Ask HN: How much did the founders of Lynda get during the LinkedIn acquistion?

4 pointsbyoung21 comment

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/lynda-com

I'm not sure if the Crunchbase data is complete, but they were founded in 1995, took on $289 million only recently, and then were acquired for $1.5 billion. With typical dilution, how much do you think the founders made?

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They took in the latest $186b in Jan 2015 at a ~ $1b valuation, or about 18.6% of the equity.

Assuming the series A was for a similar proportion and that they had some seedfunding and such in '95 it is probably safe to say that the owners got somewhere between 30-50% ownership.

With that back of the napkin maths, $500-750m give or take.

Considering the the time between series B and acquisition was less than half a year, I say that is a pretty decent ROI.

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