San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Who will get rich when ‘unicorns’ go public
Some of the most valuable tech startups are preparing to go public, starting with Lyft on Friday. The initial public offerings promise to generate big paydays for the startups’ employees and investors. Here are some of them.
Lyft: The ride-hailing service, which has branched out into scooters and bike-sharing, among other ventures, was worth about $25 billion when it started trading Friday. The value of each stake in Lyft is based on a pre-IPO share price of $72.
$2.26 billion: Rakuten, Japanese e-commerce firm.
$1.34 billion: General Motors, automaker.
$1.34 billion: Fidelity, financial firm.
$1.1 billion: Andreessen Horowitz, venture capital firm. Andreessen Horowitz, founded a decade ago, is one of Silicon Valley’s top venture capital firms, having invested in Instagram and others. It’s poised to win big with this year’s IPO wave: It owns stakes in Lyft, Pinterest, Slack and Airbnb, all of which are expected to go public this year or in 2020.
$924 million: CapitalG, investment arm of Alphabet, Google’s parent company.
$603 million: Logan Green, co-founder and CEO.
$416 million: John Zimmer, co-founder and president.
$111 million: Floodgate, venture capital firm. Ann MiuraKo, a co-founder of Floodgate, was one of the first investors in Lyft when it went by its original name, Zimride.
$478,000: Valerie Jarrett, former adviser to President Barack Obama.
Uber: The world’s biggest ride-hailing company, which also does food delivery, selfdriving cars and electric bikes, may be worth about $120 billion when it starts trading this year. That’s when we’ll find out how much its investors and employees could make. Uber, Pinterest, Slack and others are expected to go public in the coming weeks and months. All three have filed documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission but have not yet detailed ownership stakes as part of those filings. Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO. Benchmark, venture capital firm.
GV, venture capital arm of Alphabet. GV was formerly known as Google Ventures. The largest tech firms have for years invested in startups as a way to get a foothold in emerging technologies. Uber’s autonomous vehicle efforts put it in competition with Alphabet, leading to an ugly legal battle. Fidelity, financial firm. Microsoft, tech company. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, sovereign wealth fund.
SoftBank, Japanese conglomerate.
Travis Kalanick, co-founder and former CEO. Kalanick stepped down as CEO in 2017 after months of questions over his leadership of the company, which had become a prime example of Silicon Valley startup culture gone awry.
Toyota, automaker.
Pinterest: The social media company, which lets people create digital “pin boards,” is the rare “unicorn” that is not hemorrhaging cash. Private market investors last valued it at $12 billion.
Ben Silbermann, co-founder and CEO. Silbermann has not followed Silicon Valley’s playbook of chasing growth at all costs: By avoiding a “move fast and break things” culture, Pinterest has avoided the scandals that have hurt some of its Silicon Valley peers.
Evan Sharp, co-founder. Paul Sciarra, co-founder. Bessemer Venture Partners, venture capital firm.
Andreessen Horowitz, venture capital firm.
FirstMark Capital, venture capital firm.
Fidelity, financial firm. Valiant Capital Management, investment firm. Postmates: The delivery app was last valued at nearly $2 billion by private investors.
Bastian Lehmann, co-founder and CEO.
Sean Plaice, co-founder. Sam Street, co-founder. Tiger Global Management, investment firm. The hedge fund was among the earliest Wall Street firms to invest in private startups, making bets on SurveyMonkey, Spotify, Juul, Glassdoor and Eventbrite.
Spark Capital, venture capital firm.
Founders Fund, venture capital firm.
BlackRock, financial firm. Slack: The workplace messaging company was valued at $7.1 billion by private investors in 2018, but investment firms recently have offered to buy its shares at a price that values Slack at $13 billion.
Stewart Butterfield, cofounder and CEO. Butterfield helped found Flickr, the photo-sharing site that Yahoo eventually bought.
Cal Henderson, co-founder and chief technology officer. Accel, venture capital firm. Andreessen Horowitz, venture capital firm.
Vision Fund, Japanese conglomerate. Vision Fund is led by SoftBank, a Japanese conglomerate. Its founder, Masayoshi Son, believes that our lives will be dominated by robots, artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies, and he has been investing in the companies he thinks may build that future, as varied as transportation, food, work, medicine and finance.
Social Capital, venture capital firm.