Thursday, February 8, 2007

Google's YouTube Pact Spawns Big Paydays

Google filed today a regulatory form registering beneficiaries from its purchase of YouTube to sell stock. In doing so, it revealed approximately how much people with a significant stake in YouTube stand to make from sales of their shares.
YouTube founders Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, Jawed Karim are indeed fabulously wealthy, the filing confirmed. With a Google share closing price of $470.01, the Wall Street Journal calculated, Hurley’s shares are worth $345.6 million, Chen’s $326.2 million, and Krim’s $64.6 million.
Venture capital firm Sequoia Capital’s shares are worth about $442.3 million, after providing $11.5 million worth of funding over two rounds.
Want to see how rich all the members of Hurley and Chen’s families are? The filing has the share breakdown.

Updated: there were a slew of stories right before and after YouTube’s acquisition announcement by Google last year about some big music labels getting a small share in YouTube, and could be worth as much as $50 million... that Vivendi’s Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, and the Warner Music Group each quietly negotiated to take small stakes in YouTube as part of the music and video licensing deals they did. But nothing in the SEC filing on the payments/stocks to these companies. Not sure of the intricacies of how it would, could and did work, but did this mean a music deal was never signed or possibly that direct stock wasn’t included?