Venture History [Perennial Post]
By Alex Mackenzie at
WIP / Evolving doc.
Best returns I've come across in venture - will model at some point.
- TVI's $1M into Microsoft for 5%. Owned 5% at IPO.
- Benchmark's $3M into Ebay.
- Kleiner Perkins' $XK into Genentech.
- Fred Wilson when at Flat Iron invested in Geocities at a 20M pre-money, exited at $3.5B.
- Hummingbird's first three funds were each 10x net. link
- Peak produced $600 million in revenue from just 100 employees at its apogee. link
- From an investment of just $5 million, they had scored a return of $276 million – a gross multiple of 54.4x. Peak alone returned Hummingbird’s first fund 9.1x. link
- Meanwhile, Ecevit and Karamanci led Gram to a winning outcome. In 2018, Zynga acquired the startup at a valuation of $394 million. At the time of the acquisition, Hummingbird owned nearly 30% of the business, which it acquired for just $2 million. Ileri had delivered a 49.5x gross return on his first-ever investment. link
- From a $6 million investment, Hummingbird amassed a peak stake of 16.2%. It would sell more than half its shares in 2021 at a weighted valuation north of $5 billion. To this day, Kraken is Hummingbird’s best investment on a gross multiple basis, returning approximately 112x. link