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Comment by xpose2000 | Hacker News Reader

xpose2000

The impressive thing is that he waited until FB was over $100 to sell. Facebook was faced with a huge uphill battle with Wall Street. Each time they had solid earnings, the stock would go down on fears of young people not using the service or their inability to monetize mobile properly or that they overpaid for Instagram.

Wall Street finally caught on that it is a social network in a league of their own and a company that makes solid decisions, but it took a long time and Marc could have easily sold along the way.

Andreessen stuck through all of that to make it to $100+. It seems like he felt like it was time to cash in. Rightfully so. FB will be just fine moving forward.

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> The impressive thing is that he waited until FB was over $100 to sell.

That would be impressive for a dev who had 99% of her net worth in Facebook stock, but for someone who is already cash wealthy and a paper billionaire, it's much less impressive.

a) How do you know he's cash wealthy? (How could anyone know this, except Marc himself?), and b) Why is patiently holding something, then selling it when you said you would "not impressive", and why does his wealth have to do with the quality of a decision?

> How do you know he's cash wealthy?

That may be a bit of an assumption, but starting two billion dollar companies then buying Skype (a lot of which was done with personal money), selling it for $5 billion more... He would have to try really hard to be cash poor.

Not to mention marrying a philanthropist whose parents are billionaires.

He owns very expensive things and gives away a lot of money, it would be shocking if he does not have significant assets outside of high-value startups and his Facebook stock.

His pre-existing wealth matters quite a bit with the decision of whether or not to sell out of a position that has been very profitable. Diversification is a fundamental part of wealth management. It's just not smart to have all your eggs in one basket, regardless of what basket that is. Marc already has a lot of baskets, while the hypothetical Facebook engineer does not.

Andreessen said in a podcast that to go public in today's market, you really have to build up the company as "a fortress", i.e. be prepared for several quarters of negative market reaction, and that he worked extensively with Zuckerburg before Facebook's IPO to do this. It's logical that if he had inside information about Facebook's financials, their strategy, upcoming moves, and monetization experiments, he could set a much more accurate price target than Wall Street.

Interestingly, you could probably turn this into a trading strategy by looking for other newly-IPO'd companies that Andreessen is a board member on, waiting for them to inevitably sink after IPO, and then buying in.

Some good stories related to this via Chris Sacca on TWIS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SK4ezQrTqFw&ab_channel=ThisW...

Essentially Zuckerberg treated the IPO process with contempt, was cavalier and unorthodox, offending many Wall Streeters. 'The Hoodie' legend exploded during this period, as did perception that Facebook was hopeless on mobile AND had poor leadership.

Both turned out to be false, as FB post-2012 found a way to monetize mobile and Zuckerberg grew into his role as CEO, now telling jokes in Chinese and managing the press more effectively.

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