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MENLO PARK, Calif. (AP) — In Silicon Valley, where sudden wealth is hardly something new and CEOs favor hoodies over bespoke blazers, Facebook‘s IPO on Friday didn’t bring everyday life to a halt.

Employees weren’t popping champagne corks at company headquarters, at least not where anyone outside could see them. And locals had plenty to do —from finding a job to locating the next Facebook.

The company’s sprawling headquarters along the southern edge of San Francisco Bay was quiet except for security guards walking the parking lots, a dozen TV satellite trucks and an onslaught of reporters who were not allowed inside.

The morning began with a ceremony attended by a few dozen people in a courtyard in the center of campus known as Hack Square. Mark Zuckerberg rang the opening bell to start the Nasdaq Stock Market’s daily trading as chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, Nasdaq executives and other employees looked on.

Afterward, employees tried to get back to business as usual. That is, building a company under immense pressure to meet shareholders’ expectations. To remind everyone not to get caught up in the hoopla, Facebook’s 2,000 employees were given t-shirts that read “Stay focused & keep hacking.”

As is standard at large tech companies in Silicon Valley, employees were told not to talk to the press.

In the parking lot, venture capitalist Mark Siegel had come down to take a longing look at one that got away. Like many of his fellow technology startup investors with offices a short drive from Facebook on Silicon Valley’s famed Sand Hill Road, Siegel said he had chances to back Facebook early on but didn’t.

He said at the time, when competing social networks like Friendster and MySpace still had clout, it wasn’t clear that Facebook would come out on top.

“In hindsight, any price would have been a good price to pay,” said Siegel, a managing director at Menlo Ventures.

To avoid a similar fate in the future, Siegel’s firm is invested heavily in Internet and social media companies, including popular blogging service Tumblr.

As for the viability of Facebook as an investment now that it’s public, Siegel said he expects the stock to be in for a bumpy ride in the near future.

“I might buy a little, but I would buy it as a long-term hold,” he said. “It’s very fully valued, so I think in the short-term there’s going to be a lot of ups and downs.”

At a strip mall that includes the closest Starbucks to Facebook, the company’s stock was not the first thing on everyone’s minds. (Not that anyone at Facebook needs to come across the highway to Starbucks — gourmet coffee is just one of the company’s many meal perks.)

Ann House, 49, an education researcher at a nearby nonprofit, said the IPO would obviously mean more rich people in the area, but she’s been pleasantly surprised so far that the company’s recent move to its new headquarters hasn’t yet led to a big uptick in street traffic.

Though not a heavy Facebook user, she said the ads on the social network’s site have started to annoy her more. She expects the IPO won’t help.

“It probably means there’s going to be more advertising on the site, so I’ll use it less,” she said.

Claire Bonnar, 22, of Pacifica became a teenager shortly before Facebook first went online, but she doesn’t count herself among the Facebook generation. She has an account, but she said she only logs on once every few months. She said she communicates with her friends by text message and phone to avoid the headaches she witnessed among former co-workers who were heavy users.

“They’d always be in each others’ business,” she said. “I don’t want that kind of drama.”

Facebook’s IPO was also far from Bonnar’s mind as she focused on more pressing concerns. Laid off from her job at a San Diego hospital a few months ago, she came north to be with family. She works as a cashier at a San Francisco barbecue restaurant to make ends meet while she plots her next move.

An aspiring pharmacist, she had traveled the 30 miles from Pacifica to a job training center in Menlo Park that, by coincidence, receives money from Facebook. The company does community outreach since moving into its new headquarters, which borders on neighborhoods that are far from wealthy.

Bonnar said she doesn’t find it weird that Mark Zuckerberg, also in his 20s, has become one of the world’s richest men thanks to an online service she doesn’t even like.

“I think that it’s really awesome, actually. It sucks I’m not in his position.”

