Hero or villain? Just over a week after its IPO, David Ebersman, the person in charge of sponsoring Facebook’s stock market launch, has become the perfect target for the anger that surrounds the social network.
His last-minute decision to substantially increase the number of shares to be offered has proven to be one of the factors that derailed the most anticipated public offering of the year.
Now, while regulators dissect what happened and investors search for culprits, the future of Facebook’s chief financial officer seems to hang from a delicate thread that could snap at any moment.
Until approximately 11:30 in the morning on May 18, when the first price of the social network flashed on the screens of the Nasdaq OMX at $42.05 per share, Ebersman had been considered “a good guy” by the canine community of investors and analysts that populate Wall Street.
His fame as a kind man without any kind of egocentrism was far from his boss, Mark Zuckerberg, the child prodigy who founded the most important social network on the planet. However, the series of problems, fiascoes and legal actions that have seasoned one of the most disappointing stock market openings in recent times, call into question his work.
At 41, Ebersman has grown up primarily in the arms of biotech giant Genentech. His fine arts when it came to orchestrating the merger with Roche Holdings, in an operation valued at 46,000 million dollars, were the perfect calling card among the North American corporate for this inveterate musician, who currently plays bass in Feedband, a group originated on Facebook who often covers musical hits.
In March 2005, when Genentech chose to appoint a 34-year-old boy as CFO, many experts were uproarious, until his face-to-face meetings with Ebersman proved not only his validity but his ability to deal with the odds. more finicky and tricky issues. Perhaps that’s why when Facebook knocked on his door, he had no hesitation in making the leap to a startup with fewer than 1,000 employees and with a reputation for not taking its CFOs too seriously.
Nor should it be overlooked that during his more than 15-year journey at Genentech, where he began working in 1994 as a business analyst, Ebersman managed to attract the attention of Art Levinson, chairman of the board of directors of the biotechnology company and also of Apple and made him one of his protégés.
Right now, among computer engineers and twenty-somethings, Ebersman has managed to earn the trust of his new comrades through music, although his excessive attention to detail is perhaps the quality he most shares with Zuckerberg. It is precisely for this reason that both the press and the investment community wonder why Facebook’s IPO has been marked by so many potholes and the “incompetence” of the various people in charge of making it a reality.
One of Ebersman’s great responsibilities was to keep the company’s growth forecasts on track, especially when he knew that otherwise he would have to suggest to his underwriters, that they should revise his recommendations. Now he will have to convince Facebook investors and regulators that they can fully trust him, at a time when the social network’s stock is moving aimlessly.
Facebook Comments
Disqus