How Chris Sacca And J.P. Morgan Acquired 10% Of Twitter
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Odeo was VC backed wasn't going anywhere for a number of reasons, namely iTunes beating them to the podcast game. It did launch a side project called twttr though, which back then was an SMS focused app. Shortly after Ev bought out the investors in Odeo, spun twttr off to a new company and then sold Odeo which has still never done anything remarkable. Odeo's sale price was something like a million bucks, compared to Twitter's current $4.5b valuation. Talk about identifying and keeping the gems.
The thing is, I don't think even he knew which way it was going to go until after the Summize acquisition two years later.
Twitter always seemed like a worthwhile project, but those first two years were really hard for everyone and from the outside it looked like they might just completely fail to keep up with the growth.
When did that happen ? How did I miss that ?
That's pretty...errr...frothy...and epic.
I never knew he packed that sorta heat. Congrats to him...but now he has the wonderful task of actually putting so much money to work.
I would love to be getting his 2% right now.
That's a big cash-out for a company that's not even public yet. Max Levchin's share of PayPal, which IPO'd and then was bought for $1.5B, was only estimated at around $40M.
And the cashing-out environment has completely changed. It's harder to go public, but easier to cash out without going public. It's tough to get anything out of the comparison, other than "Boy, things have changed!"
The title spoke about how Sacca owned 10% of Twitter - yet there are so many other 'throw away' gems in there that really make you stop and re-read what you think you just saw.
That's kinda insane that Ev cashed out $100M worth of shares and still is the single largest shareholder.
Good for him!
Which is still $2M annually. He hires 10 people at $100K a piece, and office expenses of about $200K if he wants to be ostentatious. That's about $800K annually.
Not bad, not to mention that he gets his 20% of the carry.
Keep in mind that we are talking 10% of the 2% standard rate which I am relatively certain he isn't getting.
Either way, it's not a bad living.
This trend highlights again that, there are 3-4 companies that become thunder lizards and money just pours on them. As companies ready to go ipo, underwriters want to get early access and back stage tickets.
EDIT: Morgan Stanley takes facebook and JP Morgan takes twitter. Awesome to see underwriters paying upfront to own quality companies - shows how dry the ipo market is and how desperate underwriters are.
This time the printed money goes into tech startups => tech bubble.
in 2009, chris rode a bicycle across the US
buffalo...
I thought I'd mention Sharespost. Its a good source to buy premarket stocks. They allow for shareholders (often internal stakeholders) to put their shares up for sale before IPO. Currently, Facebook and Linkedin are up for grabs. I found an interesting article on Linkedin's IPO earlier today. I'll start it in a new thread here in Hacker News.