A huge tech initial public offering raises billions. More money for super-rich investors and bankers, right?
Well that’s not the whole story. Not this time.
If you’re a parent, a letter home from school is common.
But today, Simon Chiu, the president of Saint Francis High School in Mountain View, California, wrote to parents to share some “monumental news”.
In 2012, he began, the school invested $15,000 in a cool new app that was being used incessantly by Andrew and Natalie Eggers, two siblings who attended the school.
Their father Barry was a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, a local investment firm. After seeing how excited his children were to be using the app, and learning that their friends were as obsessed as they were, he decided to get involved. It was, of course, Snapchat.
He met with co-founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy, who today are multi-millionnaires thanks to their company’s incredible stock market debut, but back then were working out of a dorm room at Stanford.
Mr Eggers was suitably impressed, and so Lightspeed…