Eduardo Saverin is often described as lucky.
That is fair. Meeting Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard was an extraordinary piece of luck. Saverin provided some of the early money that helped get Facebook running, became its first CFO, and received a large ownership stake.
There is no useful lesson in “meet the next Zuckerberg at college.” You cannot replicate that.
What happened afterward is more interesting.
As Facebook moved to Silicon Valley, the relationship between Zuckerberg and Saverin broke down. Saverin’s stake was heavily diluted, and the dispute eventually ended in litigation and a confidential settlement.
He could easily have ended his financial relationship with Facebook there.
He didn’t.
Saverin fought to protect his ownership and remained a shareholder. He eventually sold some of his shares, but continued to benefit enormously as Facebook grew.
That decision interests me most.
It is easy to hold a company when you like the founder, work there every day, and feel personally invested in its success. Saverin’s situation was almost the opposite. His relationship with Zuckerberg had collapsed. He was no longer helping to run the company.
But owning a company and working for a company are two different things.
Facebook continued to add users, engineers, advertisers and eventually billions of dollars in revenue. Saverin did not need to return to the office to participate in that growth. His shares did that for him.
This is one of the things I find most interesting about equity.
You can stop working for a company without necessarily wanting to stop owning it.
By Facebook’s 2012 IPO, Saverin was living in Singapore and had renounced his US citizenship. The tax consequences of that decision attracted considerable attention, although the actual long-term savings are difficult to know from public information.
What is much easier to see is the value of the Facebook stake.
As Meta grew, so did Saverin’s fortune. He subsequently co-founded B Capital and built a substantial investment business of his own. Today, he is regularly ranked among Singapore’s richest people, with a fortune estimated at more than $30 billion.
There is an obvious warning here.
Holding a concentrated position in one company is not automatically smart. Plenty of founders have held declining companies all the way down. Sometimes selling is exactly the right decision.
But Saverin’s story illustrates something that is easy to forget, particularly for entrepreneurs.
We tend to think about our contribution to a company in terms of work: the meetings we attend, the decisions we make, the people we manage.
This is especially true in Japan, where hard work is deeply respected while income earned without visible effort — particularly investment gains — is sometimes viewed with suspicion.
But ownership works differently. That is true in Japan just as it is anywhere else.
If you own part of an exceptional business, other people can continue creating value on your behalf long after your own operating contribution has ended.
Saverin was extraordinarily lucky to get his original opportunity.
Keeping an economic interest in Facebook after everything that happened was a separate matter.
And in the end, that may have been almost as consequential as getting the opportunity in the first place.
