Seedcorn Capital

The story of Jeff Bezos’ $250,000 investment into Google in 1998 makes for amazing reading. Whilst this story has been covered across traditional print and the web, I concluded that this was worth re-publishing for those who have not read about this. I have tried to add some flesh to the bones, and further reading has revealed that amazingly Bezo’s is also reported to be an early investor in Twitter! I wonder if he got the same terms as his initial investment in Google! For those who have not heard of Jeff Bezo, he is the founder of Amazon and he has a net worth of c.$10 billion.

In 1998 when Larry Page’s and Sergey Brin’s (the founders of Google) offices were based in a Californian garage, Bezos invested $250,000 into the search engine in a c.$1 million investment round. When Google went public in 2004, that $250,000 investment translated into 3.3 million shares of Google stock. At Google’s initial public offering that represented a position worth over $280 million! Bezos does not disclose how many of those shares he still holds, at the current price of Google stock they would represent an investment position of over $1.5 billion. Even Michael Moritz would envy the stage and scale of this investment.