I happen to know a lot about this situation, and there wasn't anything sketchy at all:

1) St. Francis is an expensive ($17k a year, which is actually pretty low for the area) private school, not a public school that receives funding from the government.

2) Most private schools have endowments and investment vehicles to manage those endowments. Tuition money generally isn't going into these funds, rather they're for donations and capital campaigns.

3) Many of the parents of the kids at St. Francis are tech executives or VCs, so it's not surprising that they're investing in startups instead of more traditional mutual or index funds.

Note to self, send my future kids to St. Francis.

Take a look at Bellarmine, Castilleja, and Harker as well.

This is an educational program for the kids through the school. Lightspeed is definitely not struggling to fill out a $500k allocation... a general partner of the fund just happened to be a school parent and got the school club into the deal. A very Silicon Valley and unusual thing for a school club for sure, but nothing sketchy at all.

Definitely not sketchy as you mentioned, but according to the article the parent is right about the allocation:

> It turns out that Eggers actually persuaded his partners to cough up only $485,000 of the $500,000 investment. On his invitation, Natalie and Andrew’s school, St. Francis High School in Mountain View, Calif., chipped in the remaining $15,000.

I read on another article that he's on the board of the school's investment fund which backs startups. So it's a strategic initiative and definitely not sketchy as it's a private school.

> It turns out that Eggers actually persuaded his partners to cough up only $485,000 of the $500,000 investment.

This almost certainly means convincing his partners to let someone else come in instead if LVP taking the whole $500k. Lightspeed has over $3B in assets under management and $500k is already at the low end of check sizes they'd generally write. On the other hand, squeezing a friend into an interesting deal is a big favor.

Oh yeah that's my mistake. That makes perfect sense now given your comment and re-reading that line.

How is it clickbait? It is literally what happened.

We've come full circle, now even the clickbait is fake.

/s?

> Also how are schools allowed to invest like this at all?

Companies are allowed to invest their private money however they want. Why does it make a difference if it's a school?

It's named after a Catholic saint, so I kind of doubt it's a public school.

I get your point, and you can pretty much tell it is a Catholic school from the name, but in California, there are plenty of public schools named after Catholic saints because there are a ton of cities named after Catholic saints. Santa Monica High School, San Jose High School, San Miguel Elementary School. I think the tip off is whether the it's anglicized or not.

The tipoff is whether the schools' name is based on the name of the city, no?

In the Los Altos Mountain View area, I can name St. Nicholas, St. Simon, and St. Francis which are all private schools, none of which are named after the city that they are in.

There are lots of schools named directly or indirectly after saints that aren't also in cities named after saints.

> I think the tip off is whether the it's anglicized or not

There are definitely both public and private schools in California with the names of Catholic saints in both English and Spanish on each side, so that's not a certain tip off.