Hacker News Reader

Comment by kwonkicker | Hacker News Reader

What does it mean for a layman?!

There are two very different possible reasons:

1. They believe the price will drop and want to sell before that happens. If this is the case, it raises the question why they think the company is overpriced since, as somebody involved with the company for a long time, they might have insights the public missed.

2. They want to cash out for reasons unrelated to the company. For example because their investment model is to invest in a private company, wait until it goes public, and then sell.

3. They're a time-limited fund that needs to dispose of assets to their LPs (limited partners) before the fund closes down. They can do so by selling the shares, or they can do so by transferring the shares to their LPs. In this case as you can see in the footnotes, as a substantial proportion of these shares where transferred to their LPs, not sold.

I consider that part of option 2.

It's the example you gave in #2, that's how VC firms generally work.

To some, it raises questions about the fundamentals of the business[0]

[0]:https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1383860897999851521?s=19

Make sure to read the replies to this one, as the tweet you have linked to seems to massively misrepresent the sales in question (presenting them as proportions of these peoples total holdings, rather than the proportion of the shares they'd registered to sell)

Compared this, from the quoted tweet:

> On the same day #Coinbase CEO @brian_armstrong was on @CNBC publicly pumping COIN, he was privately dumping 71% of his shares.

with [1]:

> CEO Brian Armstrong sold 749,999 shares in three batches at prices ranging from $381 to $410.40 per for total proceeds of $291.8 million, according to one filing. While a Coinbase representative declined to comment due to the company being in a so-called “quiet period,” based on filings made before the listing, it would indicate Armstrong sold about 1.5% of his stake.

[EDIT: I'll note that both Taleb and the person he quoted have had their mistake pointed out to them and have just ignored it, which frankly is a pretty awful look]

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/coinbase-ceo-sold-291-8m-2350...

Unfortunately he is quite unpleasant on Twitter, except for when he talks about food or language. Disagreements usually seem to end up in being blocked by him.

You are going off-topic.

The case in point is USV selling all their stake in a company and what that means for the business.

I didn't say anything about the CEO

USV isn't selling their stake either At least nowhere near all of it. As the filing itself says, a lot of is being disposed of to their LPs (the owners of the capital in the fund). This is normal practice when a fund is preparing to wind down. The headline here is flat out wrong. You then linked to a tweet which spread further misinformation.

This and the Brian Armstrong story seem to be intentional or ignorant mischaracterizations of what is happening.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com