It’s a bit over 500 miles from The Bay Area to Sin City, but a Stanford professor named David Cheriton didn’t need to win a jackpot in Las Vegas to become filthy rich — all it took was a $100,000 investment into Google that has now turned into $10 billion.
Yeah, digest that for a second. He’s one of the wealthiest people on the planet because he trusted his gut and bet on two of his former students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
While teaching at Stanford, Cheriton was in charge of a team of computer scientists who developed the V operating system, which became a cornerstone of what Google would need to create its search engine. Cheriton was on the cutting edge of operating systems for his entire tenure at Stanford, and that specialty was worth billions. He was already successful before his famous investment. He co-founded a company called Granite Systems, which was eventually sold for $220 million.
In 1998, he was sitting on a pile of cash when Brin and Page showed up at his front door and gave him a sneak peek at their shiny new toy, Google. Cheriton scratched out a $100K check with his former business partner Andy Bechtolsheim, and the rest is history. That was the seed money needed to get Google off the ground.
If Cheriton ever runs out of dough, he can hit up his former students because, thanks to him, both Page and Brin are worth over $90 billion.
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