A Little Coin Taken Off The Table in GOOG @ $400

Just a smidgen of coin

SEC filings are boring and hard to understand but often give revealing tibits about the companies we cover. In SEC Stalker, we’ll translate these filings back into English, revealing the plays and people behind the companies we know so well.

Googlers get paid and a Yahoo does too — but not as much as he could have — in today’s SEC Stalker.

Venture capitalist and Google director John Doeer just converted derivative securities into 76,995 Google (GOOG) shares before selling them off at $400 a pop and netting a tidy $30 million. Bet that felt almost as nice as being named a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in April. Almost.

Google’s top lawyer, David Drummond, converted 1,300 derivative securites — in this case, probably options — into Google shares and sold them off for a $514,761 pay day. Besides fending off Microsoft in Washington, David is famous in the Valley for hammering out the Google-YouTube deal outside a Denny’s in September 2006.

Google’s top McKinsey alum, business operations boss Shona Brown excercised or converted 583 Google shares and sold them off at prices ranging $396 to $397. Total pay day: $231,251.219. And people wondered why the former Rhodes Scholar should bother getting a fourth degree.

Meanwhile, Yahoo’s top lawyer, EVP & General Counsel Michael Callahan, sold 12,000 Yahoo shares on the public markets at $14.12 per share. That’s a nice $170,000 pay day. Of course, it would have been a lot nicer for Michael if he’d to sell those shares to Microsoft around this time last year — about $200,000 nicer.