I find myself conflicted about secondary markets. My cautionary side wonders how these private stock sales can potentially distort incentives within companies and artificially impact valuations. The libertarian side of me, however, says all in business is fair game. Everything can be bought or sold. Everyone has a price.
There’s clearly supply and demand in this market, but its effects are… → Read More
Just 10 days ago, we noted that Facebook had hit a new valuation record as shares on the secondary markets surged some 5 percent to $31.50 a share. That auction was through SecondMarket and put the on-paper valuation of the company at roughly $78.75 billion (based on roughly 2.5 billion shares outstanding). Today — again, just 10 days later — we have another Facebook share auction that has… → Read More
Groupon recently raised $950 million at a valuation of $4.75 billion and it is talking to bankers about going public at a $15 billion valuation sometime later this year. But what is it worth right now? SharesPost, a marketplace for private stock sales, just put out a report today estimating that Groupon’s is worth about $6 billion (between $5.95 billion and $6.07 billion to be exact).
It… → Read More
Just as the Securities and Exchange Commission is starting to take a closer look at the increasing amount of trading in private company stock, a new startup that’s been in stealth mode since August, 2009 is preparing to launch another way to trade private shares. The company is Xpert Financial which, through its registered subsidiary, Xpert Securities, brings to the table a tacit stamp of… → Read More
The Securities and Exchange Commission is asking questions about private stock markets like SecondMarket and SharesPost. The SEC has sent “information requests to several participants in the buying and selling of stock” to a number of companies, reports the New York Times (although private market SecondMarket says they have received no request from the SEC).
Over the past year, trading in shares… → Read More
SharesPost, a private equity market that allows employees and founders to convert some of their shares into cash launched a publication platform to include reports that give greater insight into the valuations of companies like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. We examined last year’s report, which estimated Facebook’s valuation between $4 to $6 million. Today’s report pegs Facebook’s valuation at… → Read More
A new analyst report from private secondary market SharesPost values Twitter at around $750 million, which is less than the $1 billion valuation it got in its last round of funding and less than the $1.5 billion valuation private shares of Twitter are trading for on SharesPost itself. The report notes that the $1 billion valuation was based on preferred shares, whereas it is looking at common… → Read More
Analyst firm Next Up Research has published an extensive report on Linden Lab, the San Francisco company behind virtual world Second Life. The research is based on aggregate data and is available on SharesPost, a site set up to trade shares of privately held companies (if you register, you can download the report for free from that page, or you can find other valuation reports on companies like … → Read More
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