Venture Capital
Stanford VCs Are Looking for the Next Snapchat
The university-affiliated StartX had no venture fund when Evan Spiegel was a student. That’s changed.
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As a student at Stanford University, Evan Spiegel often hung around the offices of StartX, the school’s entrepreneurial hub. Spiegel, who was working on a photo-sharing app called Picaboo, would seek advice from people affiliated with the incubator. In return, he volunteered part-time in 2011, helping design some early marketing materials for StartX.
Spiegel’s side project eventually became Snapchat, whose parent company Snap Inc. held an initial public offering last week valuing the business at $24 billion. It made the 26-year old and a lot of other people very wealthy. Stanford wasn’t one of them. In those days, StartX didn’t have a fund for making investments.