Jeff Bezos is a top angel |
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Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos is known for a lot things: e-commerce, the Kindle and an enormous laugh. But who knew that the Seattle entrepreneur had developed the Midas touch when it comes to angel investing?
BusinessWeek, working in conjunction with YouNoodle, today released its list of the top 25 tech-oriented angel investors in the U.S. Bezos ranked seventh on the list, boasting 18 angel investments all of which are still alive today.
Here's what BusinessWeek had to say about Bezos, whose Seattle angel deals include Finsphere, Pelago and TeachStreet. But that's not where he's made his money.
The founder of online retail giant Amazon.com invested in the young entrepreneurs Larry Page and Sergey Brin in Google’s early days. It was obviously a good call: The company is now the single most powerful engine of wealth creation in Silicon Valley. Bezos didn’t respond to an e-mail, but he made the investment in the search giant around the same time as Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim, who has said that his Google stake returned more than $1 billion. Bezos’ best shot at reprising a return on that scale may be his investment in Twitter.
Bezos was the only Seattleite to make the list (sorry Paul Allen). And his inclusion is interesting given that nearly all of Bezos' bets as CEO of Amazon.com during the dot-com boom -- remember Kozmo, HomeGrocer.com and Living.com? -- ended in failure.
The angel list was led by tech luminaries such as Chris Dixon, Ron Conway, Reid Hofman, Esther Dyson and Peter Thiel.
Tracking and ranking angel investors is a little bit like herding cats. But YouNoodle ranked the angels based on the success of past investments, leadership and diversity and reach of the portfolios.
Full list here, and story explaining the methodology here.
Related story: "Alliance of Angels posts record investment totals for 2009"
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