Melville fund manager early Facebook friend

Vincent Napolitano, social network fund manager at Melville-based Rockwell Global Capital, began buying up stock in Facebook almost a year ago, mostly from former employees who looked to cash out on the issues they were given when they joined the company.

Little by little, Napolitano, 40, bought up shares. His fund now has about a $20-million investment in Facebook, which announced earlier this week that it will become a publicly traded company, with shares going onto the stock exchanges sometime this spring. Facebook, which has 850 million users, is expected to be valued at between $75 billion and $100 billion.

Napolitano figures Facebook shares will sell at between $35 to $40, initially. "We could make our clients up to $40 million over the next year or two," he said.

He said he figured a year ago that Facebook would one day go public. The company was growing fast and would need cash to continue to expand.

"Companies like Facebook come around every decade or so," Napolitano said. "You had Amazon and Microsoft. Typically, it's to their advantage to go public." Amazon went public in 1997 and Microsoft in 1986.

Napolitano said Rockwell plans to launch a social media fund to cover Twitter, MySpace and other such outlets.

Rockwell's chief executive, Bruce Guarino, said the Facebook fund, currently Rockwell's largest, was created only to acquire Facebook shares. If you feel left out, you're in the majority. The fund was limited to 99 investors who were required to invest a minimum of $100,000 each. They also were required to have a net worth of seven figures.