Everyone’s favorite social media site, Facebook, has been having a rough week. Let’s start by showing off the latest milestone that they have been able to hit which is – their stock going down to under $20 a share. At the time of this post being written it was sitting switching between $19.92 and $19.94, changing in that range after every other paragraph was g written.
No one wants to have their stock running that low as one of the largest tech companies in the world. To put that in perspective that means according to Wall Street they are now worth under $44.6 billion dollars which is what Microsoft offered to pay for Yahoo back in 2008. This may not be 100% accurate as different sites show a varied amount of outstanding shares though if the other # is correct the stock will need to fall to $16.28 to fall into the correct range.
No matter how you look at it though the stock that was released to such fanfare has been steadily falling since it’s IPO and being under $20/share compared to it’s $42/share is not something that they can be happy about.
Good thing Mark Zuckerberg cashed out his shares right as they went public!
It’s financial position on Wall Street is clearly not all they’ve been losing though. Often with the release of a company’s IPO they tend to lose talent who cash out or don’t like how a company has to change to make the market happy. Well Facebook is no different as they have had three long term employees throw in the towel this week. So who have they been losing? Well it looks like: Ethan Beard (Director of platform partnerships at Facebook), Katie Mitic (Platform marketing director) and Jonathan Matus (Mobile platform marketing manager.) These are some of Facebook’s highly placed talent when it comes to marketing and partnerships and their losses could reflect something that all companies and investors fear – a growing company stalling out from a lack of talent.
While none of the three have been specific on where they are going it sounds like each one has their own plans and this is not a central company picking off Facebook’s talent. Still, such a loss in so short of time can only keep investor’s worried if any more talent decides to jump ship in the near future.
I guess if that’s all they can be losing out on lately that has to be the end of Facebook’s bad news? Unfortunately for them that just isn’t the case. Dalton Caldwell has been having some issues with Facebook as of late. For those of you who don’t know Dalton Caldwell he is a Silicon Valley veteran with enough successful years in the Valley that when he speaks up things people take note. So what has he had to say about working with Facebook? Well apparently in a closed meeting with top Facebook executives he was straight out told that if he didn’t sell them an app and service that he was in the process of building that they would “destroy [his] business.”
Apparently the application that he’s been building for the past year is a direct competitor to something Facebook itself has just started to put together. Facebook’s internal developers have been telling him that he would have top-level support when his product was released and now this no longer seems to be the case at all. This goes slightly against the vision that Mark Zuckerberg has laid out that Facebook development is open to anyone and if it is true will be something that could cause many future developers to think twice when working with Facebook.
Related Links: Tech Crunch, All Things D, CNet
