Brian Armstrong sold $291.8M in Coinbase shares on opening day
reuters.com
reuters.com
Having to dump large amounts as if it's a given is something banks tell startups so they can get the equity themselves for a price they like.
This doesn't make sense. All of the shares are available to trade as soon as the DPO happens, regardless of whether or not they exchange hands. People who want them are free to place limit orders, and if those limit orders remain unfilled, they are free to raise them until the price is attractive enough for sellers to fill.
In this way, a natural equilibrium is reached where buyer and seller are both happy and engage in a trade. It doesn't take some mandatory or pre-stipulated "having to sell some amount".
Anything that would attempt to influence holders to sell under the premise that they "need to sell something" to "create a market" doesn't make sense, and typically serves the interest of the people saying it.
There's no reason such high early liquidity is mandatory.
My point is that the idea that some people "must" sell shares for there to be a market is false. "Must" implies: regardless of price.
If sales are not sold at opening-market prices, what happens is that offer prices increase until they are attractive enough to be filled.
This is a fill by mutual market price-discovery interest, rather than a fill by obligation. ("Must.")
My point is that "must" is incorrect, because even without it, trades would take place.
The idea that some group of insiders need to agree to liquidate no matter what on the first day is wrong, because natural market dynamics would incentivize it to happen anyway.
This is literally exactly what happens in a direct listing. There is no obligation anywhere. Each person selling is selling because the price offered is attractive to them.
It's not that a group of insiders has to liquidate because there's a DPO. It's that there's a DPO because a group of insiders wants to liquidate.
[1] https://www.coindesk.com/coinbase-ceo-sold-291-8m-in-shares-...
Coinbase is the trusted inlet to trading crypto for individual investors. One of the blockchains, Bitcoin, has a 1 trillion dollar market cap, and the next largest has 259 bn. And coinbase captures a fee of some large percentage of transactions on those.
He should be worth much more.
lol
The only part of crypto that isn't bubble, is the slice used for drug trading. It's been eleven years and there are still no usecases for any of them.
Some folks are counting un-exercised options as shares to make it sound like insiders sold less than they actually did, but you cant sell shares you dont own.
The CFO exercised 20% of her options and then sold those shares, which the chart then spins as her selling 100%.
What am i supposed to do with this info ?
What about all that "this is only the beginning" talk?
_grin_
His public character may be questionable by my standards (i.e. being a non BLM supporter - atrocious), but regardless I'm still genuinely happy for him! This is an exit entrepreneurs dream of.
Exciting times. :)
That said, it's easier to be honest for Coinbase than physical retail stores - BLM can't steal TVs from Coinbase
That's not what the HODL gang has been telling me. Have fun staying poor, Mr. Armstrong.
It might be more motivating for him to not have that cushion. At least that is the theory people usually have.
He got so rich on the DPO that he learned the massive enrichment power of building a strong business. It's easy to picture a motivation to ring the register here, but it's also easy to view the windfall as a motivator.
A shareholder with properly balanced portfolio would likely go for the $5T option. Fully invested CEO might want to stay safe and even avoid bringing up this opportunity as there’s 90% chance for him to loose everything.
He no longer has the threat of poverty if his company fails. He has a nice 300 million cushion should anything go wrong. You could say that makes him less likely to put in maximum effort.
Without the distorting action of governments printing money, interest rates might be set by market forces inside "crypto land".
This might lead to a long term situation where artificially low interest rates are paid in government controlled currencies, but market prices are paid in crypto currencies.
If this leads to a mass adoption of crypto-lending, then Coinbase might be where people hold their funds. Because it is even more complicated to stake coins than it is to just hold coins.
Are there any forums on the internet where a serious discussion about these types of topics can be held?
The current problem seems now that just not enough people are willing/able to do anything productive with capital, leading to a shortage of lending opportunities. In theory this should create a buyers market for anyone wanting capital, and to some extent it has. The problem is that, for whatever reason, people choose to poor capital into unproductive assets (IMO crypto being a minor culprit compared to real-estate or share buybacks).
