YouTube spoils made official, co-founders did well
YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen are each worth about $326 million as a result of Google’s purchase of the video-sharing company, documents registered by Google Wednesday reveal.
Their takes are five times that of third co-founder Jawed Karim, who returned to Stanford before YouTube was bought last year. Karim got 137,443 shares, worth about $65 million based on the $470 closing price of Google’s stock yesterday. Hurley and Chen both have 694,087 shares.
For the full, long list of beneficiaries, check out the Securities and Exchange Commission document directly (see pages 5-16). Only a partial list is below in screenshot.
Venture firm Sequoia Capital, the main early backer of YouTube, got more than a million shares, or more than $502 million based on Google’s current stock price. Most of that, however, was transferred to Sequoia’s investors. The SEC link above provides a good look at who they are. Artis Capital, a hedge fund with ties to Sequoia, got about 176,500 shares, now valued at about $83 million. The other big indirect YouTube beneficiary we hadn’t known about before was the Ford Foundation (an investor in Sequoia). It carries 218,989 shares, valued at $103 million.
Finally, YouTube senior software engineer Yu Pan did well, with 75,593 shares, or about $36 million.
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About the Author, Matt Marshall
Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
