Paul Allen names his own price:
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Paul Allen fund sells stake in Priceline.com
By Bloomberg News
February 14, 2001, 6:00 p.m. PT
Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's investment firm sold its stake in
Priceline.com, a Web site that lets customers bid their own price for
airline tickets and other items.
The divestiture by Vulcan Ventures was made public in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday. It comes after Vulcan reported selling off entire stakes in five other technology concerns in other SEC filings last Friday.
The Seattle-based investment firm, which manages Allen's personal fortune and invests mainly in technology companies, has been bearish on technology stocks since mid-1999 because of "overvaluation" in the markets, said spokeswoman Susan Pierson Brown, adding that the Priceline sale is part of that view.
"We aggressively monetized our holdings in technology companies" last year, Pierson Brown said. "We continue to be concerned about the state of the market, and as such we expect to be more frequently a seller than a buyer in the near term."
Priceline's most recent proxy filing in March 2000 had listed Allen as holding 5.3 percent of the company's common stock, or about 9.1 million shares. In an amended filing with the SEC on Wednesday, Allen and Vulcan reported holding no common stock as of Dec. 31 last year.
Vulcan's short-form SEC filing today didn't say when the final sales were made, and Brown declined to elaborate. The investment firm, which is managed by Bill Savoy, earlier disclosed plans to sell some stock in June, though in August it announced plans to put money back into the stock.
The investment announced in August was to buy an undisclosed number of shares from Priceline founder Jay Walker for $23.75 per share, though that price included options in Walker's closely held Walker Digital.
Vulcan paid $3.20 a share for 9.4 million shares before Priceline's March 1999 initial public offering, according to past SEC filings.
Priceline, based in Norwalk, Conn., sells airline tickets and other products and services under the "name-your-own-price" model. The company's stock has plummeted more than 95 percent since Internet stocks began sliding last March. In that time, several large investors have sold shares, including Walker, who resigned from the company's board in December. |
