Cameron HeroldFounder of the COO Alliance & Invest In Your Leaders Training

I Was a Reference for Elon Musk in 1995

2 Oct 2026 · 1 min

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Cameron Herold was a reference for Elon and Kimbal Musk when they raised funding for Zip2 in 1995. He had employed Kimbal at College Pro Painters in 1993, training him in operations. Investors gave them $3 million instead of the $600,000 they asked for, and Zip2 later sold to Compaq for $317 million.

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I was a reference for Elon Musk and Kimbal Musk in their very first round of funding in January of 1995 for Zip2. So I've known Elon for 31 years. Brother Kimbal worked for me in 1993 at College Pro Painters. I had to be a reference for Zip2, and the reason College Pro Painters is mentioned in the autobiography on Elon Musk, the one by Walter Isaacson, College Pro is talked about, is because the initial funding they got was Kimbal Musk's operational and leadership skills that I trained him in, that he got from College Pro. They weren't going to bet on Elon because he'd never done anything. He was this crazy autistic, way out of the box thinker. But Elon had the skills to manage people, projects, time, interdependencies, conflicts. Kimbal called me that night. He goes, what did you tell them? I'm like, did I fuck up? He goes, no. We asked for $600,000 in funding. Again, January of '95. They gave us $3 million. They sold Zip2 2.5 years later for $317 million cash to Compaq, the largest cash all acquisition in history at the time because of the skill sets that they had coming into the company.