Jeff Bezos is one of the wealthiest people in the world because of Amazon’s success. But his early stage investment in Google could have made him a billionaire without it.
In 1998, four years after Bezos launched Amazon, a search engine startup was emerging in Menlo Park and looking for early investors. He invested $250,000 in the new company, Google, during a $1 million follow-on round.
By the time of Google’s 2004 IPO, his share was worth over $280 million.
What makes Bezos’ investment particularly interesting is that he was driven primarily by Google’s founders rather than its business model. At the time, it wasn’t the most established tech company — competitors like Yahoo! and AltaVista were further along. But when Bezos met Google’s two founders, Stanford PhD students Larry Page and Sergey Brin over breakfast, he immediately wanted in.
“I just fell in love with Larry and Sergey,” he told Ken Auletta, author of “Googled: The End of the World as We Know It.”
According to the book, three of the other investors were David Cheriton, Stanford University computer science professor, entrepreneur Ram Shriram, who had sold his company, Junglee, to Amazon in 1998, and Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems (JAVA). Bezos had to convince Page and Brin to accept his investment, because the early stage funding round had closed. But he believed in their vision, so he took a chance.
When Bezos contributed, the price per share of Google’s stock was 4 cents. Getting in early raised the stakes, but in this case it made all the difference in what he walked away with.
Like most early-stage investments, Bezos wasn’t immediately rewarded. Then Google went public in 2004, at which point the investment represented 3.3 million shares of Google stock. His patience and trust in Brin and Page paid off.
It’s unclear if Bezos still owns his early Google shares, but if he did, they’d likely be worth more than $10 billion today.
