$100,000 · August 1998

Andy Bechtolsheim

Google, 1998

A Sun Microsystems co-founder wrote a $100,000 cheque to a company that did not yet legally exist, after a demonstration reported to have lasted well under an hour.

What happened

In August 1998 Andy Bechtolsheim met Larry Page and Sergey Brin, saw the search engine they had built, and wrote a cheque for $100,000 made out to Google Inc. Google's own account of its founding puts the moment at the centre of the company's origin story, and notes that the cheque could not be banked until the entity existed to receive it.

The detail that gets repeated is the speed. The detail that matters more is who was doing the deciding. Bechtolsheim had co-founded Sun Microsystems and spent his career building hardware and networking systems; he was not guessing about whether the technology was good, he was recognising it.

He was not alone. Within weeks the round grew to roughly $1m, with Jeff Bezos, the Stanford computer scientist David Cheriton and the entrepreneur Ram Shriram all participating — a group whose combined technical and commercial judgement is not easily replicated.

Estimates of what that $100,000 became run into the billions. Those estimates move with the share price and with assumptions about what was sold and when, so this page does not assert a current value. The relevant, stable fact is the entry price relative to everything that followed.

Where sources disagree

What we do not claim

Individual amounts for the other Google angels vary between accounts — Bezos is widely reported at $250,000, while figures for Cheriton and Shriram differ by source, and at least one book reports several of the angels putting in identical sums. We state only the figures that are consistently reported.

For your own cheque

What an angel takes from this

This is the cleanest example of domain expertise as the actual edge. Bechtolsheim could evaluate the technology in minutes because he had spent twenty years building adjacent systems. An angel without that background looking at the same demonstration would have needed weeks and would still have been guessing.
The practical instruction is not "decide faster". It is to invest where your own judgement is genuinely better than the market's, and to be honest about where it is not. Most angels have exactly one or two domains where they can see what a generalist cannot, and those are where their money belongs.
It is also worth noticing what the story omits. A great many technically brilliant people wrote cheques into 1998 internet companies that returned nothing. The distribution is what it is; this is the tail.

Checked, not remembered

Sources

Every figure on this page is traceable to published reporting. Where credible sources disagree we say so above rather than picking the most quotable number, and we do not state what a stake is “worth today” — that moves with the share price and is stale the moment it is written.

GoogleHow we started and where we are todayabout.google ↗Stanford EngineeringAndy Bechtolsheim: Hero talks innovation, success and engineeringengineering.stanford.edu ↗

The mechanics

Terms this story turns on

Valuation capThe maximum valuation at which your SAFE or convertible note will convert into shares, no matter how high the company's next round is priced.SAFEA short agreement in which you pay cash now for shares issued later, at a price set by a future priced round — with no interest, no maturity date and no repayment.DilutionThe reduction in your percentage ownership when a company issues new shares — a mathematical certainty in venture that reduces your slice while, in a good outcome, increasing its value.