Marc Andreessen Sold 73 Percent of His Facebook Stock in the Last Two Weeks | Hacker News Reader

Marc Andreessen Sold 73 Percent of His Facebook Stock in the Last Two Weeks

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106 pointstechaddict00946 comments

Previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10548690

Andreesen is a board member, so under Facebook's insider-trading policy he is required to conduct sales under a Rule 10b5-1 plan [1]. From FB's most recent annual proxy statement [2]: "Certain of our directors and executive officers have adopted written plans, known as Rule 10b5-1 plans, in which they will contract with a broker to buy or sell shares of our common stock on a periodic basis. Under a Rule 10b5-1 plan, a broker executes trades pursuant to parameters established by the director or executive officer when entering into the plan, without further direction from them. The director or executive officer may amend or terminate the plan in specified circumstances. Our executive officers and directors are required to conduct all purchase or sale transactions under a Rule 10b5-1 plan." (Emphasis added.)

"A company making such disclosure [that an insider has adopted a 10b5-1 plan] generally will disclose the existence of a plan but not the specific details." [3]

[1] Form 4 reporting Andreesen's sale: http://investor.fb.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=1127602-15-304...

[2] http://edgar.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/00013268011...

[3] http://media.mofo.com/files/Uploads/Images/FAQ10b51.pdf ("MoFo" is Morrison & Foerster, a leading Bay-Area BigLaw firm.)

> The director or executive officer may amend or terminate the plan in specified circumstances.

Under this system, would it be possible to contract with two brokers, telling one to sell shares and the other to buy the same amount? If so, should you learn useful information later, you could terminate one plan, putting the information to use immediately.

You can't terminate or amend (or even start) a plan without a cooling off period. So any information you'd like to act on will likely be priced in by the time you can take any legal action. Also, you can't have two plans. A modification requires a suspension of all trading.

Frequently modifying or cancelling 10b5-1 plans is itself usually forbidden under insider-trading policies, precisely for this reason.

Awful tax consequences

Anyone speculating on this should look into the mechanics of 10b51 plans. He made no active decision to sell or not sell.

The sale may have been triggered by a price floor ($100?) that he must've established a very long time ago.

He is probably getting money together for that motor home he has been wanting to buy.

Seriously, he probably wants liquid cash to do what I guess he most enjoys: investing in new companies.

Sorry if this is really off topic, but I think that it is most interesting to understand what people really enjoy in life. I like to ask people what their hobbies are before asking them what they do for a living.

Marc Andreesen strikes me as the kind of guy who likes to be in the game, startup wise.

Any details about his motor home?

The one that he'll buy with the money he makes when he sells his Facebook stock? Let's just say it's a really nice one.

Whoosh.

Please don't do this here.

The impressive thing is that he waited until FB was over $100 to sell. Facebook was faced with a huge uphill battle with Wall Street. Each time they had solid earnings, the stock would go down on fears of young people not using the service or their inability to monetize mobile properly or that they overpaid for Instagram.

Wall Street finally caught on that it is a social network in a league of their own and a company that makes solid decisions, but it took a long time and Marc could have easily sold along the way.

Andreessen stuck through all of that to make it to $100+. It seems like he felt like it was time to cash in. Rightfully so. FB will be just fine moving forward.

> The impressive thing is that he waited until FB was over $100 to sell.

That would be impressive for a dev who had 99% of her net worth in Facebook stock, but for someone who is already cash wealthy and a paper billionaire, it's much less impressive.

a) How do you know he's cash wealthy? (How could anyone know this, except Marc himself?), and b) Why is patiently holding something, then selling it when you said you would "not impressive", and why does his wealth have to do with the quality of a decision?

> How do you know he's cash wealthy?

That may be a bit of an assumption, but starting two billion dollar companies then buying Skype (a lot of which was done with personal money), selling it for $5 billion more... He would have to try really hard to be cash poor.

Not to mention marrying a philanthropist whose parents are billionaires.

He owns very expensive things and gives away a lot of money, it would be shocking if he does not have significant assets outside of high-value startups and his Facebook stock.

His pre-existing wealth matters quite a bit with the decision of whether or not to sell out of a position that has been very profitable. Diversification is a fundamental part of wealth management. It's just not smart to have all your eggs in one basket, regardless of what basket that is. Marc already has a lot of baskets, while the hypothetical Facebook engineer does not.

Andreessen said in a podcast that to go public in today's market, you really have to build up the company as "a fortress", i.e. be prepared for several quarters of negative market reaction, and that he worked extensively with Zuckerburg before Facebook's IPO to do this. It's logical that if he had inside information about Facebook's financials, their strategy, upcoming moves, and monetization experiments, he could set a much more accurate price target than Wall Street.

Interestingly, you could probably turn this into a trading strategy by looking for other newly-IPO'd companies that Andreessen is a board member on, waiting for them to inevitably sink after IPO, and then buying in.

Some good stories related to this via Chris Sacca on TWIS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SK4ezQrTqFw&ab_channel=ThisW...

