Stanford earns $336 million off Google stock

The San Jose Mercury reports on how Stanford cleaned up:

Stanford University and Google have always had a close relationship -- and now there is a clearer value on it: $336 million, the amount the university made from selling its Google stock.

``In the history of returns on technology, it is one of the big hits,'' said Gary Matkin, a dean at the University of California-Irvine and an expert on the relationship between universities and technology companies.

Stanford received the stock -- 1.8 million shares -- in exchange for giving the Mountain View company the right to use its key Internet search technology, which company founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page developed while graduate students at Stanford. The university holds a patent on the technology, which it licenses to Google under a multi-year deal.

Stanford sold 184,207 of the shares -- about 10 percent of its stake -- for $15.7 million in Google's initial public offering in August 2004.