Kara Swisher

Recent Posts by Kara Swisher

Tidbits From the Facebook IPO Filing: I’ll Have What SV VCs Marc Andreessen and Jim Breyer Are Having!

Because I am an obessive-compulsive and Facebook is my new target of stalkery, I have re-read its IPO filing from earlier this week about nine times so far.

It’s chock full of interesting little bits of tasty info about the Silicon Valley social networking giant that I plan to shine a little more light on this week.

First up is not exactly a news flash: Besides graphic artists, VCs also clean up in the public offering docs.

But I am not talking about the variety of venture firms with their fingers in Facebook, which run the gamut from Accel Partners to DST Global and more.

I am talking about individual wins for venture capitalists, most especially Accel’s Jim Breyer and Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz.

According to the filing, while Accel holds almost 190 million shares, Breyer himself holds 11.7 million shares personally in the “James W. Breyer 2005 Trust dated March 25, 2005.”

Depending on what Facebook’s valuation turns out to be, based on current estimates, that hovers around $300 million. One caveat, according to the filing, is that 10.4 million of those shares — which are currently Class B stock and will be converted to Class A stock — are “subject to a voting agreement in favor of Mr. Zuckerberg.” That would be CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, who controls the company via such arrangements.

Not so the shares of super-VC Marc Andreessen, whose firm holds 3.6 million shares. But he himself has 5.2 million restricted stock units, presumably for board service and other advisory duties to Facebook. That’s a possible $125 million or more windfall.

Other board members have also gotten RSUs, but not in that large an amount. Washington Post head Don Graham holds one million of them, while Washington, D.C. political vet Erskine Bowles and Netflix’s Reed Hastings each clock in at only 20,000 each.

That’s a big delta, of course, which means it’s good times for VCs in Silicon Valley, both professionally and personally.

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Nobody was excited about paying top dollar for a movie about WikiLeaks. A film about the origins of Pets.com would have done better.

— Gitesh Pandya of BoxOfficeGuru.com comments on the dreadful opening weekend box office numbers for “The Fifth Estate.”