Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, November 20

• Successful Tech IPO#1: Shares of Square Soar by 45% After Public Offering: Square began trading as a public company on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday, at one point surging more than 64 percent above its initial public offering price of $9. It ended the day up 45 percent, closing at $13.07. The first-day pop followed a turbulent I.P.O. process for the six-year-old company, one that was marred by questions over pricing and valuation and that arrived in the face of a precarious public market for technology offerings. On Wednesday, when Square had priced its shares at $9, that was lower than the $11 to $13 range it had set, putting its valuation at $2.9 billion, well below the $6 billion price tag that private investors had valued the company at last year. As recently as Wednesday, advisers laid out options for Square including pulling the deal, three people briefed on the discussions said, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, but for Square, that was not a consideration.  “We have a great beginning,” said Jack Dorsey, Square’s chief, striking an upbeat note in an interview on Thursday, which was his 39th birthday. “I don’t see negativity as necessarily something that detracts from our work.” The I.P.O. ordeal illustrates the difficulties — some might say guesswork — of accurately valuing companies, both when they are private and when they go public. And Square, which closed its first day trading with a market capitalization of $4.4 billion, now faces the challenge of moving on from the fund-raising event, solidifying its business and building itself up. “I want to get back to a steady state and back to business,” Mr. Dorsey said. He added that Square’s strategy now was “to continue to save people trips to the bank. We’re not going out there to say we’re getting rid of the banks or card networks. We’ve just put a much cleaner face on that infrastructure.”

• Sucessful Tech IPO#2: Investors 'swipe right' in Tinder-owner Match's debut: Shares of media mogul Barry Diller's Match Group, the owner of popular dating site Match.com and mobile app Tinder, jumped as much as 24 percent in their market debut on Thursday, valuing the company at $3.57 billion. Match Group, which touts itself as the world's No. 1 dating company, is seen as the crown jewel of Diller's media properties and has driven parent IAC/InterActiveCorp's (IACI.O) profit and revenue in recent quarters. The U.S. online romance market, worth more than $2 billion a year, has thrived as instant messaging, photo-sharing and geolocation services grow in popularity. One of Match Group's most popular offerings is Tinder, a mobile app on which people "swipe right" or "swipe left" to signal their willingness – or not – to meet prospective partners.

• Facebook Makes It Easier to Move On After a Breakup: Breaking up is now a little easier to do, at least on Facebook, thanks to a new feature that lets people untangle themselves from a relationship without cutting ties altogether. The operator of the world's biggest social network introduced a tool on Thursday for users to "take a break" after changing the status of a relationship with another person, letting them see less of an ex's posts without blocking or unfriending them. People can also tell Facebook to show an ex less information. While the feature might seem intrusive, it's become more necessary as Facebook has worked to highlight a user's most important relationships. The company is using its data to make better suggestions, such as who should be invited to events or whose birthdays are more important to celebrate. For example, Facebook has been serving up flashback memories of older posts, which, after a breakup, could bring back bad memories. And Facebook doesn't want to drive away any of its 1.55 billion users. The tools are more subtle than unfriending or unfollowing someone—the ex won't see any changes. Twitter, which lets users know if they were blocked, came up with a similar option last year, adding a "mute" button that would keep users from seeing someone's posts without letting them know. Facebook's new breakup feature is also reversible—just in case.

• Patron of Indian start-ups Tiger Global to tone down current aggressive style; to come up with two-track approach in giving money to companies: Tiger Global Management, the most prolific backer of startups in India, has decided to tone down its current aggressive style here, several people aware of the thinking at the US firm said, in a reflection of the limits of its strategy so far as well as the changing investor mood. Tiger, which is based in New York with private investments led by Lee Fixel, is coming up with a twotrack approach when it comes to giving money to companies in its portfolio, conversations with founders and investors reveal. The ones that are in leadership positions in the market can expect Fixel to keep his purse strings open, but not the laggards which have been told to fend for themselves. They must obtain validation from investors other than Tiger to lead new rounds and get unit economics right with positive operating margins. One of the founders who met Fixel recounted the conversation thus: "I will be leading very few investments in the next six to eight months, but if you use your cash and survive this cycle, then the pressure will ease out." Tiger, which is the main backer of India's most valuable startup Flipkart and owns significant stakes in the country's largest cab aggregator Ola, has invested around $2 billion (Rs 13,000 crore) in over 35 Indian companies. This year it has been even more active than in the past, but that has changed along with the onset of a more cautious mood about throwing large sums of money at consumer internet ventures. 

• Trailing in the Cloud, Google Taps VMware Founder to Chase Amazon: With its cloud business, Google finds itself in a rare position: Behind. The search giant has toyed with different enterprise products for years, with limited success, and now faces fierce competition from Microsoft and Amazon. But Google is signaling that it is serious about building an enterprise business. And here is its biggest sign: Alphabet has tapped Diane Greene, a founder and former CEO of the software company VMware, to run it. Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, announced the move in a blog post. Therein he said Greene, who has been a Google board member since 2012, will take over “all our cloud businesses, including Google for Work, Cloud Platform and Google Apps.” The move includes an acquisition of Greene’s new company, Bebop. Pichai describes it as a “new development platform that makes it easy to build and maintain enterprise applications.” Google isn’t sharing a price on the deal. Greene is joining at a moment when Google’s cloud efforts, both on the application and the infrastructure side, seem to be spinning. Three years ago, the narrative about Google Apps was how it was so often displacing Microsoft Office with its word processing and spreadsheet apps that run in a browser. Now that Microsoft Office has gotten the cloud religion with Office 365, which runs both as an on-premise version and in the cloud, the narrative around Google Apps has shifted in the last year or so: It’s now described generally as “doing well with small businesses,” even though Google itself still touts the fact that 60 percent of the Fortune 500 use it. Still, the cloud world has just gotten a lot more competitive. On Tuesday, Microsoft announced Office Graph, a set of unified APIs that will let third-party developers build add-ons and apps that enhance how Microsoft Office works. This hiring seems a partial response to that.