Filings from the Securities Exchange Committee reveal that the Trustees of the College were issued 8,989 worth of shares in Google worth $4.25 million, money resulting from Dartmouth's investment with Sequoia Capitol, which made a fortune off YouTube's $1.76 billion sale to Google.
Sequoia Capital is a venture capital based in Menlo Park, Calif., that specializes in technological investments. According to its website, the company is an investor and business partner with companies that compose 10 percent of the NASDAQ.
Although the risks of investing in Silicon Valley can be large, as the YouTube sale demonstrates, the payoffs can be enormous. Sequoia Capital's original investment into YouTube of $11.5 million translated into $442 million worth of Google shares.
Usually, venture capitalists keep the names of their investors secret, but the YouTube sale was an exception. The biggest winners were YouTube's founders Chad Hurley, 29, and Steven Chen, 28, who made, respectively, $345 million and $325 million in Google shares. A third founder, Jawed Karim, who left YouTube to pursue a computer science degree, made $64 million worth of shares
Disclosures also revealed the wide range of investors who profited from YouTube's sale. Among those who profited were television talk show host Maury Povich who made $80,000 and Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang who has 340 shares worth $160,000. The San Francisco Symphony made $80,000 and even Sequoia Capital's receptionist made $1.2 million.
Dartmouth, however, was not the only college to profit from the sale. Many schools ranging from MIT to Oxford also saw large profits.
Other Ivy League schools that posted profits from the You Tube sale were Brown University, $1.7 million; Columbia University, $6.8 million; Yale University, $9.3 million; Princeton University, $8.7 million; and Harvard University, $9.3 million.
