Kevin Rose and Tim Ferriss have made a co-investment in Facebook on the secondary market. In this video clip posted this week, Rose announces that he and Ferris recently invested in Facebook “before the craziness.” We’ve embedded the video below; Rose talks about the investment just after the 34 minute mark.
We confirmed with Rose that he and Ferriss actually bought shares on secondary market SecondMarket at a $45 billion valuation. We’re told the deal was in the seven figures. The ‘craziness’ Rose is referring to is Facebook’s recent $1.5 billion funding round from Goldman Sachs and DST at a $50 billion valuation, and the possibility of an IPO for the network by April 2012.
In terms of why he invested in Facebook at this stage of the game, Rose said this of the investment: This is still early days for Facebook, the graph is starting to extend into interests and personal preferences. This is going to enable a slew of new ideas and startups — I believe Facebook is well positioning to be in the middle of it all.
Rose has been a prolific angel investor in a number of startups and high-profile companies, including Twitter, Zynga, Foursquare, Gowalla, DailyBooth, and Square. Ferriss is also an angel investor, and has made investments in Twitter, SimpleGeo, Posterous, Foodzie and a number of other startups.
While Rose and Ferriss’ investment isn’t monumental news it does show that experienced investors are betting that value of Facebook’s shares will definitely grow significantly, especially if the social network does IPO next year. And Facebook is dominating share auctions on SecondMarket. Ferriss actually spoke to PEHub early this year on investing in Facebook, saying, “I think it’ll be hard to lose on Facebook — assuming there’s not a repeat macroeconomic double dip. If things are fairly stable, I think Facebook is a very strong bet.”
Random Episode 87 from Glenn McElhose on Vimeo.
Hat tip to UniPaul.
Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...
Kevin Rose is a Partner at Google Ventures, where he primarily focuses on early-stage and seed investments. Prior to joining Google Ventures, Kevin co-founded Milk, a mobile application development company in San Francisco. Previously Kevin was the founder of Digg, and co-founder of Revision3, and Pownce (acquired by Six Apart). In addition, Rose is the founder of Foundation, a private newsletter and podcast, and formerly was co-host of the tech news podcast Diggnation.
Tim Ferriss is a start-up angel investor (Twitter, Posterous, RescueTime, and others), blogger, and entrepreneur. His best-known written work is The 4-Hour Workweek, which had been sold into 35 languages and reached #1 on The New York Times, BusinessWeek, and The Wall Street Journal bestseller lists. On May 3, 2009, it celebrated its 2nd straight year on The New York Times business bestseller list since its publication on April 27, 2007. Tim is also a guest lecturer at Princeton...
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