Mark Pincus didn’t get the outcome he once expected, but he held onto Zynga shares long enough to generate hundreds of millions in gains.
, revenue surged to almost $830 million, up seven-fold from full-year revenue in 2009. FarmVille accounted for 27% of sales.Paul Martino, a venture investor who backed the game developer in its first financing round in 2007 said that, between 2008 and 2011, Zynga got more chatter than any other company in Silicon Valley. In particular, during the financial crisis, venture capitalists weren't putting money into much of anything, but Zynga was still raising cash.
Heading into the IPO, Kleiner Perkins was so bullish on Zynga that in early 2011 it increased its stake by buying shares at $14, valuing the company at $12 billion. The stock debuted below that, at $10, and surpassed $14 a few times in early 2012.— the company's games spread virally by using the social network for distribution.
"But if you told us in 2007 that the company would be bought at a $12-$13 billion number, I have to imagine we probably would have been pretty happy about that," he said. Pincus's one big stock sale came at the right time, for him, and drew the ire of other investors. In April 2012, as part of a secondary offering,
worth of shares at $12 apiece, representing about 15% of his total stake. Many shareholders were still in post-IPO lockup at the time and didn't have that option.
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