They sold six years ago when they were relatively tiny compared to today. There's no way they would have been a "major" win up there with the 4 huge exits webwright mentioned:
"We couldn't get them to tell us the acquisition price, but they did tell us that the company has raised just $100k (all in summer 2005) and currently has an average of 70,000 daily unique visitors and 700,000 or so page views."
Not to mention, it's arguably still not a win for Conde Nast - I know the founder of Reddit is seen as a success, sure, but the truth is it's hard to monetize their user base.
For what it's worth, stock in companies at these stages are often pretty damn liquid-- not quite as much as an IPO'd company, but still plenty liquid. YC could sell their stock in either company at or near their recent valuations on SecondMarket. For all we know, they could've partially cashed out in any of the rounds (though I'd bet they haven't).
"We couldn't get them to tell us the acquisition price, but they did tell us that the company has raised just $100k (all in summer 2005) and currently has an average of 70,000 daily unique visitors and 700,000 or so page views."
http://techcrunch.com/2006/10/31/breaking-news-conde-nastwir...