Facebook Inc board member Marc Andreessen is filling his wallet ahead of the holidays. Andreessen, a Facebook investor and an early board member has sold more than 1.5m of his Facebook equity in the past two weeks valued at about $160m as per SEC.
Since Oct 2015, he has sold more than 73% of his entire stake in the firm. In fact, he has sold about 90% of his class A shares – shares that don’t carry voting rights. The sale of the shares took place around the time that Facebook revealed its Q3 earnings on Nov 4. The firm beat analyst numbers and it hit a new landmark with its daily users reaching 1bn. The stock has risen about 6% since the end of Oct. to 12 Nov; hence, it is easy to conclude that Andreessen is taking profits off the table.
The Curious Case of Andreessen
Marc mentored Mark Zuckerberg CEO and founder of Facebook when Yahoo made a $1bn bid to buy the firm in 2006. He says, “Every single person involved in Facebook wanted Mark to take the Yahoo offer… the psychological pressure they put on this 22-year-old was intense. Mark and I really bonded in that period, because I told him, ‘Don’t sell, don’t sell, don’t sell!”
Marc’s stock sale is unusual because it involves a truckload of money. More so, it is strange for top investors to sell the volume and amount of shares that Marc has been selling in the past two weeks. Usually, pre-planned sales take place at intervals in order to avoid causing a selloff. Yet, the sale in question is unusual but it doesn’t mean that things have gone sour between Andreessen and Facebook .
Facebook Turns Messenger into an App for Everything
Facebook is working hard to stay ahead of it game and ensure that it doesn’t bore Wall Street. The latest move has the firm working on how to turn Messenger into an App for everything. Messenger has doubled its users since 2014 from 300m to 700m monthly active users. The app is second only to WhatsApp, which has 900M users in the app messaging world. The firm is not trying to help users conduct all their business deals – with robotic Pas, telecoms call centers, retail assistants, and airline ticketing agents – using Messenger.
“On Facebook, we already have 45m active businesses on Pages and 700m active people on Messenger, so the two side of the network already existed, but there was no bridge between those two worlds to communicate,” head of Messenger David Marcus explained. At the time of joining Facebook in August last year, the firm has spun Messenger into a standalone app that could be a portal of communication with everyone. As part of this plan, it stated a new layer called ‘Businesses on Messenger,’ which allows users to convey with brands and businesses within the app.
