Last night, PrivCo, a New York-based firm that tracks privately held companies, released a list of what it has determined were the top 20 venture capital firms of 2012, based on the firms’ successful M&A exits. We asked for the numbers behind the deals.

Not everyone buys Twitter’s foot-dragging act. PrivCo, a New York-based research firm that focuses on private companies, believes Twitter will file to go public in the fourth quarter of this year, largely because of Facebook’s botched public offering last year.

Today, the third tranche of restrictions locking up Facebook shares expires, and the quantity of shares available to trade – roughly 800 million, or 36 percent of the stock outstanding — is stunning.
The big questions, of course, are how many shareholders – and, importantly, which of them — will use the occasion to turn that stock into cold, hard cash.

Sam Hamadeh, head of private company research firm PrivCo, has a history of making bold and bearish statements about hot social media companies, including his recent comment that Facebook’s Zuckerberg is “in over his hoodie” as CEO. Is he just trying to get attention?

Facebook put SecondMarket on the map. Then it went public and everything changed.

Expect Facebook to “supersize” its acquisition strategy after it goes public.

In the last twelve months, Jawbone, a 12-year-old, San Francisco-based company best known for its elegant Bluetooth headsets, has raised an astonishing $159 million, including $40 million just weeks ago from J.P. Morgan Asset Management, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Deutsche Telekom, and Russian investor Yuri Milner. While the company didn’t disclose the valuation of its latest round, the Wall [...]

If Zynga goes public at what is expected to be a $20 billion valuation, the company will make many people very rich, including a healthy percentage of its roughly 3,000 employees and its earliest venture investors. The IPO will also turn Zynga founder and CEO Mark Pincus, who owns about 18% of the company, into a [...]

Public market investors who once hungrily awaited the IPO of Zynga keep receiving more to digest about the company. It’s not clear how the confusing array of data will settle with them, either. While Zynga’s July 1 S-1 filing was met with much fanfare, some worrisome numbers have emerged since, including in a September amendment [...]

Groupon’s troubles are bad — and they’re likely to get worse, says Sam Hamadeh, founder of the New York-based financial analysis firm PrivCo. Since Groupon released its third and most recent amended S-1 document — excluding what it pays out to merchants, and revising its reported 2010 revenue of $713 million down to $313 million as a [...]