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.”

CHICAGO (AP) — Hoping to get in on Facebook‘s hotly anticipated public stock offering? You’ll need Facebook friends at very high levels — or a lot of money.

Most people who like the idea of owning Facebook’s stock will have difficulty getting it at the offer price, currently expected at $28 to $35 a share. Unless you know the right people at Facebook, you’ll likely need to have a large, active account with one of the big banks or brokerage firms directly involved in the stock sale.

Otherwise, you can take your chances by buying shares after the initial public offering is completed, when Facebook begins trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market under the ticker symbol “FB.” That’s likely to happen Friday.

Doing it that way typically means paying much more for the stock, however. And heavy demand skews the early stock price, leaving an investor vulnerable to the risk of a big drop.

Jerome Cleary isn’t deterred. One of a legion of Facebook fans, he has never wanted to own a stock as much as he wants to buy this one. Cleary, a standup comedian in Los Angeles, says he has already signed up for an account with a discount online brokerage so he’ll be ready.

“I know you should buy stock in what you know and like,” Cleary says. “I feel that because they have an incredible mass of wealth and such growing popularity, the stock really may pay off.”

Facebook Inc.’s IPO is expected to be the largest ever for an Internet company. It’s expected to raise as much as $11.8 billion for Facebook and its early investors — far more than the $1.67 billion raised in Google Inc.’s 2004 IPO.

Analysts say there’s so much interest in Facebook’s stock that some underwriters are closing their books as early as Tuesday. This means they won’t be taking any more orders from potential buyers. The IPO is expected to be completed late Thursday, with shares available for trading Friday.

Scott Sweet, the owner of advisory firm IPOBoutique, says the high demand also means that Facebook might raise the per-share price above $35, the high end of the range Facebook currently expects. Facebook and the IPO’s lead underwriter, Morgan Stanley, declined to comment.

If you’re thinking of investing in Facebook, here are some things to consider.

— IPO SHARES

Facebook and its early investors are selling more than 337 million shares, but those shares are parceled out very carefully, away from the public’s eyes.

Typically individuals get to buy no more than 10 percent to 20 percent of shares sold at an IPO’s offering price. The vast majority will go to company insiders, institutional investors, the underwriters selected by the company to handle the process and preferred clients of all of them.

Morgan Stanley leads the team of 33 underwriters selected for the Facebook offering, followed by JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs.

The inclusion of online broker E-Trade Financial Corp. as an underwriter was seen as a glimmer of hope that Facebook might make more shares available than usual for retail investors through discount brokerages. But chances of getting any are very slim regardless.

— ELIGIBILITY

The big online brokerages have been taking formal requests from customers for Facebook’s IPO. They anticipate they’ll get their own allocations from one source or another, such as one of the underwriters. E-Trade, Fidelity Investments, Charles Schwab and TD Ameritrade, among others, have been fielding abundant queries.

But the requirements they set on who gets them eliminate most small investors.

Fidelity, which will be getting an undetermined number of shares from underwriter Deutsche Bank, says customers should have $500,000 in their accounts and have made 36 trades in the past year to be eligible. Ameritrade’s account requirements are at least $250,000 and 30 trades in three months. Schwab’s are a minimum $100,000 or 36 trades in the past year, but the firm says it also has other requirements.

Even meeting the requirements is no guarantee of getting shares.

Joshua Freeman, an information technology professional in New York, knows investing in Facebook is risky, but he believes “it’s got a pretty good shot to make some money.”

He has been investing with E-Trade since the mid-1990s and has about $200,000 in his account. But he’s pessimistic about his request for 100 Facebook shares at the IPO price, given the frenzy over the offering.

“I’m hoping to get some but I’m guessing that I won’t,” Freeman says. “I’m hoping it follows the trend and goes crazy and then dips a little bit. If it does that, I may buy some on the open market.”

— OPEN MARKET

If you strike out as an insider, it will still be easy, but expensive, to buy shares on the open market. Open and fund an account with a brokerage. Then for a transaction fee of as little as $7, you can buy Facebook stock at whatever price the market demand has driven it.

Be aware that the price could jump significantly by the time you place your order. Among last year’s hottest IPOs, Groupon Inc. soared in the opening minutes and gained 31 percent on the first day of trading. Zillow Inc. jumped 79 percent and LinkedIn Corp. more than doubled.

Investors buying on the open market miss much or perhaps all of any first-day “pop.”

The first-day market price of newly issued stocks during the past decade has been an average 11 percent higher than the offer price, according to University of Florida finance professor Jay Ritter.

For investors buying at the offer price, Facebook is likely to produce a gain on the first day, he says. But once it starts trading, investors should think of it as just another stock that’s as likely to go down as up.

Consider this: Groupon, which went public at an IPO price of $20 six months ago, soared as high as $31.14 on the first day. It closed Monday at $11.73, 41 percent below the offer price.

