GiPHY was bought by Facebook. I was surprised since I participated in their early investing experiment, through Alphaworks, but never got any emails about this. In July of 2014, I invested the minimum, $2,500 in GiPHY. I want to show you investments rarely pan out in this thread

GiPHY did another round in 2015, and in total they raised $72M but sold to FB for $400M. Tech investing is like "Hollywood accounting" b/c something can sell for 10x or 50x what investors put in and investors can barely break even. The 5x multiplier means I might get little back.

I know someone that put a few grand into a friends/family investment in a company that raised single-digit millions but sold for half a billion dollars.

I thought it would net them at least a million out of such an incredible return, but they only got about 5x what they put in.

Alphaworks changed their name in late 2015, and the twitter account associated with it hasn't been updated since 2015

in mid-2016 they announced they were winding things down. The quire URLs for my login no longer work. Eventually they were sold to something called Assure who uses Glassboard.

Tonight, I logged in to Assure, but my portfolio is empty. I assume they lost it from one of the three previous systems, so it didn't carry over. I'll update this thread when I hear more.

My early guess: I will get $0 or some concession like $500 from $2,500 invested.

This is my 7th or 8th investment I've made in a company. I always do "small" amounts up to $10k. People say VCs get 9 failures for every 1 hit, which more than makes up for it.

After several acquisitions, the best I've done is get my investment back, b/c that founder insisted.

I've been the very first investor in something that sold for 4x what it raised and I got about 50% of what I put in.

I emailed the people in charge of the fund and I'm curious if anything will come out of this GiPHY thing.

This is a very small potatoes investment so I don't mind being public about what (if anything) comes out of the FB buyout. When they do track my shares down, I'm curious if they'll be worth anything.

This isn't even the worst process, I've learned about companies I invested in were sold before in the press. I've had one company wait three months before a lawyer tracked me down and I had to sign something to get shares in the new owner's company.

I was there at the dawn of blogging and close friends made hundreds of millions to billions off their work. I always assumed tech investing was easy and highly profitable if you knew the right people, and I know those people!

It's still a total longshot to make any $ in this.

in 10yrs of casual angel investing, I've come to realize it's like investing in restaurants. At best, you get free food, at worst, you never seen your investment again. Unless you invested in Shake Shack in a series A, the chances you even get your investment back are low.

I should pause here to tell you how rigged the system is towards rich people. In the early 2000s I couldn't invest in a few companies launched by friends because I wasn't a "qualified investor". Back then to become one, you had to make around $400k/yr to prove you could invest.

I get that these rules might be there to prevent regular folks from blowing their small life savings on wacky ventures, but it's weird when you know your brilliant friend is making a killer product and you have a few grand in the bank but you can't get into a friends/family round

anyway, that's all the tweets for tonight. I found another GiPHY series A investor like me who is also wondering what the heck is up. I'll call the portfolio people in the morning and update this thread when I hear more.

update: a fund manager says I can expect to receive an update e-mail with further details about my holdings later this week.

nice surprise: sounds like everyone in the A round will see a 5x+ return. This would be my best performing investment of all of them most likely.

The funding round vs. the final sale was about 30x bigger, so 5x is less than that, but still pretty good compared to other investments that scored acquisitions/buyouts.