first goes public, especially in those first hours of trading. CNBC’s bombastic stock market commentator Jim Cramer said on his TV show last week:

“I think you’d be a fool not to try to get some shares in this deal and take advantage of it, so long as you sell on the spike in the first day. …I think you will get an initial pop, but after that you don’t want to be left holding the bag. So please, do get some shares in the deal. And then get out.”

Of course, Cramer’s record is far from impeccable when it comes to accurately predicting stock market activity. But lots of people out there do watch his show religiously and many of them do heed his advice — so it will be interesting to see just how high Groupon goes once it actually hits the public market.

One thing’s for sure: Groupon’s road to an IPO has been an interesting thing to track so far, and the company’s actual stock market debut promises to be an exciting event as well.

Feature image of Wall Street subway sign courtesy of Flickr user epicharmus.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout
• Social third-quarter 2012: analysis and outlook