Barry Eggers from Lightspeed Ventures had two kids in St. Francis catholic school in Mountainview, CA. These children enjoyed playing with Snapchat and this caused Eggers to seek out the founders of Snapchat and invest $500k in the company — making Lightspeed the first investors in the start up.
Then, which is unbelievable to me, Barry convinced his kids’ high school to invest $15k in Snapchat, from a fund started by parents for the little school back in 1990.
Who does that?
How did Eggers approach the school and say ‘hey Father, why don’t you take some of your endowment money and invest it with me in this little app that permits people to send naked photos of themselves to each other?’
Yesterday, St. Francis sold two thirds of their position, 1.4m shares, at $17.
I suppose the good catholics are letting the additional third run, justifiably, since it’s all found money at this stage.
St. Francis’ statement
“The school’s investment in Snap – which this morning announced the completion of its IPO – has matured and given us a significant boost as we continue our work towards realizing the bold vision and goals set out in our community-inspired strategic plan: leading with Hope & Zeal.”
How does that make you feel, honestly, knowing that investable opportunities like this only come by way of private markets that are mainly enjoyed by connected VCs and lucky catholic high schools who happen to educate their children? When was the last time the market truly produced a long term winner, based on growth, and now just some stock coming back from the dead?
All of the winners, $AAPL, $AMZN, $NFLX, have been chosen and their big gains are behind them. Aside from the occasional biotech stock shooting higher Off breakthrough clinical data, the markets gains have been muted and pale in comparison to what’s being made in the private markets.
In a sense, the public markets have been relegated to a dumping grounds for those early investors in the private markets hoping to get liquid on the Johnny Come Latelies.
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Yes it is lucky rich kids who benefit from this but it’s also a sign of how stupid every other school system is that they can’t even figure out ANY way to improve their organizations.
VC company big winners in SNAP sold barely any of their shares. They have a 5 month lock up period.
Sounds like they’ll be running this up for awhile then.
The pope is a commie Marxist.. All is well with the Catholics.
Amen
Perhaps they’ll open a franchise of Comet Pizza….
Valuation is insane! The combined market cap of $CLF, $X and $AA is not even half of $SNAP!
And they had the sense and ability to GET OUT
while the getting out was good.
The Johnny-come-latelys are in lockups.
The Founders and Investment IPO bankers
SHOULD BE in lockups. Like JAIL, man.
The lockups can sell covered calls and buy puts for the next 5 months, and actually make money doing just that with their loaded positions. Vol on the options will be expensive like with GPRO. No one’s getting hurt except the bagholders. And who knows, maybe they’ll figure out a way to make money.