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Tag: mark pincus

  • Zynga’s Engineering VP Resigns

    Zynga’s Vice President of Engineering, Neil Roseman, has recently resigned after 15 months at the social media games company.

    Last month, Roseman had oversaw the the launch of Zynga’s social games platform, Project Z. This allows games to be played directly on Zynga’s site, bypassing Facebook, which helps the company assert its independence from the social media giant. Roseman also managed Zynga’s San Francisco office, and helped to recruit engineers. He confirmed that he left the company about three weeks ago in a brief phone interview, after the launch of Project Z.

    Roseman cited the main reason for leaving as too much time away from his family in Seattle, as he was spending three or four days a week in San Francisco. He added that he will likely get into something entrepreneurial in the future. Before his time at Zynga, Roseman was the CEO of Evri, a startup that Paul Allen invested in, and was also one of Amazon’s first engineers.

    Zynga didn’t comment on Roseman’s resgnation, but confirmed that its Seattle office was being managed by Jim Veevaert, former president of Jerry Bruckheimer Games. Zynga employs about 50 people at its Seattle office, and is expanding. Besides hiring, Zynga also acquired Seattle-based Gasworks Games and CupidsPlay. Recently, Zynga Seattle launched the gaming community Slingo on Facebook.

    It was recently reported that Mark Pincus, CEO of Zynga, will be selling 15% of his stake in the company, roughly 16.5 million shares, its secondary offering. Zynga is recently priced its shares at $12, a bit of the downgrade of their market value of $12.31.

  • Zynga Prices Secondary Offering At $12 Per Share

    Social gaming giant Zynga has announced that it’s pricing its stock at $12 per share in its $515 million secondary offering. The 42,969,153 shares will be sold by existing stockholders, and Zynga won’t receive any proceeds from the sale.

    In an S-1 filing last week, it was revealed that CEO Mark Pincus will sell 15% of his shares, and his voting power after the sale will drop to 35.9% from 36.5%. Those selling shares in the offering include IVP, SilverLake, Union Square Ventures, Google, Reid Hoffman, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Owen Van Natta, General Counsel Reggis Davis, COO John Schappert and CFO Dave Wehner.

    Zynga is attempting to manage the lock-up period for employees, and states it seeks to “facilitate an orderly distribution of shares and to increase the company’s public float.” Basically, Zynga is trying to avoid employees all selling their stock at the same time, which devaluates the shares. Zynga states that employees have transfer restrictions of their shares for 90 days after the secondary offering. The primary purpose of this is to facilitate the even distribution of shares.

    Interestingly, the current market value of Zynga stock is $12.31 – perhaps Zynga is just rounding down? In December, the stock was priced at $10 per share at the time of IPO.