Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed: Sequoia's Google Gains

"There is a story out tonight on Bloomberg about the gains venture firm Sequoia has obtained from its Google stake. Fair enough, but the math in the piece doesn't work for me. The author says that Google has gained more than '150-fold' on its investment in the last six years.

Well, yeah, but isn't it a lot more than 150-fold? That multiple times the original $12.5-million that Sequoia invested in Google produces 'only' (I use that term advisedly in the context) $1.88-billion. Given that Sequoia held 23.9-million shares at the Google offering, to get the above-mentioned figure they would have to sell all their shares for an average price of $78.60. Howzat, given that Google never sold for that low of a price ever post-IPO? And more importantly, Sequoia did much of its distributions this year at way-way higher prices.

By my math Sequoia's Google gains were closer to 500x than 150x. Is there something going on here that I'm missing?"