World's largest angel investor
Emailed on March 13th 2020 in The Friday Forward
This week Vanity Fair published an interesting piece on hands-down the largest angel investor ever: Shaq.
Shaq has built an empire inside and outside of basketball. Over the years he's accumulated a slew of academic degrees—and plenty of cash. He earned nearly $300 million in his two-decade basketball career and as much as $27.7 million in a single year. He also managed to find time to work as an actor (playing the titular 5,000-year-old genie in the film Kazaam) and a rapper (he released four studio albums featuring songs including “Shoot Pass Slam” and “I’m Outstanding.”)
Not just that, he built a venture capital portfolio that includes investments in Vitaminwater and Ring, as well as pieces of multi-billion-dollar companies like Google and Lyft, long before they went public.
My favorite snippet from the piece: “I got into Google by accident,” he said. “I was in a restaurant playing with some kids.” The kids happened to belong to a high-profile investor whom Shaq declines to name.
“He said, ‘Shaq, I like you, I got something for you,’” the basketball star recalls. “I looked at it.”
After connecting with Silicon Valley legend, Ron Conway, who had also invested in the deal, Shaq made a Shaq-sized investment.