Andreas Bechtolsheim made a legendary investment in Google that changed the world and made him billions. Then he threw it away for an insider trade worth far less.
| Andreas Bechtolsheim doesn’t like to waste time. The entrepreneur made one of the most celebrated investments in the history of Silicon Valley – the initial $US100,000 that bankrolled a search engine called Google in 1998 – while on the way to work one morning. It took just a few minutes.
Bechtolsheim was not trading for himself, the SEC complaint said. He instead used the accounts of an associate and of a relative. Perhaps this was subterfuge, or perhaps it was a gift. The investor and his lawyer didn’t respond to emails for comment. Minutes later, he bought shares in a third drug firm. When the deal for Medivation was announced, the third company became a hot prospect, and its shares soared, too. Panuwat’s profit: $US107,066.
Bechtolsheim grew up in rural West Germany, developing an interest at a very early age in how things worked. “I spent all my free time just building stuff,” he once said. Asked in a 2015 oral history what his social life was like during Sun’s early years, Bechtolsheim replied: “Social life?“I didn’t have any social life. I was working day and night on designing new workstations and building the company. That was the only thing that mattered to me at the time.”
Page and Brin couldn’t deposit Bechtolsheim’s check for a month because Google did not have a bank account. When Google went public in 2004, that $US100,000 investment was worth at least $US1 billion. Arista and the other company, which was not named in court documents, had a history of sharing confidential information under nondisclosure agreements.
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