Google has a market cap of $1.3 trillion.
Imagine you were one of the first angel investors when it was founded by Larry & Sergey in 1998.
Below we take a look at Google’s very first angel investors and their insane returns.
- Jeff Bezos — founder of Amazon
Bezos convinced Google’s founders to let him become an early investor, even though the funding round had already closed.
Bezos and his wife were vacationing in the Bay Area when he reached out to Shriram with a request to meet the guys behind Google.
Bezos ended up investing $250,000 in Google in 1998 at 4 cents a share in Google. Six years later when Google IPOed, the stake was the equivalent of 3.3 million GOOG shares.
Bezos’ stake would be worth $4.8 billion today, a gain of nearly 20,000% in a little over two decades.
2. Ram Shriram — also known as the startup sherpa
Shriram worked with both Google and Amazon, and he helped Bezos get in as an angel investor in Google.
He invested $250,000 in 1998 and had 5.3 million shares at Google’s IPO.
3. Andreas von Bechtolsheim — co-founder of Sun Microsystems
Bechtolsheim Invested $100,000 in 1998.
He wrote the check to Google’s founders before the company had even been legally incorporated.
It’s not certain how many shares he bought, but somewhere between 2.5 and 5 million.
He sold $31 million of his stock during the IPO. The value of his original Google investment would now be worth several billion.
4. David Cheriton — wealthiest academic ever & founder of Arista Networks
David invested $100,000 in 1998 and sold about $29 million worth of his stock during the IPO.
He is a Canadian computer scientist, mathematician, billionaire businessman, philanthropist, and venture capitalist. He is a computer science professor at Stanford University, where he founded and leads the Distributed Systems Group.
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