By now you probably know that Gina Bianchini, the very visible CEO of white-label social network platform Ning has left the company and been replaced by COO Jason Rosenthal.
The reasons for the move remain shrouded in mystery, but it appears that Bianchini left of her own accord, in order to spend time with her family. Rosenthal told PE Hub that “as she looked at what we needed to do to scale the business and what she was looking to do in her own personal life, I think she felt good about handing over the reins to the team she’d put in place.” Bianchini’s penultimate tweet before her departure was about choosing family over work:
“So bummed to not be at #SXSW with the crew but with my family in town this weekend - family comes first :-)”
Normally, the resignation of a startup’s CEO would constitute a disaster for investors, but Ning cofounder and angel investor Marc Andreessen stands to make an incredible return, almost regardless of what happens to the company.
Ning has raised a whopping $119 million of venture capital, after initial investments from Andreessen and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman. The last fundraising round, a $15 million infusion from Lightspeed Ventures that valued the company at $750 million, implied that Andreessen and Hoffman’s initial Series A purchases had appreciated at least 35X, according to Lorenzo Carver, CEO of research firm Liquid Scenarios.
“To put that into perspective,” Carver wrote us, “imagining that Mr. Reid and Mr. Andreessen had made that investment as a venture fund, as opposed to making it as individuals, and then assume that they made 20 additional investments for the same exact amount time and each one of those lost 100%; their reported IRR, although unrealized, would put them in the top quartile of venture funds actively investing in 2004.”
It would be all but impossible for Andreessen to lose money on Ning. With an exit of $134 million, all preferred investors appear to get 1X their money back. Andreessen and Hoffman would get their original investment back on the Series A and the Series B at that price. The Series A gets 2X back at a $147 million sale and the Series B gets 2X back at a $160 million dollar sale.
Legg Mason also stands to do well. Later investors, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Allen and Company, on the other hand are in riskier positions. For Lightspeed's Series D to get the same kind of return (2X), the company has to sale for over $1 billion. 
Source: Liquid Scenarios Search2Model preliminary estimates
At Culture, Religion & Tech, take II in Miami on October 29, 2024
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Ning is the world’s largest platform to create powerful, custom social websites. Top organizers, marketers, influencers, and activists use Ning to create a social destination where content intersects with conversations to inspire action. Every social website comes with out-of-the-box social integration, community features, point-and-click design tools, and turnkey monetization solutions that are easy to use.
In October 2010, Ning announced the launch of Ning Everywhere. It offers unparalleled flexibility for Ning Creators and third party developers to create mobile apps, monetize and integrate with popular cloud services in a matter of clicks, and develop custom apps using Ning’s API.
Ning spans categories including politics, entertainment, consumer brands, small business, non-profits, education and more, connecting over 74 million people around the globe with the topics they are passionate about. Palo Alto, Calif.-based Ning was co-founded in October 2004 by Chairman Marc Andreessen and is privately held.
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Since founding bpCentral, our focus has been on increasing each user's competitive advantage each and every time they interact with one of our applications. Naturally, this involves more than simply enabling complex calculations to be performed accurately. In fact, during the first 12 months of developing our new technologies and applications, we put an inordinate amount of resources into discovering how to transform the relationships between idiosyncratic decision-makers and financial information. Our premise was that if that human to data relationship could be elevated to a new standard, then the relationships of those professionals with the entities and individuals they interact with could be more efficient and therefore more valuable.
In response, we developed CIMPA, the Carver Import Algorithm, a system that allows any electronic financial information, data or reports to be interpreted by a receiving system without the need for XML, XBRL, tagging approaches or extensive manual data entry. As a result of this technology, the Company's systems for private equity and venture capital professionals are able to import data in a matter of seconds, instead of a matter of hours.
Similarly, the Company noted that when users attempted to calculate the outcomes of complex liquidation preferences, anti-dilution provisions and other complex terms that are common to VC/PE transactions, any output was virtually impossible to verify without a costly audit of the formulas. Since the formulas were generally based in excel, this meant that few if any partners or other key investment professionals could afford to expend the effort to verify how amounts were arrived at. Upon further consideration, the Company realized that, to a certain extent, this was true of all financial reports. For traditional financial statements, this point is evidenced in the fact that notes to financial statements typically occupy several times more pages than the actual financial reports do. This realization inspired the Company to develop a system it calls OferX, which presents all financial information in a manner that allows any user to audit and see how amounts were calculated (in an easy to understand, quantifiable manner) without the need for extensive textual descriptions.
Together these unique tools form the foundation for the Company's offerings, which are backed by over 29 patent pending technologies.
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