High-Profit IPO Strategies: Finding Breakout IPOs for Investors and Traders, 3rd Edition

Chapter 22

Secondary Markets, Angel Investing, and Crowd Funding

In the early 1980s, David Cheriton joined Stanford University as a professor in the computer science department. While there, he made significant breakthroughs in areas like communications and distributed systems. But along the way, he also created several companies, such as Granite Systems, which eventually sold to Cisco for $220 million.

Then in 1998 he met two Stanford students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. He liked their idea for a search engine, called Google, and even invested some money in the company. Yes, it turned out to be one of the most successful transactions in history. In fact, Cheriton’s investment, which came to $100,000, turned into more than $1 billion.

But this ...