REUTERS/Mike Blake
Lyft President John Zimmer and CEO Logan Green speak as Lyft lists on the Nasdaq at an IPO event in Los Angeles March 29, 2019.
- Lyft's IPO is set to make many of its original investors very rich.
- Executives' Logan Green and John Zimmer, who hold an outsize stake in the company they founded, could hold a combined stake of more than $1 billion at the IPO's expected prices.
The long-awaited day is finally here: Lyft is going public.
The ride-hailing company is set to begin trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange Friday with an initial price of $72 per share, or a total valuation of about $21 billion.
That last-minute surge, fueled by standing-room-only meetings on its investor roadshow, has helped push Lyft's co-founders' stakes to a total of more than $1 billion, based on their disclosed holdings in company filings.
Here's the breakdown:
- Logan Green: 684,591 class A shares and 7,689,182 class B shares worth a total of $602.9 million at IPO prices.
- John Zimmer: 684,591 class A shares and 5,090,527 class B shares worth a total of $415.8 million at IPO prices.
The two founders aren't the only ones to strike it rich with Lyft's massive IPO but they will keep a majority of voting power over corporate issues thanks to the stock's dual class structure.
The controversial division between voting classes will allow Green and Zimmer to maintain "significant influence over matters requiring stockholder approval, including the election of directors and significant corporate transactions, such as a merger or other sale of our company or its assets."
That's rubbed some industry watchers, like the Council of Institutional Investors, the wrong way. The group's executive director wrote a letter to Lyft's board of directors in February saying "public companies should provide all shareholders with voting rights proportional to their holdings."
Governance structures aside, plenty of other investors set to get rich, too. As Business Insider's Julie Bort reported from the company's initial S-1 documents, other early investors could also see a massive windfall.
- COO Jon McNeill, who joined the company from Tesla in 2018 holds 736,932 shares that could be worth $5.3 million.
- Sean Aggarwal, best known for his roles as the vice president of finance for eBay, PayPal, and Trulia, joined Lyft's board in 2016. His roughly 1.41 million shares that could be worth about $101 million at IPO prices.
- The US' largest automaker, General Motors, and financial giant Fidelity each own nearly 19 million shares, or about 8% of the company each. At Friday's IPO pricing, those stakes could be worth $1.37 billion for the companies' respective investors.
More Lyft IPO coverage:
- Lyft's historic IPO is coming - and is set to value the ride-hailing company at $21 billion
- Lyft is about to go public - here's what the first Wall Street analysts to cover the stock are saying
- Lyft moved its San Francisco roadshow meeting at the last minute amid protesting drivers
- Inside the Lyft roadshow in NYC where investors packed the penthouse of a $1,000-a-night hotel
- A $3 billion investment chief breaks down the strategies he expects traders to use around the Lyft IPO - and reveals how his firm is planning to play it
- A 'warrior's warrior': Why insiders say the first-time CFO running Lyft's $20 billion IPO is the perfect fit