Big offering for big data: Tableau prices stock at $31 per share

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Tableau Software had been boosting its proposed price for Friday’s initial public offering for the past few weeks and now we’ve got a concrete number. The company will price its shares at $31 for Friday’s IPO and offer five million shares, while stockholders are offering 3.2 million shares. It marks the biggest tech IPO of the year, with… Read More…

Jeff Bezos-backed Workday soars in IPO, now valued more than rival Concur

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Workday, a Pleasanton, California-based company that specializes in cloud-based payroll, financial management and employee expense management, is soaring in its initial public offering today. The company, which priced the IPO at $28 under the ticker WDAY, is now trading around $47 per share. The competitor to Redmond-based Concur Technologies is backed by Amazon.com co-founder Jeff… Read More…

After all-night hackathon, Facebook rings opening bell

Facebook shares are officially in the 'hangover' phase

[Update, 9:21 a.m.: Facebook shares have settled in around $40/share, after opening at $42. Notably, shares of Zynga, the maker of blockbuster Facebook games, have plunged 13 percent today, and the NASDAQ is down slightly.] Can Facebook hold on to its hacker culture as it becomes a public company? In the buildup to the social… Read More…

Open Letter to New Facebook Millionaires: Pay off mom’s mortgage! (And 5 other tips)

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Every once in awhile the matrix reboots itself. When Facebook makes its initial public offering this week, there will be an estimated 1,000 newly minted millionaires from the employee ranks. It’s hard for me not to reflect back 20 years ago to the heady days of Microsoft’s rise, resulting in a reported 1,200 people at… Read More…

‘Big data’ company Splunk, backed by Ignition, soars in IPO

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Shares of business intelligence company Splunk are up more than 80 percent in their first day of trading today — a strong IPO from a “big data” company backed in part by the Bellevue-based Ignition Partners venture capital firm. Ignition Partners led a $25 million round in Splunk in 2007, with the firm’s John Connors, the former… Read More…

Microsoft’s Facebook investment: Smartest deal Ballmer ever made?

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It was a modest amount in the scheme of things — a $240 million investment by Microsoft in Facebook in 2007, valuing the social network at $15 billion at the time, and giving the Redmond company a 1.6 percent stake in Facebook. More than four years later, Microsoft has held on to the investment. And it… Read More…

Groupon IPO: Is this the next Amazon.com or Pets.com?

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Group discount buying service Groupon, the granddaddy of the daily deals startups, debuted on the stock market this morning with its highly anticipated IPO, trading on the Nasdaq exchange as GRPN. This will be a fascinating one to watch as a litmus test for other startups and a gauge of the tech economy. It’s hard… Read More…

Rich Barton on Zillow’s IPO: It’s a ‘great accelerant’ for the business

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As CEO of Expedia in 1999, Rich Barton missed out on the excitement of the company’s initial public offering. After all, the online travel company priced shares on the day that Barton’s first child was born, and the high-tech executive wisely chose to be with his wife in a hospital room instead of on Wall… Read More…

Microsoft’s IPO, 25 years ago, and what happened after that

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It was 25 years ago today — March 13, 1986 — that a personal-computer software company named Microsoft Corporation sold its shares publicly for the first time. Fortune magazine is marking the moment by reprinting the in-depth piece that followed Bill Gates and other company executives as they went through the entire process, including details… Read More…