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Disclosure: Kleiner Perkins profiting from ‘digital growth’ deals

By
Dan Primack
Dan Primack
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By
Dan Primack
Dan Primack
Down Arrow Button Icon
February 14, 2014, 7:44 PM ET
Mary Meeker

FORTUNE — Mary Meeker is turning out to be a pretty good venture capitalist.

The former Morgan Stanley Internet analyst joined Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in January 2011, to lead a new $1 billion fund focused on growth-stage technology companies. At the time, she had plenty of skeptics. Meeker would be in charge of KPCB’s largest active fund, despite having no past professional investing experience. Moreover, wasn’t KPBC chasing a later-stage fad — perhaps in order to collect popular company “logos” — rather than sticking to its early-stage knitting?

Today, however, Meeker’s fund filed its first-ever Form 13F with the SEC — an action prompted by the fund’s holding more than $1 billion in marketable securities as of Dec. 30, 2013. What it shows is that, as of year-end, the fund had around $1.3 billion worth of stock in five publicly-traded companies. They were:

  • Facebook (FB): $21.8 million
  • FireEye (FEYE): $122 million*
  • Groupon (GRPN): $76.6 million
  • Twitter (TWTR): $1.08 billion
  • Zynga (ZNGA): $6.7 million* The FireEye stake results from the company’s purchase of KPCB portfolio company Mandiant

Assuming that the fund still holds those shares today, the value would be a bit lower at $1.28 billion — but still well above the $1 billion fund size.

More importantly, that figure doesn’t include shares the fund already has sold in some of those companies, nor other big realizations like Waze (sold to Google). And then there are the portfolio’s heady pre-IPO companies, which include JD.com (in registration), Docusign, Jawbone, LendingClub, One King’s Lane, SoundCloud, Spotify and Square. In other words, there should be several more big wins on the horizon.

To be sure, not all of the credit goes to Meeker. For example, she wasn’t even formally with the firm when it began negotiating its Twitter investment — and several of the Digital Growth Fund’s deals are co-investments with the early-stage fund.

But, ultimately, Meeker is responsible for the fund’s success or failure. And, based on what we learned today, it clearly seems to be the former.

Sign up for Dan’s daily email newsletter on deals and deal-makers: GetTermSheet.com

About the Author
By Dan Primack
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