Some Uber employees probably won't see huge payday after IPO day

The value of Uber's public shares held by some of the company's employees is most likely less than they anticipated, as predicted Thursday in a Bloomberg opinion column by Shira Ovide.Citing data from EquityZen, Ovide said Uber was valued at about $49 a share in mid-2016. The company priced its IPO shares at $45, at the low end of the $44-to-$50 range it announced in a regulatory filing.Uber opened at $42 late Friday morning.Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.The value of Uber's public shares given to some of the company's employees is most likely less than they anticipated, as predicted Thursday in a Bloomberg opinion column written by Shira Ovide.Read more: Uber begins trading in one of the largest US IPOs on recordCiting data from EquityZen, Ovide noted that Uber was valued at about $49 a share in mid-2016. The company priced its initial public offering at $45 — at the low end of the $44-to-$50 range it announced in a regulatory filing — and the shares opened at $42 each when the stock began trading Friday morning.As Ovide predicted, those numbers suggest that an Uber employee who was hired in 2016 and given a compensation package that included the ability to receive equity for meeting tenure- and performance-based targets has yet to see the upside employees probably anticipated.Of course, it's easier to sell shares in public markets than in private ones, and, as Ovide noted, Uber employees are not allowed to sell their shares for the company's first six months on the public markets, so Uber's share price could rise by the time they're allowed to sell.The company's decision to set a relatively conservative IPO share price may have been a response to Lyft, which saw its share price fall by 36% between the launch of its IPO on March 29 and the end of Thursday.Read Bloomberg's full opinion column here.Read more:Uber boasts that it awarded $40,000 to any driver who made 40,000 trips. Almost no one would have made the cut. Uber's original pitch deck from a decade ago shows just how much the ride-hailing giant has changedUber is going public at a $75.5 billion valuation. Here's how that stacks up.Driver protests, bans and fighting with the competition: how Uber and other ride-hailing apps are holding up around the world