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The professional social media site LinkedIn went public late last week , and there were plenty of critics who argued that investors should be wary of the real value of stock that quickly doubled from the initial offering of $45 per share. But long term, the success of LinkedIn as a business, and as an investment, depends largely on whether the site remains the site of choice for business-based social networking, as argued in this short piece from the New York Times DealBook editors:

As Congress continues to try to figure out new rules on bank regulation, some investors who lost money in the global economic crisis are fighting the banks themselves. Through the courts. Marketplace 's Paddy Hirsch explains the legal battle over fiduciary responsibility: Why investors are suing the banks from Marketplace on Vimeo .

John C. Bogle , founder of the Vanguard Group , writes, in today's Wall Street Journal, that corporate stewards have betrayed the trust of investors: "far too many of our corporate and financial agents have failed to honor the interests of their principals—the mutual fund investors and pension beneficiaries to whom they owed a fiduciary duty." Bogle traces this betrayal to the rise of "institutional investors" over the last half of the Twentieth Century. Institutional investors--mutual funds, and private and government pension plans--now control nearly 70% of stocks for US corporations, according to Bogle. This is nearly double the percentage they controlled in 1975. This growth in institutional investors has "linked the agents of corporate America with the agents of investment America," Bogle writes, and has brought several major changes to the way the US financial system operates. Here are two examples: First, the folly of short-term speculation has replaced the wisdom of long-term investing as the star of capitalism. A rent-a-stock system has replaced the earlier own-a-stock system. In 2009, the average stock turnover appears to have exceeded 250% (changed hands two and a half times), compared to 78% a decade ago, and 21% barely 30 years ago. Result: The momentary illusion of the price of a stock took center stage, replacing the enduring reality of the company's intrinsic value—the discounted value of its future cash flow. Our newly empowered agents ignored the famous warning of Benjamin Graham in "The Intelligent Investor" that "in the short run, the market is a voting machine; in the long run, it is a weighing machine." Two, the financial sector became the driving force in the U.S. economy. During the past decade, revenues of stock exchange firms (excluding trading gains or losses) rose to an estimated $375 billion from $200 billion, and mutual fund fees and expenses rose to nearly $100 billion from $47 billion. The higher these intermediation costs, of course, the lower the returns to investors as a group. Alas, in this Alice-in-Wonderland world of the financial markets, the investor feeds at the bottom of the food chain. Bogle calls for Congress to establish "a federal principle of fiduciary duty." Read Restoring Faith in Financial Markets here .

Foodie fans of fine French cuisine from all over have been known to schedule trips to the Bay Area just to get a table at Berkeley's Chez Panisse . Alice Waters , the celbrated owner of Chez Panisse, started the business back in 1971. She has been honored with the prestigious James Beard Award, a Bon Apetit lifetime achievement award, and most recently accolades from the French Legion of Honor, for her contributions to cuisine . Getting the food right was one challenge. But the bigger challenge was learning how to run a business. Waters shares her Startup Story at CNNMoney , and she says the beginning, as with most startups, was rocky: "In no time I had 50 employees, and I didn't know how to manage any of them," Waters says. "We were open seven days a week from 7:30 a.m. to 2 a.m., serving breakfast, lunch and dinner. It was too much. We were hemorrhaging money. I had to lay off half of my staff, and we stopped serving breakfast and closed on Sundays." She turned things around, and the business started to make a profit...after eight years. Read How Chez Panisse Began here .