Jim Breyer, the venture capitalist whose firm Accel Partners were the early investors in Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB), sold some its shares worth more than $81.1 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The filing said, Breyer, who is on Facebook’s board, sold 3,563,387 shares at prices ranging from $22.48 to $23.29 per share, on Thursday. Though the prices at which the shares are sold were low compared to $38 a share at the time of IPO, still the current prices are relatively higher as of late. The stock has shown improvement following the company’s solid quarterly results and encouraging words from CEO Mark Zuckerberg on money-making opportunity from mobile. Breyer still holds more than 7.2 million shares of Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB), which at current price of $21.94, is worth more than $157.6 million.
Last week, Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) reported third-quarter earnings that slightly exceeded Wall Street’s estimates. Company’s adjusted earnings per share came in at 12 cents for the third quarter ended September 30, a penny higher than analysts were expecting. Revenue for the quarter jumped 32 percent from the year-ago quarter, to $1.26 billion. Company also revealed that 14 percent of its ad revenue now comes from mobile devices.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, said “As proud as I am that a billion people use Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) each month, I’m also really happy that over 600 million people now share and connect on Facebook every month using mobile devices,” said Zuckerberg. “People who use our mobile products are more engaged, and we believe we can increase engagement even further as we continue to introduce new products and improve our platform. At the same time, we are deeply integrating monetization into our product teams in order to build a stronger, more valuable company”.
Back in 1997, Jim Breyer was only a Managing General Partner at Accel Partners, and now he is a president of Accel Management Company, and a founder and CEO of Breyer Capital, and sits on various boards. In 2005, on Breyer’s insistence, Accel invested $12.7 million in the nascent Facebook enterprise. At that time, Breyer was so much impressed by the technological and financial promise of Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB), that he invested one million dollars, establishing an ownership share of about 1%.
