A Californian school is going to be making big bucks when Snapchat parent company Snap goes public, thanks to a fortuitous early investment in the app.
The Information's Alfred Lee and Tom Dotan report that Saint Francis High School stands to make "tens of millions" of dollars— if not even more.
The private Catholic school, located near Google parent company Alphabet's central offices in Mountain View, was apparently one of the earliest investors in Snapchat back in 2012, around a year after it first launched.
Now operating under the name Snap, the company is preparing to go public in an eagerly awaited New York IPO at the start of March that should value it at up to $22 billion.
It's not clear how much Saint Francis High School invested in Snapchat, or exactly how much it stands to make — but it should be a lot. According to The Information, the combined value of the shares sold in the two 2012 funding rounds, worth $15.2 million at the time, are now roughly $3.2 billion. (We don't know which of the two rounds the school invested in.)
That's roughly a 21,000% return on investment.
So what's a school doing investing in a messaging app that had (at the time) a reputation for sexting? It's down to one of the fathers of a student at the time — Barry Eggers, founder of another early Snap investor Lightspeed Venture Partners. It was Eggers apparently who got the app on the radar of SF Growth Fund, the private school's investment fund.
On its website, Saint Francis High School says it "serves Catholic families and all families who wish to experience a Catholic, Holy Cross education. In the Holy Cross tradition, Saint Francis High School serves students with a variety of abilities and backgrounds and unites them into a community where the gifts and talents of each person are appreciated." It charges $16,000 a year for tuition.
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