No-slumdog millionaire: The story of a Stanford professor becoming Google's first investor

The fortune of the first investor in the Internet giant Google today exceeds $6 billion. Despite a huge amount of money and an honorable 293rd place in the list of the world's richest people by Forbes, David Cheriton, PhD in Computer Science, still teaches computer science at Stanford just as he did 25 years ago.

He doesn't own snow-white yachts and luxury sports cars, he drives an old 1986 Volkswagen Vanagon and lives in a small house in Palo Alto, which is also called the unofficial capital of Silicon Valley. Over the past years, his hobby has been investing in promising ideas and financial assistance to universities.

In August 1998, David Cheriton made a deal that every business angel dreams of: it was his investment in Google, a company whose market capitalization today exceeds $1 trillion.

It all started when Cheriton was approached by Stanford students Larry Page and Sergey Brin to get advice on monetizing the algorithms of their project, the Googol search engine. Cheriton got interested in the idea and decided to introduce the two young men to his friend, a famous engineer and entrepreneur Andy Bechtolsheim. The momentous meeting took place in the professor's house. The students managed to convince both the professor and the entrepreneur that the startup was promising, and that evening Cheriton and Bechtolsheim wrote them checks for $100,000 each. These were the first investments in Google.

When drawing the check, Andy Bechtolsheim misspelled the name and wrote Google instead of Googol. To get the money, Page and Brin had to re-register the company using a new name. Since then, the search engine has had this name.

After receiving money from the business angels, the students went to Burger King that night to celebrate the birth of their company. The first funds they attracted helped them eventually collect 1 million from acquaintances, relatives and friends and successfully launch a project of monetizing ad clicks.

The invested $100 thousand brought Cheriton more than $1 billion and a place in the list of the richest people on the planet. In 2003, David was awarded the prestigious SIGCOMM award for his great contribution to the development of computer networks. The largest School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo in Canada was named after the philanthropist Cheriton who donated $25 million to it.

The answer to the question if Cheriton would have become a billionaire without funding Google is Yes. Thanks to his gift for seeing promising markets and technologies, as well as his deep knowledge of computer science, he and Bechtolsheim founded more than one successful company and invested in more than 20 well-known technology startups.