NEW YORK (AP) — Some investors who thought they had bought Facebook shares at the opening of trading were left without knowing for hours whether they had received the shares.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is looking into the glitches in the trading of Facebook’s initial public offering around the time of its scheduled debut Friday on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

The glitches caused traders problems changing and canceling their orders. Nasdaq said around noon that it was “investigating an issue in delivering trade execution messages” for Facebook stock.

The SEC will review the incident with Nasdaq “to determine its cause and steps that will be taken to address it,” agency spokesman John Nester said.

Technical glitches at the Nasdaq Stock Market had already delayed the trading of Facebook’s stock by half an hour. The stock, which was expected to start trading at 11 am, opened at 11:32 a.m. at $42.05 and ended the day at $38.23.

Joseph Saluzzi, co-founder of broker Themis Trading, said it’s understandable that a delay at the opening might occur with a large IPO like Facebook’s. “The problem is when people don’t know if they had bought or sold a certain number of shares and that affects how people manage risk,” Saluzzi said.

Brokers who might have wanted to sell after the IPO was priced weren’t sure if they had received a piece of the highly-anticipated offering from the online social networking phenomenon.

Nasdaq didn’t respond to requests for comment, but the exchange posted a message on one of its websites telling investors who had problems buying or selling Facebook stock between 11:11 and 11:30 a.m. to call Nasdaq before 5 p.m. with their order information.

“Our intention is to reach resolution of those trades today through an offline matching process,” Nasdaq said in a comment posted on its website. “If at the end of that process, a firm continues to have questions or concerns, the firm needs to submit a formal accommodation request to us through the normal channels.”

In March, there was a far worse technical foul-up at the intended IPO of BATS Global Markets Inc., a Kansas-based company that competes with Nasdaq Stock Market and the New York Stock Exchange in offering stock trading services.

BATS tried to list its stock on its own trading systems, but a series of snafus prevented the stock from ever opening for trading. The company wound up canceling its IPO and its CEO, Joe Ratterman, issued a public apology.

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AP Business Writer Marcy Gordon contributed to this story from Washington,

Even the hottest initial public stock offerings can lose steam after their first day of trading.

Sure, company insiders will make money selling at the opening price. And investors who used connections or big bucks to score shares at the IPO price will profit if they sell after a first-day “pop.”

For everyone else, the wildly mixed record of other ballyhooed IPOs beyond their first trading session offers a lesson. It’s one that should remind us that buying Facebook stock Friday provides a chance to lose money.

It’s understandable that everyone wants to get in early on what could be the next Google. Shares of the Internet search leader had an initial offering price of $85 in 2004, started on the stock market at $100 and climbed above $700 by 2007. Even after moving sideways for more than four years, they’re still above $600.

But odds are against hitting a grand slam like that in the current market.

Cautionary points to weigh if the Facebook frenzy is tempting you to buy stock on Day 1:

YOU’LL PAY MORE FOR YOUR STOCK THAN THE SMART MONEY DID.

The vast majority of average investors couldn’t get in at the $38-per-share offer price. Those shares went largely to company insiders, the deal’s underwriters or their fat-walleted clients. The price almost always shoots quickly higher by the time orders to buy at the market price kick in.

SEVERAL OF LAST YEAR’S “MUST-HAVE” IPOS AREN’T ANY MORE.

— Pandora, an Internet radio company, went public June 15 at $20 a share. You could have bought the stock during the day for $26. It’s now trading under $11.

— Groupon, the online daily deal company, priced its stock at $20 a share in its Nov. 4 IPO. The stock traded above $31 the first day. Now it’s under $13.

— Zynga, the developer of “FarmVille” and other Facebook games, went public at $10 a share on Dec.16. The stock traded as high as $11.50 on its opening day. Lately it’s around $8.

— Even one of last year’s IPO stars isn’t a huge winner when you factor in the risk. LinkedIn more than doubled from its $45 offer price within minutes of hitting the market last May 19 and reached $122.70 before closing the first day at $94.25. It’s back to around $105 after a turbulent year, with a modest overall gain of 11 percent since the first day.

Buy-and-hold investors who want to make money off Facebook should hold off on the first day of trading. Maybe later they can think about buying.