As for the idea of buying the stock at a low point a few months from now, Ritter says that has not worked historically as a reliable strategy with IPOs. And this one’s starting at a very high price, he emphasizes, with optimistic expectations of future growth built into it.

The only sure winners, he says, will be Facebook employees and venture capitalists who invested in the company when it was private.

James Breyer and his Accel Partners firm, investors since 2005, stand to make up to $1.34 billion from the 38.2 million shares they are offering. Zynga Inc. CEO Mark Pincus, a Facebook investor since 2004, stands to make up to $35 million on 1 million shares.

“The time to buy Facebook was five years ago,” Ritter says.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A disgruntled Yahoo shareholder questioned the qualifications and integrity of recently hired CEO Scott Thompson after exposing a misrepresentation about the executive’s education.

The fabrication confirmed Thursday by Yahoo Inc. gives New York hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb more artillery as he tries to topple a board of directors favored by Thompson, who became CEO of the troubled Internet company four months ago.

Loeb, whose fund Third Point owns a 5.8 percent stake in Yahoo, gained more leverage when he discovered Thompson doesn’t have a bachelor’s degree in computer science from a small college in Easton, Massachusetts, as Yahoo stated in a regulatory filing last week.

Thompson only has an accounting degree from Stonehill College, an accomplishment that Yahoo also listed in the filing. The accounting degree was the only one listed in Thompson’s resume last year by eBay Inc. when he was still running that company’s PayPal payment service. He graduated in 1979, according to Stonehill’s website.

Yahoo confirmed Thompson’s credentials had been exaggerated in the recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company, which is based in Sunnyvale, California, brushed off the distortion as an “inadvertent error.”

But Loeb pounced on the misinformation as a violation of Yahoo‘s code of ethics and called for an independent investigation to determine whether Thompson had misled the company’s board about his technology credentials. He also cited the mix-up as an example of Yahoo‘s poor corporate governance.

“If Mr. Thompson embellished his academic credentials we think that it 1) undermines his credibility as a technology expert and 2) reflects poorly on the character of the CEO who has been tasked with leading Yahoo at this critical juncture,” Loeb wrote in a letter to Yahoo‘s board on Thursday. “Now more than ever Yahoo investors need a trustworthy CEO.”

In the past, other companies have suspended or fired executives who were caught lying on their resumes.

Yahoo hired Thompson to reverse years of financial lethargy that set in at the company even as more advertising shifted to the Internet. The funk has weighed on Yahoo’s stock, which has been hovering between $10 and $20 for most of the last three years. Yahoo shares fell 27 cents to close at $15.40 on Thursday. That’s well below the $33 per share that stockholders could have gotten in May 2008 if the board had accepted a takeover offer from Microsoft Corp.

The company stood behind Thompson in its statement. “This in no way alters that fact that Mr. Thompson is a highly qualified executive with a successful track record leading large consumer technology companies,” Yahoo said. “Under Mr. Thompson’s leadership, Yahoo is moving forward to grow the company and drive shareholder value.”

Tensions between Loeb and Thompson escalated since late March when Yahoo appointed three new directors to its board. In doing so, Yahoo snubbed Loeb, who had been lobbying for a board seat along with three allies who he believes have the skills necessary to help Yahoo rebound from its long-running struggles. At the time, Thompson made it clear that he and the Yahoo committee overseeing the search for new directors had concluded Loeb wasn’t the best candidate.

Loeb is waging a campaign to persuade Yahoo’s shareholders to elect him and his allies to the board at the company’s annual meeting. The date of that meeting still hasn’t been set.

Besides ripping Thompson, Loeb also sought to discredit Patti Hart, one of the Yahoo directors he wants bounced from the board. Hart led the committee that recommended Yahoo’s new appointments to the board.

In his letter, Loeb noted that Yahoo’s recent SEC filing says Hart holds a bachelor’s degree in marketing and economics from Illinois State University. In its response, Yahoo clarified Hart received a bachelor’s degree in business administration with specialties in marketing and economics.

Thompson, 54, has mostly cut costs to boost profits since taking over as Yahoo’s CEO. Last month, he laid off about 2,000 employees, or 14 percent of the workforce, in the biggest payroll purge in Yahoo’s 17-year history. He also disclosed plans to close about 50 Yahoo services that haven’t been attracting enough users or generating enough revenue.

He has made modest progress on other financial fronts. Yahoo registered its first year-over-year increase in quarterly net revenue since 2008 during the three months ending in March.

Even though he doesn’t have a computer science degree, Thompson has a background in technology. He served as PayPal’s chief technology officer for three years before being promoted to the payment service’s president in 2008. He also previously worked as chief technology officer at credit- and debit-card processor Visa USA.