Whether the success of video sharing website YouTube is
pleasing to you or not, it looks like the money could soon be filtering
down the chain.
Jawed Karim set YouTube up along with Steve Chen and Chad
Hurley in 2005, and got mighty rich when Google purchased the site a
year later.
Now he has teamed with two other angel investors,
Kevin Hartz and Keith Rabois, to bring his next idea to life.
He is
launching Youniversity,
an early stage angel investment collective.
A New Investment Coalition
Rather than form a regular investment firm and solicit
applications
and letters of interest, the three have formed something more like a
coalition.
Their plan is to find companies that all three believe in
that are consumer internet start ups. Once they find one they all like,
they will all invest their own money in the venture.
They have already quietly invested in two start ups under the
umbrella of this new coalition. One is TokBox,
a video chat service. The other is BluBet, a prediction marketplace.
They were joined in their BluBet
investment by the CEO of Flixster,
Joe Greenstein.
A Massive Budget
Their budget for investment runs between $50,000 USD and
$300,000
USD. The coalition will be pulling its potential start ups from alumni
of Stanford University and the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign.
When asked why the chose those two colleges for the
lucky investment lottery out of all of the colleges in the nation,
Keith Rubois responded that nearly every truly great internet start up
company has involved a graduate of one of those schools.
Even more than graduates of the universities’ involvement with
start
ups, the coalition is tied to them as well. Karim graduated from
University of Illinois, and met his YouTube
co-founders there as well.
All three members of the coalition did their
graduate degree work at Stanford. Alumni ties run deep.
Solid Financial Backgrounds
Rabois and Hartz have solid financial roots to back the
company’s decisions, having been major players in Xoom and PayPal,
respectively.
With that kind of investment know-how and Karim’s knack
for the killer start up instinct, they should have no trouble finding
(and funding) the next big thing.
This article is based on a Profy post written by Leslie Poston.
