Back in 1998, David Cheriton cut Larry Page and Sergey Brin a check for $100,000 to help them get their new company Google off the ground. Now, that early investment in Google is worth more than $1 billion.
Cheriton, who still works as a computer science professor at Stanford, opened up to Bloomberg West on Tuesday about why he decided to invest in Google early on and what impressed him most about the company's founders.
"Actually, the first time they really impressed me as entrepreneurs was when I took them in to see John Doerr at Kleiner Perkins," Cheriton said in the interview. "To see two young guys fresh out of our PhD program go toe-to-toe with one of the most recognized venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, if not the entire world, really impressed me that they could handle the business side as well."
Cheriton also explained why he thought Sergey Brin was more likely to be Google's CEO than Larry Page, at least as of a few years ago.
"Sergey has always been a little more outspoken and aggressive about what they were going to," he said, "whereas I think Larry is a little more thoughtful and a little bit introverted and so, he seemed more like the scientist type than the CEO type to me."