At the higher level, I see this as a consequence of globalisation, where capital was made hyper mobile, and therefore it was applied away from home. Negative interest rates are a somewhat desperate attempt to put more capital in motion at home, but other policy has made this unattractive for anything but speculating.
Why does the USA bonds pay 1.5% while European bonds pay nothing?
Yes, why?
They're all hovering around zero due to rate targeting and failure to get price/wage inflation back up to about 2%.
"distorting" as opposed to "influencing" or "creating" - of course it has impact, it wouldn't be a thing to do if it had no effect.
But your statement is a bit like "roofs on houses distort the fall of rain". If not categorically wrong, it's an unconventional and loaded framing.
Does the role of government in law enforcement and armed forces that that allows markets to exist in the first place also fall under the category of "distortion" in this absolutist framing?
What are the prevailing interest rates in pure-crypto land?
This is probably a small fraction of staked coins in crypto over all. But I have only looked into this Ether so far.
Isn't Tether mostly used for lending purposes? There is about $50B in Tether out there.
Maybe someone who is more experienced with the state of staking/lending can chime in.
Crypto twitter is one place: https://twitter.com/balajis/
Most of the crypto / de-fi developer community (for Cosmos, Polkadot, Kava, Compound, Balancer, Dharma etc) is on respective Telegram groups.
"This is brilliant @balajis. India Totally need to add Crypto to India stack. Such a thoughtful piece. Will read it a couple of times and compile my thoughts around it."
This is basically an upvote blown up to a bunch of words I have to read.
Second reply just reads "@balajis you’re incredible".
I am looking for a discussion where only thoughtful comments that add to the discussion are posted. Or at least only those are voted to the top.
If so, it was a pure "Here, we built something valuable. You can have it now if you pay enough" kind of deal with the investors?
Somehow this type of transaction always makes me feel a bit strange about the value of a company. Not sure if this is a rational thing or not. I think "Why did they bring it to the market at all?". What is the rationale for taking a profitable company that does not need additional funding public?
Yes. No new shares were created. Shares were just sold by existing owners.
Liquidity for investors
I think the main reason is to allow insiders who were compensated by stock (options) to cash those out. By creating an actual liquid market, it becomes a lot easier for people who hold the stock to sell it.
In general, direct listings allow more people to put money into the company, which should see its stock price rise. Which stock-holders like. Alternatively, it creates a more accurate view of the value of a company, which might make it easier to get loans.
Money.
The rest of the gains go to the limited partners (LPs) - the institutional investors who put in the money. Of course the YC partners are investors too, particularly in the early days when YC was just a structure for the original four partners to invest in startups.
But these days most of the returns would go to external LPs.
Sure I haven’t factored in dilution but still...
YC has had limited partners since 2014 [1], and at least some of the 7% equity is allocated to that LP fund, though it's not clear how much. For a few years before that much of the $150K was provided by outside VCs.
This must be the case, as YC's operations (number of companies funded) has been growing rapidly since well before their standout companies reached liquidity (though I heard somewhere they've sold some stock privately earlier to fund growth).
The whole ~7% was owned by YC itself back in the first few years when YC was just a vehicle for the original four partners to invest in startups efficiently, and they only invested about $20K per startup. But that ended in about 2012 when new investors came in and the deal changed from ~$20K to $150K.
Sure, they're still hugely successful! But it's just not a simple case of all those 7% stakes (less dilution) of every YC-funded company ever sitting in the ownership of a single YC entity.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/22/yc-ends-venture-partnershi...
Too bad HN users hated on him in 2012 when looking for a co-founder instead of having an open mind.
1) Are people really concern before posting their actual thoughts on HN ( Is it not bad for a product developer to not know about actual thoughts but some carefully written words ? )
2) Why are people on HN so pessimistic about everything ?
Lockup periods come from the traditional IPO process, where the company creates new shares that are sold on day 1.
Unlike most tech founders, Armstrong will be able to sell shares right away after Coinbase goes public. That’s because there’s no lock-up period as part of Coinbase’s direct listing, which differs from an IPO in that the company doesn’t raise fresh capital but instead allows existing shareholders to sell stock on the open market.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/23/coinbase-ceo-armstrong-owns-...
The error is in people not knowing it is a direct listing and how they work.