Would DST IPO Reveal Facebook Financials?
Digital Sky Technologies reportedly plans to go public next year in New York, and already has hired Goldman Sachs as a lead underwriter. For the uninitiated, DST is a Russian Internet conglomerate known for taking minority stakes in companies like Facebook, Zynga and Groupon. It also has lots of local investments, including in leading Russian web portal Mail.ru. Matthew Ingram described DST as a “mutual fund of hot startups.” He's largely right, except that mutual funds disclose financial information on underlying portfolio companies (or at least it's easy to find, since the companies are publicly-traded). DST, on the other hand, may not be required to tell shareholders much more than company name and date of investment. In other words, a DST IPO won't open the Pandora's Box that worried so many VCs during the public pension transparency debatse of 2002 and 2003.
