Hewlett-Packard is meeting with shareholders today in Mountain View, California. While the proceedings are expected to be routine, Meg Whitman will be making a presentation to reiterate her plan to turn around the company in 2013 and 2014. However several shareholders are seeking to have HP’s management changed around according to AllThingsD.
AppNexus is a company that has a real-time bidding platform that has raised $75 million in funding. The Series D round of funding was led by Technology Crossover Ventures. Investors that participated in this round include Venrock and Tribeca Venture Partners. AppNexus has raised a total of $140.5 million.
Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of the VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, is also a major shareholder and board member at Facebook. He has disclosed in an SEC filing that he has sold over 2.3 million shares of Facebook at prices that range from $22.85 to $23.83 per share. This adds up to around $54.1 million.
Andreessen Horowitz has hired Chris Dixon as a full-time general partner. Chris Dixon, an employee at eBay, is an outspoken New Yorker and entrepreneur. He will be working out of Andreessen Horowitz’s offices in Menlo Park. Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, said that he was impressed by Mr. Dixon’s track record as an investor and entrepreneur. Mr. Dixon sold his company SiteAdvisor to McAfee and Hunch to eBay. Mr. Dixon also invested in companies like Kickstarter, Dropbox, GroupMe, and BuzzFeed. Mr. Dixon will remain as an advisor to the companies that he put money into.
The Fancy is a Pinterest rival that is known for curating style and fashion. Fancy has raised $26 million in funding and was rumored in August to be getting acquired by Apple. It sounds like the Apple acquisition will not be happening now that the company has raised a new round of funding.
Andreessen Horowitz has invested $15 million into RapGenius.com. RapGenius.com is a website that explains what the meaning of rap lyrics mean for all of the latest songs. Andreessen Horowitz partner Ben Horowitz is a rap fan. Rap Genius uses crowd-sourcing to find out the meaning of the lyrics and they were a Y Combinator company. Below is what Marc Andreessen had to say about the funding:
The New York Times has published a compelling profile on Meg Whitman, the current CEO of Hewlett Packard. Before Whitman became the HP CEO, she attempted to run for governor of California and was the CEO of eBay. Ms. Whitman believes that Wall Street does not quite get HP. HP has a lot of promise in mobile devices, cloud computing, and Big Data. “I believe in creative destruction,” said Ms. Whitman as quoted by The NYT.
Facebook does not want to make the value of their stock any lower so they have cancelled their secondary offering. They will instead pay for taxes on its restricted stock units with cash as evidenced by an 8-K that they filed with the SEC today. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has informed that the SEC he does not have any plans to sell his stock in the next year. Facebook board members Marc Andreessen and Don Graham said that they will sell some of their stock to cover taxes, but beyond that they do not have any present “intention to sell any shares.”
