Andreessen Horowitz Made $78 Million Over $250,000 Seed Investment In Instagram

Posted on Apr 23 2012 - 8:24am by Editorial Staff

Andreessen Horowitz revealed that it made $78 million off its $250,000 seed investment in Instagram’s billion-dollar acquisition in a blog post. Two years ago with making an investment of $250,000 in Instagram, results now in worth of $78,000,000 when the Faceboook acquisition closes.

“Ordinarily, when someone criticizes me for only making 312 times my money, I let the logic of their statement speak for itself. However, in this case, the narrative that some critics put forth has the nasty side effect of casting two outstanding entrepreneurs—Kevin and Dalton Caldwell”

Here is an excerpt from Horowitz blog post:

After speaking with both entrepreneurs and much internal discussion, we concluded that funding Kevin to compete with Dalton would be a violation of the original implicit commitment we made to Dalton—to not fund competitors to PicPlz. On the other hand, funding Dalton did not violate our implicit agreement with Kevin because he changed his business—we’d funded Burbn not Instagram.

So our choices were: a) invest in Dalton b) invest in neither or c) invest in Kevin and violate our commitment to Dalton. As soon as we fully recognized those were the choices, we ruled out option c and elected option a.

However, we still had a problem: because we had invested in Kevin’s seed round, we had both information rights and pro rata rights to the series B. These are important and valuable rights, but it seemed completely unethical to us to exercise them since we funded a competitor. As a result, we unilaterally and without compensation or consideration gave Kevin back those rights and did not invest further in Instagram.

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