Further to our post yesterday on the sale of Slide to Google, we’ve spoken to a source with knowledge of the terms to understand what everybody made from the deal.
As we speculated yesterday, founder Max Levchin did the best out of the sale, making a comparable sum to the one he made from PayPal – proving once again the value of investing in your own idea. Also, while the sale price represented a big come-down in valuation, it’s important to note that no one lost money on the deal.
Here’s how it breaks down…
Levchin, who invested $7m of his own money in the series A round, made $25m from his preferred shares in Slide plus $14m from common stock for a total of $39m. Scott Banister who also took part in the series A made $5m from the sale.
BlueRun Ventures, who invested $8m in the series B round made $28m.
The Founders Fund and Mayfield Fund, both investors in the series C, each made their money back.
Fidelity Investments, part of the series D: also made their money back.
In addition, Keith Rabois, Slide’s VP of Strategy & Business Development made $1.5m from the deal. Our sources also tell us that, along with the $182m purchase price, Google has agreed to pay an additional $46m in employee retention bonuses, making the total deal size $228m.
Slide, founded by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, makes widgets that help people express themselves. The company took a big risk in 2006 when they gave users the ability to auto-insert slide shows into their MySpace pages and blasting bulletins out to all their friends. They did this by asking users to hand over their MySpace credentials, and doing all the hard work for them. This is a clear violation of MySpace’s terms of service, though, and most people...
Max Levchin the founder and CEO of Slide, which creates and distributes popular Web applications on Facebook, as desktop widgets, and elsewhere. He is also the chairman of local review site Yelp. Prior to Slide he was the co-founder and CTO of PayPal, which was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002.
Keith Rabois is Chief Operating Officer at Square where he oversees the company’s business operations including marketing, communications, business development, distribution, human resources and risk management. Keith specializes in transforming early-stage startups into successful businesses and has deep expertise in the financial services industry and government affairs. An accomplished executive, entrepreneur and angel investor, Keith has held leadership roles at PayPal, LinkedIn, Slide and began his career practicing law at Sullivan & Cromwell. Keith was an early investor in several...
Scott is an American entrepreneur and angel investor. He is best known as a co-founder of IronPort and an early advisor and board member at PayPal. Scott Banister started his career as a pioneer in the email business. He was Founder and VP of Technology at ListBot, the largest ASP for business email list hosting. ListBot was acquired by Microsoft. After ListBot, Scott spent his time working with other start-ups as a board member and investor. These start-ups include eVoice,...
BlueRun Ventures is an early stage venture capital firm with offices in the United States, Shanghai, Beijing, and Korea. BlueRun looks at early stage investments. They really are as they say “geographically agnostic, doing business where business is best done.” BlueRun invests in information technology, mobile and consumer technologies, with an emphasis on early stage mobile opportunities.
Founders Fund is a San Francisco based venture capital firm which invests at every stage in companies with revolutionary technologies. The firm’s six partners, Peter Thiel, Sean Parker, Ken Howery, Luke Nosek, Bruce Gibney, and Brian Singerman have been founders of or early investors in numerous well-known companies such as Facebook, PayPal, Napster, and Palantir Technologies. Founders Fund was formed in 2005 and has launched four funds to date with more than $1 billion in aggregate capital under...
Fidelity Investments is a provider of investment products and services.
Mayfield Fund is one of the oldest venture capital firms in the US, focusing on early-stage to growth-stage investments in information technology companies, in particular on enterprise software, Internet consumer & media services, and communications. The firm was founded in 1969 by Thomas J. Davis, Jr.. Since inception, the firm has raised over $2.8 billion of investor commitments across 13 private equity funds. The firm’s most notable investments include Compaq, Silicon Graphics, 3COM, Amgen, Genentech, Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Sandisk, Legato Software, Citrix,...
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