Facebook’s IPO is quickly approaching: Although the social networking company hasn’t released an official date to begin trading, on Thursday it took another step closer to going public on the stock market by setting its minimum price per share between $28 and $35, valuing the overall company between $77 billion and $96 billion.
The company also launched a separate webpage on RetailRoadshow.com to promote its investor “roadshow,” the stage of the IPO process in which a company presents in front of big time investors and banks to drum up interest in its stock, although Facebook probably won’t have much trouble with that.
The feature attraction on the new website is a lengthy (30 min) video featuring key Facebook executives, including Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who spends an early part of the video extolling Facebook’s “hacker value system” that he earlier he described as “an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration.”
Zuckerberg especially touts how it helped Facebook to quickly build and expand its popular photo album uploading tool (Facebook is now by far the most popular place for sharing photos online, with upwards over 200 million photos uploaded every day as of 2011).
Watch the video in full below:
BuzzFeed’s FWD blog cut the entire thing down to 2 minutes of highlights, which concludes with Zuckerberg’s stated intention to make it so that “almost every app you use is integrated with Facebook.”
Facebook declined to comment on the video, but sources close to the company told TPM that the video is just one part of a much larger presentation that Facebook will be making to investors during its roadshow. No official date for that has been set, but the Wall Street Journal recently reported that Facebook would begin the roadshow on Monday, May 7. IPO roadshows typically last two weeks, putting the likely date for Facebook to begin trading on the NASDAQ at May 21 or May 18 at the earliest.
Meanwhile, an internal document from Facebook IPO underwriter J.P. Morgan Chase reportedly describes Zuckerberg as a potential investment “risk.” We’ll see if the video overture can sway any wary investors.
(H/T: Betabeat)
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