Mountain View, Calif. (KPIX/CNN) — Snapchat’s parent company is the talk of Wall Street after a successful first day of trading. And among the happiest investors is a Catholic high school in Northern California, which just cashed in quite the payday.
Five years ago, Saint Francis put in $15,000 into early seed funding into Snapchat.
The stock split and split again and again. Before they knew it, they had two million shares.
They sold two-thirds of it today, which came out to a divine amount of cash.
Principal Simon Chiu said, “Selling our two-thirds today is probably somewhere in the neighborhood of, like, $23 million or something like that.”
When asked what the return on investment was percentage-wise, Chiu replied, “Well, a &15,000 investment. It’s probably like — I think it was like, I did the calculations yesterday, I think it’s about 2,300 times.”
The story of how St. Francis High School came to invest in an unknown startup began five years ago, in 2012.
A parent at the school by the name of Barry Eggers convinced the school’s investment fund to get in early.
Who is this parent Barry Eggers?
It turns out Eggers is a partner at Lightspeed Ventures, also an early investor of Snapchat.
In a blog post, Eggers says he knew it would be big when he came home from work one day and saw his kids laughing and engrossed in this new app.
Former school president Kevin Makley was on the investment team that gave the green light, and says they are blessed. “I’m not so sure that I call it divine intervention but I’ll tell you what, if you can turn $15,000 into the vast amount of money that this return will bring, you have to say god’s looking out for us.”
St. Francis will put a lot of the earnings will go toward an endowment that will be used for financial aid.
Parent Kim McNair said, “It’s a catholic school. They’re going to be doing amazing things with it.”
For parents and students, it was a teachable moment, worthy of, yeah you guessed it. “Yeah, I think I learned that you can take risks. She’s probably Snap chatting me right now! I learned you can take risks and you never know what you’re going to get out of something. It’s just kind of crazy,” said student Caroline Boynton.
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