"My question is about the IPO," a Facebook investor said midway through the company's first shareholder meeting. "I think it was a disaster."
The comment was just one of several investor criticisms directed towards Facebook's executive team about the company's initial public offering last May and the stock's poor performance in the year since. One shareholder said he had invested "blindly" because his family was a "fan" of Facebook's CEO and cofounder Mark Zuckerberg; now, he's "under water." Another asked if Facebook has "any strategy to create a new product to boost the price per share in the near future."
Even those shareholders who appeared somewhat supportive of the company's leadership still lobbed criticisms about the stock price.
"I know you're trying hard, whatever you're doing," said one investor named Rose, who claimed to have 8,900 shares of Facebook stock. "Since I'm losing money at $35 a share for several thousand shares, do you think Facebook is a buy at $24 this morning."
Zuckerberg, for his part, knew that much of the meeting would center around the declining stock price, so he tried to pre-empt some of that in his opening remarks (emphasis ours):
"We understand that a lot of people are disappointed in the performance of the stock and we really are too. It's our job here to build a great company that will not only achieve the mission, but be a great return for our shareholders and we take that seriously. We are disappointed with the performance of our stock over the last year."
That didn't stop the barrage of questions about the stock price from frustrated shareholders, occasionally prompting Zuckerberg to repeat the point. In response to the shareholder who said he was under water, Zuckerberg simply said: "We don't really have control over what the share price is in the short term."
During the long question and answer session, shareholders also grilled Zuckerberg about everything from the effectiveness of ads in the News Feed ("As a user, it's become white noise to me") to more user-focused concerns like the need for better customer service. One attendee even complained about being locked out of his Facebook account.
Zuckerberg wasn't the only one to receive some tough questions. One shareholder noted how much time Facebook's COO Sheryl Sandberg has spent promoting her new book, Lean In, and asked her to "assure" him that she is still just as committed to Facebook now as she was a year ago. Sandberg responded firmly that Facebook is her "number one priority" and "I have no plans to leave."
The exchange also prompted Zuckerberg to open up about how much time he spends handling the business side of things, with an eye towards the possibility of Sandberg eventually leaving the company.
"I spend most of my time reviewing the products and the thing that our users touch," he said, before noting that advertisers are also Facebook users. "You should assume that most of the advertising products we put out, I've spent a meaningful amount of time on."
Facebook's stock surged in trading on Monday following reports that the company may be included on the S&P 500 within the next year. However, the stock ended Tuesday down more than 1% following the shareholder meeting.