YouTube, Reddit and Instagram are technology giants – but some of their founders have collected early

This is the main dilemma that the founders of the whole world face: once they have started to become large enough to attract the attention of buyers, they are faced with the decision to withdraw now or to use the compliment as fuel to go even greater.

Although this may seem obvious to say yes to an acquisition up to millions – or even billions – it can be difficult to rest later how much you could did independently.

There may not be a better recent case study than Mark Zuckerberg. In 2006, he received massive offers – $ 750 million from Viacom and $ 900 million in Yahoo – to buy Facebook. But, at the age of 22, it was optimistic that he still had a lot of track.

“We focus on building the long -term business,” Zuckerberg said at the time. Today, the social platform now known as Meta is just over 1.9 dollars, an increase of 2,100 times over two decades. And Zuckerberg’s own wealth has reached more than $ 260 billion, according to the Bloomberg billionaire index.

Years later, Facebook began to make its own acquisitions; Offering in particular to buy Snapchat for 3 billion dollars in 2013. But, the founder of Snap Evan Spiegel has resisted, and today, the social social platform is worth $ 12 billion.

Of course, in these two cases, the founders are now members of the ultrawanté and have done much more while waiting for the early sale. However, it is not reality for everyone.

Youtube: from a sale of $ 1.65 billion to a global platform of $ 550 billion

When the very first video of YouTube – “Meet me at the zoo” – is live in 2005, no one could expect the video platform to explode on the internet.

The growth was so important that a little more than a year after the foundation, the co -founders Chad Hurley, Steven Chen and Jawed Karim decided that the offer of $ 1.65 billion in Google was too good to resist.

“It’s great,” said Hurley in a video published when the sale was in the fall of 2006. “Two kings met.

Hurley, then-CEO of YouTube, received actions worth around $ 345 million at the time when Securities and Exchange Commission documents were published a few months later, according to The New York Times. Chen, the then from Youtube, received around $ 326 million in shares; And the Karim jaw, which left the business early to return to school, obtained $ 64 million.

Although the sale made them financially secured for life and cement their status as technological pioneers, it was only a fraction of the $ 550 billion of which YouTube is evaluated today, an increase of 333x (not adapted to inflation). For Hurley and Chen, their current slice could be worth around $ 100 billion each.

Reddit: from Waffle House to a possible IPO

After leaving his LSAT exam 20 minutes and went to a waffle house, Alexis Ohanian decided that he wanted to become an entrepreneur. And after meeting Steve Huffman as a student at the University of Virginia and we later were in Aaron Schwartz, the Reddit foundations were created in 2005.

In less than a year and a half, the social platform exploded to more than 70,000 unique daily visitors, and buyers came to strike. But instead of holding, the co -founders, who were at the beginning of the twenties, could not resist the offer of $ 10 million in Conde Nast. In addition, Ohanian’s life was a little in ruins: his girlfriend at the time was in a coma, his dog died and his mother received a diagnosis of terminal brain cancer.

“As CEO for the first time, fresh out of the university, you feel invulnerable, you feel really well in the construction of this business,” said Ohanian Cable last month. “And then all these things happen. And in particular when my mother was diagnosed, it really framed mortality for me in a new way. ”

Flash forward today, Reddit is now worth more than $ 45 billion after being made public earlier this year. The founders could share a pie over 4,500 times the size of the original sale. In fact, Ohanian would even exceed his wife, Serena Williams, with her net value of $ 350 million.

Instagram: the photo application that Facebook has increased by 100x

Instagram exploded on the social media scene at the end of 2010, with 1 million users registering within two months of its creation, and buyers quickly started to express their interest in the application of photo sharing.

In April 2012, Facebook announced that it bought Instagram for about $ 1 billion in cash and shares. He left the co -founder Kevin Systrom, then 28, with around $ 400 million and Mike Krieger, then 25 years, with around 100 million dollars; The rest was divided between investors and the other 11 Instagram employees.

And although the pay day was substantial, it was not as rewarding for the co -founders as they had planned it.

“I think that the biggest lesson … to come in a good amount of money fairly quickly is that the money itself is not fine. It does not make you happy. This does not solve health problems. It can help these things,” Systrom at SXSW in 2019.

The co -founders decided to sell in part because Zuckerberg allowed them to stay in Instagram; Systrom remained CEO and Krieger CTO until 2018. However, this also gave them a first -hand view of the richness they could have done alone, the photo arrows to an evaluation of $ 100 billion. Today, it is worth around 114 billion dollars, according to Kantar—Sease each of the notants of the co -founders would be good in the billions of several billion.

Krieger now serves the product manager of the company Ai Anthropic, while Sytrom did not update his LinkedIn after being CEO of Artifact, a news aggregation platform led by AI, the duo founded after leaving Facebook. Artefact was bought by Yahoo in 2024 for an undisclosed amount.

The founding dilemma

There is no doubt that in each of these cases, the acquisition had a positive impact on the overall success of each company. And while the founders of YouTube, Reddit or Instagram may have lacked billions of more wealth (SYSTROM, for example, has a billionaire status today), their early sale provided security, resources and freedom that they could not have received otherwise.

There remains an almost impossible game to predict if the startups could have set up without their new business parent. But in the end, these examples highlight how much the most difficult and most impactful decision to sell – that an entrepreneur could ever do.

Have you sold your business early, or has a major decision completely changed the course of your career?Send your story to your story to preston.fore@fortune.com.