Here's what the San Jose Mercury News had to say about the LinkedIn IPO: "Anybody looking for evidence that Silicon Valley is in a full-blown bubble needed look no further than Wall Street on Thursday morning, when LinkedIn--the social networking site for professionals--made its debut as a public stock. After raising its initial public offering price to $45 a share, up from a projected low of $32, the shares zoomed out of the gate at a jaw-dropping $83 apiece."

This certainly does bring the dotcom era to mind.

But the IPO has generated lots of buzz for another reason: the use of dual classes of shares. The shares sold to the public were class A shares, which carry a vote each. The insiders will retain class B shares, which carry souped-up voting rights to the tune of 10 votes per share. After the offering, public stockholders have around 1 percent of the voting rights.

Such class B shares have long generated ire among corporate governance and shareholders activists.

These structures were most commonly used by media companies like the New York Times aiming to keep control within a family. As of right now, just over 5 percent of public companies have dual class structures.

Breakingviews suggests that people buying into the class A shares are like bondholders who gave up all their rights back before the credit crunch set in. Perhaps we are in another bubble.   

For more:
- here's the Mercury News article
- here's the Breakingviews article

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