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Facebook Co-Founder Dustin Moskovitz Sold 450,000 Shares, Proving Patience Pays Off



Facebook Inc. (Nasdaq: FB) co-founder Dustin Moskovitz has sold 450,000 shares of his old company for around $8.7 million, according to a regulatory filing, vindicating the company's strategy to remain independent, at least for its founders.

(Photo: Forbes)<br>Dustin Moskovitz, a co-founder of Facebook.

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(Photo: Forbes)
Dustin Moskovitz, a co-founder of Facebook.
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Moskovitz still has more than125 million shares of Facebook Class B stock, which have 10 times the voting power, worth around $2.4 billion based on Facebook's current share price. He also converted another 7 million Class B shares into Class A shares, which allows them to be sold publicly.

Moskovitz, 28, holds the title of the world's youngest self-made billionaire -- he is eight days younger than Mark Zuckerberg -- and handled the programming side of the website in its early days.

As TechCrunch reported last year, a significant moment in the social network's development was a decision to reject Yahoo Inc.'s (Nasdaq: YHOO) $1 billion offer in 2006. And while that decision was ultimately Zuckerberg's, Moskovitz has retained a similar independent streak when it comes to his new ventures.
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In October 2008, he left Facebook to found Asana, a task management web application. The company has received $10.2 million in two rounds of funding from PayPal veteran Peter Thiel, Facebook's former president Sean Parker, and venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Benchmark Capital. Asana "has refused to engage in conversations about a flip," according to Techcrunch, in contrast to smaller firms like Skype, which was sold to Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) and OMGPOP, creator of "Draw Something," which was gobbled up by Zynga Inc. (Nasdaq: ZNGA).

Moskovitz has done some angel investing of his own, and passed along his ethos. He was the biggest backer of ex-Facebook executive David Morin's Path, a social network and photo sharing service. Moskovitz gave Morin the confidence to not to sell the company to Google Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG) and remain independent, according to Techcrunch.

Moskovitz also founded philanthropic foundation Good Ventures with his fiance, Cari Tuna. Last week, Good Ventures and other investors raised $15 million Series A funding for Vicarious, a startup that is working to develop "software that thinks and learns like a human."

Meanwhile, Zuckerberg's Facebook has had a role reversal: With its $750 million acquisition of Instagram, it's become a buyer itself.

Facebook shares closed Monday at $19.15, only 15 cents above half its IPO price set on May 17.

http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/377849/20120827/facebook-dustin-moskovitz-sells.htm