LinkedIn Prices IPO At $32 To $35 Per Share

Of all the Social* out there, LinkedIn seemed the most purpose driven. The real issue with it is that there is no benefit in being a member of it. It matters to firms and recruiters and if that wasn't shitty enough, LinkedIn will rank higher in search engine results for your name that something you might have published yourself. In return, I give employees bonus points for getting to the top of search results on their own, using their own skills and not a fill-in the blanks template profile site.<p>That correlates to my main question of: why is LinkedIn valuable to the tune of $35 / share? Is it because they just started to rake in some profits for the first time from their job listing service ? Is it the secondmarket hype ? Is it because Sequoia capital has it in their best interest ? Maybe it's just because they re-branded their service as hiring solutions, added value to advertisers and rode the wave that Facebook created.<p>Do away with it and invest time in making an employee/career profile for yourself. It's a joke how LinkedIn is more of the same that didn't work for employees in the past.

There's an interesting analysis of which web company is worth the most per user at <a href="http://neptune.observer.com/node/138871" rel="nofollow">http://neptune.observer.com/node/138871</a> - LinkedIn ranks 3rd on their list of 9 arbitrary companies:<p><pre><code> Groupon - $210 Facebook - $105 LinkedIn - $33.33 Zynga - $25.58 Twitter - $18.05 Foursquare - $20 Tumblr - $15 Skype - $1.56</code></pre>

Of the 7,840,000 shares being offered, 3,012,196 are from existing holders, and the balance (4,827,804) are issued. Therefore, post-IPO, LinkedIn will have 94,498,627 + 4,827,804 = 99,326,431 shares outstanding.<p>At a median price of $33 per share, that gives LinkedIn an implied valuation of <i>$3,277,772,223</i>, which isn't as high as I'd expected, given Facebook, Zynga, Groupon and Twitter's recent valuations

LinkedIn is worth 94,498,627 * $32 = $3B and the co-founder still owns 21%.<p>It had Q1 revenue $94M, Q1 net income $2M.

&#62; The company expects [to get] approximately $146.6 million (in total the company will be raising $274 million but some of this money goes to fees etc.).<p>Is this normal? They paid almost a third of the money they have raised.

If the valuation starts off so high that means future growth has already been priced in, which means there's no compelling reason for any new investor to buy the shares. The share price will drift downward for years (which happens to most IPO's) unless they can completely blow the doors off with new revenue.

When is this ipo?

Too high. They should learn from Bill Gates.