This content was created by GHION.AI . This content was uploaded by GHION.AI . This is a YouTube video titled "Barry Silbert: Trading Private Company Stock" created on May 9, 2011. It features Barry Silbert discussing the inception and growth of a marketplace for trading private company stock, starting with Facebook shares in 2007-2008 and expanding significantly by 2010.
Chapters
I'll start off with kind of how this came about in late 2007, early 2008. It started with, as Tom mentioned, Facebook. So remember at the time we were only just in one asset class, maybe we were in two in auction rates, but we had not yet launched this private company market. And we got a phone call from a former employee at Facebook saying, okay, I just left the company. I need to go buy a car or buy a house. I don't know what it was. Could you help me find a buyer for my stock? And we said, sure. Facebook, cool company. And we had this big network of buyers. Let us see if we can find a buyer for this. And what was really interesting at the time was that there were institutions that were willing to buy Facebook stock without any information. They had really nothing beyond just the Microsoft valuation and maybe the stock option price. Yet they were willing to deploy the millions and millions of dollars into the stock at that point in time. Obviously it was a good investment decision for them. But we said, there's something going on here, because as we started trading Facebook, we then started getting calls from other shareholders and other private companies who said, hey, I want to do this too. I want to sell my stock. So then the light bulb went off, said, ok, it's now time for us to do this. It's now time for us to get involved officially in, in this private company market. So the next thing we did is we went on a bit of a roadshow, met with a bunch of venture capitalists and lawyers and bankers to say, ok, we're going to go create this marketplace for private company stock. What do you think? And you want to guess what the response was? Ok, so the response was, it'll never work. There's no need for it. You're going to fail. So, of course, what do we do? We launch a private company market. So today or over the past 18 months, what you can see is the volume has increased significantly. You can see in 2008, we did about $30 million. And this is just private company stock went to about 100 million in 2009, 360 million in 2010. And this year has started off very.
