Twitter finally released its official IPO filing, revealing who its major shareholders are–and giving some idea of how much those stakes are worth.
- Ev Williams’s 12% stake is extremely lucrative on paper.
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One big winner: Co-founder Evan Williams, whose 12% stake makes him a billionaire–at least on paper. The shares held by Twitter’s co-founder and largest shareholder are worth about $1.08 billion, according to the $9 billion valuation the company reportedly attained in private sales of its stock.
Co-founder Jack Dorsey’s 4.9% stake comes to about $450 million.
Major venture capital shareholders include the investment duo of Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures, who already scored a big win this year when Yahoo bought blogging service Tumblr for $1.1 billion.
The two firms are listed in the filing among the six investors who hold stakes of 5% or more. The others are venture firm Benchmark Capital and two later investors, private equity firms DST Global and Rizvi Traverse.
Twitter has yet to put a price on its offering, but at the $9 billion valuation, a 5% stake would be worth $450 million–the same size as the venture fund Spark closed earlier this year.
Benchmark’s 6.7% stake is the only one specifically listed because one of its partners, Peter Fenton, is a Twitter director. That stake includes some stock he holds personally. The value of that stake would be about $603 million.
Spark Capital’s Bijan Sabet and Union Square’s Fred Wilson, both early Twitter backers, stepped down as directors in September 2011. At the time it was reported that both firms had sold some Twitter shares and the company’s S-1 filing appears to confirm that.
The filings also show the advantage of getting in early. Spark Capital bought close to two million shares in the company late in 2010 at a per-share price of $7.63, spending $15 million. Benchmark bought more than a million shares at the same price, spending more than $9 million.
Twitter’s filing shows it valued its shares at $20.62 as of August, meaning those firms have seen the value of those shares rise nearly threefold.
And that’s not even counting their original investments, which they made at a far lower valuation. Boston-based Spark joined in the $15 million second round in May 2008, which valued the company at $95 million, and Silicon Valley’s Benchmark contributed $21 million to Twitter’s $35 million third round in February 2009. Union Square invested in Twitter’s $5.7 million first round in July 2007.
DST Global, meanwhile, made a $200 million investment in July 2011, for which it paid $16.09 per share, meaning it has seen a bump, but not a huge one, in the value of its holding, based on Twitter’s $20.62 August 2013 share price.
Twitter has a host of other backers including Bezos Expeditions, Charles River Ventures, Insight Partners and Institutional Venture Partners but none held enough shares to get included in the IPO filing.
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