Man who funded Google - Kavitark Ram Shriram

 

                            

It all began in Stanford University where Larry Page and Sergey Brin were the PhD students. They were working on their PhD project based on PageRank algorithm. An Indian-American Rajeev Motwani was one of the co-authors of their paper on PageRank algorithm. When Page and Brin decided to float their own company, they badly needed funds. It was then that they approached Kavitark Ram Shriram, an Indo-American Venture Capitalist. Ram signed the first cheque to fund Google. It was of about five-lakh dollars. And thus was born Google with Ram as the founding director and board member.

Kavitark Ram was born in Bangalore and raised in Chennai. His father passed away when he was three. Shriram holds a bachelor's degree in Mathematics from Loyola College in Madras University. Ram is also an MBA from University of Michigan's Ross School of Business. After moving to the U.S. he joined Netscape in 1994. Later he became the president of Junglee, an online comparison shopping firm acquired by Amazon in 1998. Ram then joined as vice president in Amazon and worked closely with Jeff Bezos. He left Amazon and since then has been investing in technology startups through his firm, Sherpalo Ventures. Today, he is the billionaire angel investor in the Silicon Valley in US.

Kavitark Ram is currently 68 plus and resides in Menlo Park (California). He owns around 3.4 million shares of Google. According to Forbes, his net worth is 230 crores USD. He serves on the boards of several companies and also on the Stanford Health Care Board of Trustees. In 2014, Ram and his wife donated $61 million to bioengineering school at Stanford University.

Ram is very much fascinated by Steve Jobs and regards him as one of the greatest over-achievers of our times. He believes that the future revolutions would happen over the mobile phones.