Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, wrote a $100,000 check to Larry Page and Sergey Brin after a demo of their search engine, even though Google wasn't incorporated yet. He valued the company at $10 million. That single investment helped launch what became a multi-trillion-dollar enterprise.
Do you recognize this guy here? The guy on the left is Sergey, and the guy on the right, is that Eric Schmidt? It is a guy named Andy Bechtolsheim. What you're looking at are some of the OGs of Silicon Valley, the founders of Sun Microsystems. Andy wakes up one morning and he's got an email in his inbox from two Stanford students, and they're pitching him for a new kind of search engine. It's called PageRank. Instead of just giving you a word match for it, we're going to show you a link to the website that other people are linking to. And so he says, I'll see you tomorrow morning, 8 AM. Larry and Sergey show up and they show him, they say, search for something. He searches for something. The results come up and it's magic. The results are way better than you would get out of a traditional search engine. And he goes back to his Porsche and he comes back with a checkbook. He writes them a check for $100,000 and he writes it out to Google Inc. They're like, hey, we haven't even incorporated the company yet. And he goes, guys, this is the best idea I've ever seen. Take the money, start building. He invests at a $10 million valuation. Google today is like multiple trillion dollars.
