The Crazy Story of Google’s 7 Angel Investors

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
Today, I'm going to tell you about seven strangers who made the greatest investment of all time.
I'm just going to put my finger to your lips and just say, let me cook here, because I got something for you. I'm just going to, I'm going to take you down a road here. All right, so I've been down this rabbit hole, dude, for the last, I want to call it six hours preparing for this podcast, because I just got obsessed with the random story and lore of the first people that invested in Google. This is crazy. So this is the story of all the people who invested early at Google, and the lessons from this are not about investing in Google. This was like 20 years ago, but how crazy the world of angel investing is, and how much you can almost create your own luck. I want to show you how these people created their own luck step-by-step. So first, let me show you something. And if you're on iTunes, go to YouTube right now. You're going to want to see my little PowerPoint I made for Sam. All right, Sam, check this out. Do you recognize this building?

**Shaan Puri** (1:06)
Just probably something in downtown Palo Alto.

**Sam Parr** (1:09)
What you're looking at is 165 University Avenue, also known as the Lucky Office, also known as the Karma Building. You might recognize a little better here when you see one of the companies that was started here. So Google was started here. Before Google was started there, PayPal was started there. Before PayPal was started there, Logitech was started there. After Google was started there, a company called Danger was started there, sold for 500 million to Microsoft by the guy who created Android right after that. This office is legendary.

**Shaan Puri** (1:38)
Who's in there now?

**Sam Parr** (1:40)
Well, it's had a little bit of a cold streak recently. It's like Ed Sheeran says, Ed Sheeran believes that rooms have songs. He's like, once a studio has been mined by four or five great artists, it loses its magic. There's no more songs left in the room. That's kind of what's happened to this office now.
All right. I want to take you through the first few people that invested in Google and how it happened. Do you recognize this guy here? Do you recognize either of these two guys?

**Shaan Puri** (2:08)
The guy on the left is Sergey. He's one of the founders. Is that Sergey or the other guy, Larry?

**Sam Parr** (2:13)
Yeah, that's Sergey.

**Shaan Puri** (2:14)
Sergey. And the guy on the right, is that Eric Schmidt?

**Sam Parr** (2:16)
It's not Eric Schmidt. It is a guy named Andy Bechtolsheim. Does that name sound familiar?

**Shaan Puri** (2:23)
No.

**Sam Parr** (2:23)
Maybe if you just look at these murdered out guys from the war. These murdered out red Corvettes from the early 90s here. This might ring a bell or two. What you're looking at are some of the OGs of Silicon Valley. These are the founders of Sun Microsystems. Do you know what Sun Microsystems did?

**Shaan Puri** (2:40)
It was one of the first big companies, was it making microchips?

**Sam Parr** (2:44)
Workstations, computers basically. Okay. And they made their own chips also. They ended up making chips. They ended up making their own operating system. They ended up doing a lot of things. These guys were like the OGs of the OG. That first guy, the Indian guy, that's Vinod Khosla. So that's Vinod Khosla, there's Bill Joy, there's Andy, and then there's Scott McNeely. All right, so these are the four founders of Sun.

**Shaan Puri** (3:02)
Dude, by the way, for the record, they look dope.

**Sam Parr** (3:04)
They look dope as hell. And I just want to say-

**Shaan Puri** (3:06)
The Corvette, the Flex, that doesn't exist anymore. And I think it's fantastic. I think this is great.

**Sam Parr** (3:12)
First of all, they're all on cell phones. Guess what? Cell phones hadn't been invented yet. So I don't even know what they're holding. There's like a corded phone that gets running into their car with the little, like the spiral cord. Anyways, these guys are awesome. So Andy wakes up one morning and he's got an email in his inbox. And it's from two Stanford students, Larry and Sergey, the founders of Google. And they're pitching him on an idea for a new kind of search engine. You know, the way that search engines worked at the time was there were these Ask Jeeves, there was Alta Vista, there was Yahoo, and all of these companies back in the early 90s, they were search engines that had some combination of manual curation. So they had like editors picking what goes up front for people.