Essentially Zuckerberg treated the IPO process with contempt, was cavalier and unorthodox, offending many Wall Streeters. 'The Hoodie' legend exploded during this period, as did perception that Facebook was hopeless on mobile AND had poor leadership.

Both turned out to be false, as FB post-2012 found a way to monetize mobile and Zuckerberg grew into his role as CEO, now telling jokes in Chinese and managing the press more effectively.

Por moi, his Tweetstorms, and his Twitter feed, might be the most educationally beneficial thing I've experienced in my adult life (in addition to Nassim Taleb's Twitter). If you're reading this pmarca: thank you.

Hope he invests in Twitter to keep it alive.

But Nassim doesn't tweet anymore, no?

https://twitter.com/BlackSwanTaleb

He does.

https://twitter.com/nntaleb

Thanks for the advice. I just started following Marc Andreesen and Nassim Taleb also.

I checked them out but Marc Andreessen keeps retweeting to the effect that fake Syrian passports mean the attacks are intended to close Europe's borders. What? Buying fake Syrian passports is what many of the migrants have done to get priority benefits. It's very normal among migrants, ISIS-loving or not. It'd be like saying a Sinaloa Cartel murderer using someone else SSN is trying to shut down the US-Mexico border. ISIS has been very vocal about sending thousands of soldiers abroad to kill. They have said, too, that they hope to provoke an anti-Muslim backlash that improves their recruiting. But ISIS is a nation state and a religion—it needs to be able to claim victory no matter how Europe reacts, just as a politician can never cleanly apologize or admit fault.

ISIS's overt strategy is to antagonize the west into over-reaction, because they want things so polarized that the bulk of Arabs have little choice but to align with them for survival. I don't know about these passports specifically, but it certainly is true that ISIS would benefit immensely from Europe and the west closing the borders to refuges.

Perhaps he is just retweeting things he found interesting. You can find things interesting without necessarily supporting them.

A bigger risk of following Marc Andreessen is that he tweets, like, all the fucking time. Your feed stands a good chance of becoming swamped.

He could be right. The part I don't get is, not why did the person have a Syrian passport (as you say, fakes are common), but why were they carrying it with them on a suicide mission?

I have no knowledge here, but it seems like even if you're going on a suicide mission, you might want a plan B. If there's some reason they decide to postpone, he might need the passport.

The thing about Twitter is that you've got to be very selective in whom you follow because you can quickly get overwhelmed with the quantity of Tweets. Use Lists to separate subject matter. Another very good follow is Paul Graham (the founder of Hacker News and Y Comb.).

I wish PG would separate his political discussions to a different handle. It's jarring to be reading his amazing perspectives on the startup world and then see his political posts which I generally don't agree with. Makes me sad.

I, on the other hand, wish PG could be as effective on his political views as he is with startups.

Paul Graham is a great follow and his signal to noise ratio is much higher than pmarca. Also, Graham's tweets about his kids are adorable.

Sam Altman is a good follow too.

Personally I use Nuzzel to aggregate tweets of all those VCs so I can see what links people are sharing en masse. You miss the "zinger" tweets but you also don't have to comb through the noise of 500 tweets an hour. I actually have several Twitter accounts that I use specifically for Nuzzel: I have one for buzzing tech links, buzzing biology links, buzzing literary links, etc.

One thing I forgot to add earlier is that Nassim Taleb has a huge "attitude." I personally love the attitude. But his attitude is not for everybody. So, if you find it distasteful, you'd be better off unfollowing.

> It’s a ton of money, and it’s not very common for executives to sell at the pace and quantity that Andreessen has been selling these past two week.

Is a member of the board of directors an "executive"? I didn't think that was the case.

I don't think this is all that surprising. Basically you want your wealth in a balanced portfolio of different companies, so that a downturn in a single company's fortune doesn't affect you.

Thus, a big win should be cashed out, otherwise it ends up being too a large a piece of your portfolio.

This certainly catches the eye. Any reason to sell now?

Facebook hit his personal target of $100

He's not the only one who has been cashing out over the last months. In my opinion, it looks like we are in for a correction if you look at the long-term historic logarithmic graph of the S&P 500's value.

http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=^GSPC+Interactive#{%22use...

As Warren Buffet says, "Buy low. Sell high." Macrotrends affect stocks as a whole, which affect public companies, which affect advertising budgets, which influences Facebook's income.

I've been bitten before by assuming a bear market, pulling out, and then seeing things recover, so I'm much more careful now and have not completely pulled out. Large investors that really don't need those extra boatloads of gold they might get if they miss an upswing have been pulling out, though, to avoid risk.

"He's not the only one who has been cashing out over the last months."

For every seller, there's a buyer. The buyers of his stock aren't the only ones investing in FB stock over the last months.

n=2 in your analysis...don't be fooled by randomness

This might have something to do with the Fed raising interest rates, all stocks will take a hit.

Peak Facebook they call it. We already passed that mark long ago.

Nah, all those shorts at $25 are going to payoff big someday...

I bought at 33 and am still holding.

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