Drew Angerer/Getty Images(MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA) — For the students of Saint Francis High School, there’s about to be another reason to love Snapchat: the school is likely to make big bucks on the public offering of the popular social media app’s parent company.
Once Snap, the parent of Snapchat, goes public, the high school is likely to earn “tens of millions of dollars” in return, according to a report by The Information.
Snap was initially priced at $17 per share. At 200 million shares, the company was valued at close to $24 billion.
The SF Growth Fund, the school’s endowment fund, was reportedly one of Snap’s first investors in 2012. The investment fund was meant to benefit student scholarships and tuition subsidies.
So how did a private Catholic school in Mountain View think to get in on one of the earliest investment rounds in Snap?
It started when Barry Eggers’ then teenage daughter, Natalie, a former student at Saint Francis, mentioned the messaging app called Snapchat that was quickly becoming one of her favorites.
Eggers said it was almost exactly five years ago, when he asked his daughter and her friends were doing on their phones.
“My daughter looked up at me and said: ‘Dad, have you seen this app? It’s called Snapchat … you take pictures, send them to your friends, and they disappear in 10 seconds.'”
Eggers, who is the chair of the school’s growth fund, said his conversation with his daughter sparked his interest and marked the beginning of the journey that him to the two young entrepreneurs at Stanford University who founded Snapchat.
He is also one of the founders of the investment firm Lightspeed Venture Capital and, along with his partner Jeremy Liew, Eggers led the company to invest in two funding rounds for Snap in 2012, worth $15.2 million then and approximately $3.2 billion today, according to Business Insider.
Lightspeed was joined by the SF Growth Fund, though it’s unclear how much the fund invested in Snap.
Saint Francis High School released a statement Thursday to share the “momentous news” of Snap’s public offering success with its students, parents, faculty and staff.
The statement said the impact of the return will allow the school to focus on their commitment to “make Catholic education more affordable and accessible to our community, recruit and retain outstanding faculty and staff, and develop innovative programs and facilities.”
Thursday morning’s Snapchat’s parent company, Snap, debuted on the New York Stock Exchange and began trading at $24 a share, a 40 percent increase from its IPO price, which gives Snap a market valuation of more than $30 billion.
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