Wednesday, June 7, 2017

Reminder: Uber Founders Have Super-voting Shares

Well duh, it's Silicon (which syllable gets the emphasis?) Valley.

From the Financial Times:
"Even if investors decided they wanted to oust Mr Kalanick, that could be a challenge. Mr Kalanick and two of his allies, Mr Camp and Ryan Graves, senior vice-president, control a majority of shareholder votes. The shares issued during Uber’s earliest rounds of fundraising have super-voting rights of 10 votes per share...."
March 9, 2017

See also The Information, March 14, 2017 "Uber’s Unfilled Board Seats"
And via a Quora query, although not touching on the votes per share, interesting nonetheless:

Uber (company): How much equity % of Uber does Travis Kalanick still own? 
1 Answer


Update as of July 20th, 2016: Travis owns ~10% of Uber’s stock, worth $7.1 billion.

The Math: We did some analysis on Uber’s most recent Certificate of Incorporation (5/27/2016) and a 12/31/2012 Massachusetts State Annual Report. From these documents, we backed out a lot of information about the company.

We estimate that there are currently 1,407,563,337 shares outstanding in Uber Technologies Inc. This includes stock options issued to the employees. By multiplying this by the share price of the recent round of financing, we can calculate the company's post-money valuation

1,407,563,337 shares outstanding * $48.77/share = $68.6B

In addition, there are an estimated 881,147,724 shares of Preferred Stock outstanding as of 5/27/2016.

At the time of the 12/31/2012 filing, there were 11,602,108 shares of Preferred Stock outstanding and 7,342,390 shares of Common Stock outstanding (out of 12,577,767 shares of Common Stock available). Assume that most of the 7.3M shares belong to the founders.
Prior to this, Uber raised three rounds of financing. Three people likely had equity ownership at the time of the Seed Round: co-founders Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp, and first employee Ryan Graves. Assume the split was 50 / 45 / 5. Here’s a breakdown of their equity dilution:
· $1.25M Seed Round in 2010: $4M pre-money valuation → 24% dilution
· $11M Series A in 2011: $49M pre-money valuation → 18% dilution
· $37M Series B in 2011: $300M pre-money valuation → 11% dilution
So, 100% ownership * Seed Dilution * Series A Dilution * Series B Dilution = 55% ownership...
...MORE

We mentioned the super-voting  shares thing in reference to Thefacebook, which prompted the "well duh".
This is Andreessen/Zuckerberg (FB) not Andreessen/Kalanick. A16Z is not an investor in Uber.

Facebook's Investors Criticize Marc Andreessen for Conflict of Interest
"Marc Andreessen Has a Pretty Creepy Relationship With Zuck" (FB)
"Facebook investors yell at CEO: Get the Zuck out of our boardroom!" (FB)
While it is true the company needs an independent board, especially in light of the Andreessen-Zuckerberg (A20G) skullduggery exposed in the current Delaware Chancery Court action,* the company doesn't have to make the change. From Motley Fool:

Can Shareholders Force Facebook Inc. to Find a New Chairman?
Spoiler alert: No, they can't. Read on for the full story
If interested in more see Backchannel 
Why Uber Won’t Fire Its CEO 

Now back to news from Gloucestershire:
Reluctant locals forced to participate in cheese rolling
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