Author Archives: Ben Parr

WSJ reports:

Question-and-answer site Quora Inc., started by two of Facebook’s earliest employees, Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever, has raised $50 million in a new financing that values it at $400 million, up from a valuation of around $86 million two years ago, said people familiar with the matter.

The new financing round is being led by Facebook board member Peter Thiel, who invested with his own personal funds. Other investors in the new round include Silicon Valley venture-capital firm Northbirdge Venture Partners, which made the investment through its partner Jonathan Heiliger, who until last year ran Facebook’s infrastructure.

Facebook Mafia, indeed. Congrats Adam & Charlie!

BREAKING: Facebook’s IPO is set for May 18. The IPO roadshow will start on Monday. on.wsj.com/97vJbq

— Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) May 1, 2012

I predict Facebook will be worth $130 billion before the end of the summer, if not sooner.

Let the fun begin!

From Facebook’s newsroom:

“Microsoft Corp. and Facebook announced today a definitive agreement under which Microsoft will assign to Facebook the right to purchase a portion of the patent portfolio it recently agreed to acquire from AOL Inc. Facebook has agreed to purchase this portion for $550 million in cash.

In the initial AOL auction, Microsoft secured the ability to own or assign approximately 925 U.S. patents and patent applications plus a license to AOL’s remaining patent portfolio, which contains approximately 300 additional patents that were not for sale.”

$550 Million. That’s half an Instagram. Think about that.

My feed is filled with commentary on Ben Horowitz’s response to the Instagram acquisition. Ben is one of the partners at Andreessen Horowitz, an early investor in Instagram and former competitor PicPlz.

Essentially, journalists decided to criticize AH for choosing to follow-up its investment on PicPlz instead of Instagram, despite the fact that AH actually invested in Burbn, the predecessor to Instagram focused on checkins. PicPlz, founded by Dalton Caldwell, pivoted away from photo-sharing when it became clear Instagram would rule the market (update: Dalton actually pivoted away from PicPlz, but the app is still on the market).

From Horowitz’s post:

“After speaking with both entrepreneurs and much internal discussion, we concluded that funding Kevin to compete with Dalton would be a violation of the original implicit commitment we made to Dalton—to not fund competitors to PicPlz. On the other hand, funding Dalton did not violate our implicit agreement with Kevin because he changed his business—we’d funded Burbn not Instagram.

So our choices were: a) invest in Dalton b) invest in neither or c) invest in Kevin and violate our commitment to Dalton. As soon as we fully recognized those were the choices, we ruled out option c and elected option a.”

Read his entire post. It’s a lesson in transparency and ethics. I’m pretty sure AH’s limited partners aren’t complaining about AH’s massive return on Instagram.

~ Ben