San Diego’s Mogl, AnaptysBio and Awarepoint.
Much of the Dow Jones report concerns the value of Avalon’s stake in San Francisco-based Zynga (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ZNGA]]). Kinsella told me a couple years ago that Avalon’s $5.3 million investment in the maker of casual games like FarmVille and Mafia Wars would probably yield the firm’s biggest returns.
But with Zynga stock now trading around $3.09 (the company’s valuation is about a third of what it was at the time of its IPO), the Dow Jones report suggests the value of Avalon’s stake in Zynga has shrunk as well. It notes that Avalon sold a small portion of its stake in early 2011, but retained 34.7 million Class B Shares—a stake that was worth roughly $347 million at the IPO price of $10 a share.
It’s also possible, though, that Avalon conveyed some of its Class B shares to Zynga’s founding CEO, Mark Pincus. As Connie Loizos noted yesterday at peHub, Zynga disclosed in a regulatory filing last week that Pincus now controls just over 50 percent of the total voting power as of July 24.
“It’s not entirely clear when, but apparently investors in Zynga Class B stock sold their shares to Pincus,” Loizos reports. “Since Class B shares are entitled to 7 votes (as opposed to 1 vote for Class A shares), that pushed Pincus over the 50 percent hurdle.”
Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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