Snowflake’s IPO boosts the wealth of Silicon Valley’s technology elites at Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn
- Iconiq Capital, a multifamily office whose clients include Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, took part in multiple Snowflake funding rounds beginning in 2017
- Its 12 per cent stake in the company, bought for US$245 million, was worth more than US$4 billion at the initial offering price of US$120. By the end of Wednesday, the same stake was worth a staggering US$8.6 billion
Snowflake’s initial public offering isn’t just creating new fortunes, it’s adding to the wallets of some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names.
Iconiq Capital, a multifamily office whose clients include Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, took part in multiple Snowflake funding rounds beginning in 2017. Its 12 per cent stake in the company, bought for US$245 million, was worth more than US$4 billion at the initial offering price of US$120. By the end of Wednesday, the same stake was worth a staggering US$8.6 billion.
Shares of the cloud-computing company surged as high as US$319 in New York trading before dropping back to close at US$253.93. That made it worth US$70 billion, about as much as Goldman Sachs and almost six times the US$12.4 billion it was valued at in a February fundraising round.
Cloud computing “is a secular trend right now,” said Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Mandeep Singh. “We have already seen Zoom, DocuSign and Datadog do well this year. Investors understand the cloud business model well and that makes a high-growth company like Snowflake attractive.”
The San Mateo, California-based firm’s top executives also saw their wealth surge. Four of them – Frank Slootman, Bob Muglia, Michael Scarpelli and Benoit Dageville – now own stakes worth a combined US$8 billion.
Only one of them, Dageville, was a founder. His stake is smaller than Slootman’s, who joined as chief executive officer from ServiceNow last year.