If Lyft completes its initial public offering on Friday, as is expected, it will cap a 12-year journey for the ride-hailing firm’s founders and investors, some of whom had more conviction than others about its ability to survive. Now, those who remained steadfast are about to be rewarded.
That group includes former eBay executive Sean Aggarwal, Lyft’s first outside investor, who put in $30,000 in 2007 and has a stake now worth $100 million. The biggest venture capital winner may be Floodgate Ventures, a seed investor which has seen a nearly 10,000% return on its roughly $1 million investment. Then there is Mayfield Fund, which invested a total of nearly $15 million in the first four venture rounds, giving it a stake likely to be worth about $600 million at the IPO.