Sergey Brin and Larry Page turned to Cheriton for advice on how to find a way to monetize Google's algorithms. He helped with advice and money

The sun sets behind the horizon and its rays, with the last of their strength, illuminate the pages of the Superyachts magazine, which lies on the table in the office of Stanford University professor David Sheriton. He looks at the bright pictures on expensive paper without much interest. “I once read that a yacht is such a whirlpool where all your money gets sucked in,” says Cheriton and throws it aside with irritation. “I don’t understand why they keep sending me such things.”

But the magazine’s publishers understand this very well: Cheriton is incredibly rich. Rich enough to afford, for example, the April Fool, a 60-meter luxury yacht worth $60 million, or the yacht Ulysses, owned by a New Zealand billionaire, put up for sale for $49 million. Moreover, Cheriton can buy both. But he doesn't like yachts. With a net worth of $1.3 billion, Cheriton continues to work full-time at Stanford. His main area of scientific interest is computer technology. If you ask him to remember his last big expenses, he will talk about buying a Honda Odyssey for his children and a spontaneous trip to Hawaii, about which he is still a little “ashamed.” His only expensive hobby? Investments in startups.

In total, he has already invested more than $50 million of his own funds in technology companies. His best deal was a $100,000 check he wrote to Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998. Today, Cheriton's stake in the Internet giant is valued at $1 billion. "I feel like even though I've been a very successful investor, I still don't know how to spend money on myself," he says.

Cheriton, who will soon be 62, is not very fond of publicity. You won't find him on Facebook or LinkedIn. He doesn't even have Twitter, a huge rarity by Silicon Valley standards. He likes his lifestyle. He still drives an old Volkswagen Vanagon, bought long before Google, and has lived in a small house in Palo Alto for the past 30 years.

As a person who works 12 hours a day, Cheriton understands that there is nothing more valuable than time. Therefore, most of his investments go into startups that optimize human life. His new company, Arista Networks, is developing technology that can reduce server time delays by several times. This allows Wall Street traders to make trades ahead of their competitors, and doctors to decipher the genome of patients in real time. Arista, founded in 2004, now has revenues of about $200 million. “Imagine if our cars went ten times faster. It would completely change the world. That’s what Arista does,” says Cheriton.

Cheriton's parents - two Canadian engineers - always tried not to impose their will on him. According to his father, Ross Cheriton, David grew up as an “independent” and “absolutely self-sufficient” child who had little interest in sports or other children. Even if the last ones were his siblings. His parents did not object when David decided to skip his penultimate year of school, considering the curriculum too “backward.” Cheriton had a wide range of interests. So when he failed to get into the University of Alberta's music department to study classical guitar, he decided to focus on his second passion: mathematics. As a result, he received a bachelor's degree from the University of British Columbia and then a graduate degree from the University of Waterloo.

In 1981, in search of funding for his research, Cheriton ended up at Stanford. It was there that he first met a brilliant German graduate student, Andy Bechtolsheim, who asked him to write software for his project, a powerful computer called SUN (Stanford University Network). In 1982, Bechtolsheim left Stanfdord to found Sun Microsystems. Cheriton, however, decided to continue his scientific career, although increasingly his students and colleagues left the university in the hope of building their own technology businesses.

In the mid-90s, Bechtolsheim said goodbye to Sun Microsystems, which by that time had become a multibillion-dollar corporation, and began looking for a partner for his next startup. He opened his old address book and called Cheriton. Together they founded Granite Systems, a company that specialized in developing Ethernet networking solutions. A year later, Cisco shelled out $220 million for Granite. In 2001, they launched Kealia, which designed networking equipment. Sun Microsystems bought it in 2004 for $120 million. In between work on Granite and Kealia, Cheriton and Bechtolsheim each invested $100,000 in Google. The best investment of their life.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page were not Cheriton's students, but they sought his advice in the hope that he could help them find a way to monetize the algorithms behind Google. Cheriton was ready to share not only his wisdom, but also his money: after the sale of Granite, his fortune instantly increased by $20 million. “It was not so easy to find investors then. I decided it shouldn’t be such a problem,” Cheriton recalls. Bechtolsheim was present when Cheriton met with the founders of the Internet search engine. It only took him a few minutes to fall in love with Google's elegance and appreciate Brin and Page's plan to charge people when they clicked on advertising links.

Although Bechtolsheim calls himself and Cheriton “accidental investors,” many disagree that their success is due solely to luck. “They're just so smart and creative that it makes it much easier for other engineers to share their ideas with them,” says Ron Conway, a prominent Silicon Valley angel investor whom Cheriton introduced to Page and Brin.

“I believe that if you are trying to create something that is truly useful for the world, the market will eventually reward you,” says Cheriton. That's why he invested in Google and that's why he stays away from social media.

Cheriton and Bechtolsheim have already invested about $100 million in Arista. CEO Jayshri Ullal says Arista finally turned an operating profit this year. It is possible that Arista may enter an IPO in the near future. “Sometimes it takes quite a long time to do something truly innovative,” says Cheriton.

The world's richest professor: how David Cheriton became Google's first investor