The secrecy with which Snap Inc. is approaching its pending initial public offering is becoming the stuff of legends. Investors, rightfully, are beginning to wonder whether Snapchat is going to stumble out of the gate in a repeat performance of Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) in 2012.
Frankly, I don’t really care.
Why’s that you ask? How could I not be excited about Snapchat, the greatest thing since sliced bread? Easy. I’ve never been a fan of initial public offerings and I’m not about to start now.
The history of IPOs is littered with overhyped companies whose shares could be bought 12-24 months later for less than the IPO price.
Take Facebook, for example. It went public on May 18, 2012, at an initial price of $38 per share, closing its first day of trading gaining a whopping 23 cents; it then proceeded to spiral downward over the summer hitting an all-time low of $17.55 less than four months into its life as a public company.
Four years later, Mark Zuckerberg & Co. can laugh about things not going entirely as planned, but it wasn’t pretty initially with lawsuits flying off the shelf as a result of Nasdaq’s aborted opening of trading for Facebook stock.
Now it seems Snapchat co-founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy, two guys still in their 20s who are at a point in their lives when they should be having fun, are instead getting all paranoid about pulling off their IPO without a glitch or media leak.
Ain’t going to happen,…