To be determined at a later date. Yelp has gone public, and good for them that they have made so much money on the offering. However, this company won’t even be around in ten years. The tech highway is littered with wrecks and if we look at even companies like Yahoo, set us to solve a specific problem, they rarely, with the exception of Apple seems able to adjust and grow. The picture of the Yelp CEO caught my attention; in another context he could have been an Abbie Hoffman outside the stock exchange wanting to destroy the symbolic architecture of capitalism.
…Yelp, which turned down a $550 million bid by Google two years ago, brought in $107 million with its initial public offering.
The stock priced on Thursday night at $15 a share, a dollar above the top end of its expected price range.
Its shares surged from there, ending the day up more than $9 at $24.58.
Yelp is following in the footsteps of Internet companies like LinkedIn and Groupon, which spiked at their debuts — although some also quickly lost steam….
These kind of companies like Yelp, of which there are many, also remind me Robert Heilbroner’s The Wordly Philosophers which was read in economics. The Dutch tulip fad was an example of how euphoria for the trivial and inconsequential can get out of hand creating a huge economic bubble. Like what Yelp is and even Facebook will hit its iceberg probably sooner than later. But, the drive, energy and ambition of a Stoppelman is remarkable. A long time ago, one of my father’s employees had a son that was supposedly a problem student. He was a tall gangling kid and he wore a t-shirt that had Rich Griffin or Mouse Miller styled graphics on it, above which read “The Meek Shall Inherit The Shit” which seemed a profound juxtaposition if this boy was as delinquent in school as alleged.
…Seven-year-old Yelp, which offers customer-written reviews of everything from strip clubs to shoe repair shops, has yet to turn a profit.
Still, Yelp’s name-brand recognition, plus revenue growth of about 75% in 2011, helped spur demand, Morningstar equities analyst James Krapfel told the Daily News.“People look at that and they want to participate in a young company that has still has a market value of about $1 billion,” Krapfel said. Yelp had offered 7.1 million shares, and its charity, Yelp Foundation, offered 50,000.