Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Pandora IPO Benefits Socal Investors

Champagne glasses must be clinking for a few, lucky Southern California investors and executives this morning, as the IPO of Oakland-based Pandora Media had a rousing welcome on Wall Street. Pandora was trading as high as $26.00 Wednesday during morning trading, after pricing at $16.00 per share last night, well above the $10.00 to $12.00 estimated pricing range from last week. The firm was trading around $19.00 at the time of this article. The Southern California linked-investors with connection to Pandora include Peter Gotcher, founder of Los Angeles-based Topspin Media, who had around 1.6M shares of the firm before IPO; Howard Morgan, of Idealab, who had around 250,000 shares of Pandora before IPO; and Pandora co-founder Jon Kraft, now COO of Twitter client firm UberMedia, with around 690,000 shares before the IPO. Pandora debuted on the NYSE as "P".

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