So when the IPO happened and it was clear there was no immediate POP, my first impression was "wow, they priced it at the maximum selling price" and then "this is good for facebook, bad for speculators?". So with Cuban's recent post I'm glad to hear someone I respect for his "call a spade a spade" philosophy speak on it.

Specifically, what are the longterm outlooks for the stock and what does that mean?

I believe facebook-as-infrastructure is the end point and if so, then it will rest at some low (by comparison) price, generating earnings from some ads yes, but from other services that are built on top of the social graph. And in that case the best use of the stock to investors is for dividends.

And here's the rest of the thought:
I also only read zuck's lette and I loved it because its the best, biggest, opportunity to test another biz strategy - the alternative to short term thinking that's normally attributed to a goal of maximizing value for shareholders. I've always thought there is a better way and here it is. Google does it by making it worthwhile for their intellectual capital to stick around and Amazon did it. Other big companies may have lucked into long term stability, but they always maintained key intellectual capital - and that, by his words, is the only reason Facebook went public. To have/keep/attract the best people to hopefully make the best product. And I can't wait to see how it works out.

I was surprised to see my friend's Nate Bolt and Wilson Minor head over to Facebook months ago. My good friends at Cuban Council, an accomplished web consultancy where snapped up by Google this year as well. I would love to think that raw brain power can be turned into cash by Google and Facebook, but the brain power has to exists in some sort of culture, and thats the part I scratch my head about.

A post about design at Valve lead me to their employee manual which in turn got me thinking about organizational cultures void of a command and control mentality. Slightly off topic, but a huge component of how you use intellectual capital. Does stockpiling "intellectual capital" matter when your culture is a bit beat up?

designstaff.org

Yup I've seen the Valve handbook and shared it around. To answer your question, culture is a key ingredient to attracting and keeping the intellectual capital. So there is no stockpiling per se, because hiring is only step 1, the elusive step 2 is infusing these key people throughout the company/culture to create a feedback loop of optimisim and challenge. Otherwise you'll lose them as soon as you get em. But if you handle step 2, then step 3? PROFIT

I think they did what they had to - their financials are gonna be depressed for a while, as they ramp up mobile. The stock probably would have settled where it is even if they had priced lower. So all it would have accomplished is getting them less money. I suspect there is a certain group of FB employees that are annoyed, but many of the old ones are still rich, and the new ones have nowhere to go but up.

Still sucks for everyone else, though.

You guys know Ricardo Semlar's book Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World's Most Unusual Workplace? Sort of awesome, in terms of how they organized their culture.

One challenge is how do you take the raw brainpower (Bolt Peters / Cuban Council) and let it breath in a big company where there's a ton of competing groups/products (Facebook / Google). I think it's one of the most fascinating organizational question.

You can take it up a notch too: How do we do this as a polity? Look at some of the cool things U.S. cities do, forward-thinking work on transport systems or climate, then at how that is not part of the national conversation. Why? It's an org problem, but an org problem is of course a political problem, too.