Big Pay Day For Twitter Investor Suhail Rizvi

Suhail Rizvi's 15.6% stake in Twitter was worth $3.8 billion at the end of trading on Thursday when the social media company went public on the New York Stock Exchange.

Suhail Rizvi Photo Courtesy: Valley Wag

Suhail Rizvi was born in India and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton Business School. He started and sold a telecom company soon after, and with the proceeds financed the buy-out of an electronic manufacturing business of a Puerto Rico phone company whose annual revenue he boosted from $10 million to $450 million by focusing on higher end products, according to Times of India.

Suhail Rizvi moved with his parents to the United States in 1971 when he was only five. His father Raza Rizvi taught psychology at Ellsworth Community College in Iowa Falls, Iowa, where Suhail and his brother Ashraf, who is a hedge fund manager, went to school.

In addition to Rizvi Traverse Capital's  $3.82 billion, other big winners of Twitter IPO include Evan Williams $2.55 billion,  JP Morgan $2.19 billion,  Spark Capital  $1.46 billion,   Benchmark Capital $1.42 billion, USV $1.25 billion,  DST Global $1.07 billion,  Jack Dorsey $1.05 billion,   Dick Costolo $344 million, and Adam Bain $80 million.

Rizvi Traverse's other major investments include a controlling interest in Playboy and music rights organization Sesac, as well as stakes in news app Flipboard and Jack Dorsey's digital payments company, Square. Sources told CNBC that Rizvi invested $100 million in Facebook before its IPO and sold its shares earlier this year. It also has sold its equity stake in talent agency ICM, and in "Twilight" producer Summit Entertainment, which sold to Lionsgate.

Rizvi's biggest individual client is Prince Waleed Bin Talal of Saudi Arabia who invested $300 million pre-IPO in Twitter through Rizvi Traverse. Rizvi also invested JP Morgan Chase's $400 million pre-IPO in Twitter. Rizvi is reported to have used personal connections in Silicon Valley to purchase these stakes from Twitter employees.

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Pakistani-American Founder Osman Rashid's Chegg Plans IPO

Book rental companies like Silicon Valley based Chegg, founded by Pakistani-American Osman Rashid and Indian-American Aayush Phumbhra, are helping American college students deal with rising textbook costs. Their business is inspired by Netflix movie rental business. Other major contenders in this space are Bookrenter, Textbooks.com, eCampus, BookByte, Direct Textbooks, Student Book Trades and Textbook Recycling.

Osman Rashid

Osman Rashid is the son of  a Pakistani diplomat. He was born in London and raised in Islamabad. He came to the United States from Pakistan in 1990s to study electrical engineering at University of Minnesota and earned a BSEE there.

Rashid is a serial entrepreneur who has founded four companies so far. He left Chegg in 2010 to start his current gig as CEO at Kno which he also founded along with fellow Pakistani-American Babur Habib. Habib has a BSEE from University of Minnesota, MS from Stanford and Ph.D. from Princeton. He serves as CTO at Kno. The Silicon Valley based company offers electronic textbooks and associated software for K-12 and college courses. It is backed by Intel, Goldman Sachs and Netscape founder Mark Andreeson's VC firm Andreeson Horowitz.

In its filing for initial public offering, Chegg says it plans to raise nearly $200 million by offering its stock for sale at $9.50 to $11.50 a share. At the midpoint of the range, that would value Chegg at nearly a billion dollars.

The name Chegg combines chicken and egg. It rents textbooks for a semester at a time at about 50% off the retail price. It has 180,000 titles in its catalog. It also offers more than 100,000 electronic textbooks and has rolled out offerings like helping high school students find colleges and scholarships, according to New York Times.

Like its competitors, Chegg offers book return guarantees and shipping speed. Chegg is a selling point for your own books as well as textbook rentals at low prices. What differentiates Chegg is that it offers course reviews and grade distributions as well as homework help for selected courses. Along with first hand reviews of a course, you get a detailed schedule of the books you need for it. Chegg claims it now reaches about 30 percent of all college students in the United States and 40 percent of college-bound high school seniors.

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