Thursday, October 3, 2013

Little-Known Hollywood Investor Poised to Score Big From Twitter IPO

By Ronald Grover and Gerry Shih

When Twitter goes public in coming weeks, one of the biggest winners will be a 47-year-old financier who guards his secrecy so zealously that he employs a person to take down his Wikipedia entry and scrub his picture from the Internet.

Over the past two years, Suhail Rizvi, founder of New York private equity firm Rizvi Traverse Management, has quietly amassed a stake of more than 15 percent in the microblogging phenomenon for himself and his investors at a cost of more than $1 billion, according to three people with knowledge of his investments.

The previously unknown extent of Rizvi's involvement in Twitter comes as the eight-year-old company prepares for Silicon Valley's biggest coming-out-party since Facebook Inc in 2012.

Twitter will soon file its IPO registration document with U.S. securities regulators, revealing the identities of top shareholders. Because the shares Rizvi purchased are distributed among investors via multiple vehicles, it is unclear whether the filing will list Rizvi or his individual investors. The size of his personal stake has not been disclosed.

People with direct knowledge of his investment activities say that Rizvi, backed by Chris Sacca, a former Google executive and Twitter investor, were instrumental in attracting large private investors to the microblogging site, serving as matchmaker between the company's founders and global financiers from Wall Street to Riyadh.

Rizvi declined to comment for this article. Sacca, a longtime friend, gave him an entree into tech investing in 2011 - when Twitter was still struggling to make money - and from there, Rizvi scored stakes in some of the most sought-after Internet startups, from Facebook Inc before it went public to Square and Flipboard.

Rizvi's string of tech deals came amid intense competition among hedge funds and private equity investors to secure shares in startups, highlighted by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner's 2009 investment in Facebook.

With tech companies waiting later than ever to go public, some investors believed they may miss out on the biggest gains if they wait to buy shares in public markets, when a company's value may no longer rise exponentially.

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