Facebook Ipo Discussion

SAN FRANCISCO: Facebook Inc began trading on the Nasdaq on Friday, becoming the first American company to debut with a valuation above $100 billion.

The debut - marred by technical hiccups and the lack of the first-day bounce in the share price that many had expected - marks the formal ascension of the No. 1 social network to the ranks of Silicon Valley technology powerhouses.

Here are a few comments from movers and shakers in Silicon Valley:

Dan Rosensweig, CEO of Textbook-Rentals Site Chegg, who tried to buy Facebook for $1 billion when he was COO of Yahoo:

"I don't think anybody would have imagined all of this. Except maybe Mark. If you take away the valuation, those conversations with Mark were very deep about the definition of a platform.

Facebook IPO: Full Coverage

"He just kept talking about a platform before the platform was cool. And I'm not even sure he knew what it meant.

"But he had a vision for connecting people of all kinds. There were only four million people on the platform and they were all college kids, and if you think back then, you could only connect to people at your own college. You couldn't even connect to friends at a different college.

"He had very big ambitions then and it's pretty clear that he was well ahead of everybody and I think still is."

Siva Kumar, CEO of e-commerce website Thefind

"It's really like buying into a 900-million Internet. A closed Internet, with all of these new types of applications that you can buy. Think about it as the early inning of buying into the Internet 20 years ago. Would you spend money to buy it? Today that seems like a good value. Because it's not a one-trick pony.

"Literally everything you see on the Internet, in a parallel you could see inside Facebook. But done with much more of the 'social graph' built into it. So the experiences are going to be more personal, more tailored to you.

"Facebook is like a realtor. So they own the platform, they're...