By Sarah McBride

(Reuters) – Just about everyone in Silicon Valley has dreamed of striking it rich with a well-timed investment.

Here are the people and institutions that will benefit the most from Facebook’s initial public offering, assuming a $100 billion valuation for the world’s largest online social network. Some of the percentages below may change due to factors such as what options are exercised and when.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Facebook took the first step toward public markets in the year’s most highly anticipated IPO, which could catapult co-founder Mark Zuckerberg into sixth place among the world’s richest people.

The world’s largest social network, a dorm room project for Harvard dropout Mark Zuckerberg that exploded in popularity and vaulted to Silicon Valley’s top tier within 8 years, is expected to make its market debut in the middle of the year. It could raise much more than the $5 billion initially targeted, and value Facebook at up to $100 billion.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Venture capital fund Andreessen Horowitz raised $1.5 billion for a new fund, bringing the firm’s assets under management to $2.7 billion and cementing the firm’s position among the venture-capital elite.

“It’s a very opportunity-rich environment right now,” said Marc Andreessen, the firm’s co-founder, who said the firm planned to stick to its strategy of investing in companies with the potential to upend an industry, often around the software theme, which he sees playing out for some time.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – The crackdown on file-sharing site Megaupload is expected to do little to reduce overall piracy of music, software and Hollywood movies, while potentially stifling emerging means of distributing content online.

In the wake of last week’s surprising indictment of the digital storage company and seven executives, other companies have begun changing their policies even as Megaupload officers maintained their innocence in a first court appearance in New Zealand.

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan 23 (Reuters) – The crackdown on
file-sharing site Megaupload is expected to do little to reduce
overall piracy of music, software and Hollywood movies, while
potentially stifling emerging means of distributing content
online.

In the wake of last week’s surprising indictment of the
digital storage company and seven executives, other companies
have begun changing their policies even as Megaupload officers
maintained their innocence in a first court appearance in New
Zealand. [ID:nL4E8CN3X6]

By Sarah McBride and Lisa Richwine

(Reuters) – The massive online protest last Wednesday, in which Wikipedia and thousands of other websites closed down or otherwise protested and helped to kill controversial online piracy legislation, was widely heralded as an unprecedented case of a grassroots uprising overcoming backroom lobbying.

Yet a close look at how the debate unfolded suggests that traditional means of influencing policy in Washington had its place too. The technology industry has ramped up its political activities dramatically in recent years, and in fact, has spent more than the entertainment industry — $1.2 billion between 1998 and 2011, compared with $906.4 million spent by entertainment companies.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – U.S. venture capitalists opened their wallets a bit wider in the last quarter of 2011 than a year ago, but they’re not quite as flush as their largesse would indicate.

The industry invested some $6.57 billion in the nation’s startups, up 19 percent from the $5.52 billion invested a year earlier, according to the National Venture Capital Association and Pricewaterhouse Coopers, using data from Thomson Reuters.