An Environment for Innovation

Entrepreneurs thrive and prosper where there are other entrepreneurs to nurture them.

And when it comes to serial entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs who have started company after company, California reigns supreme, with more entrepreneurs per square mile than any place on earth. And with those serial entrepreneurs comes venture capital. Seed money. One of those serial entrepreneurs, Sun founder Andy Bechtolsheim, put up Google's first seed money. Rumor has it that after talking to the Google founders for only a few hours, he wrote them a check for $100,000—but they couldn't deposit it immediately because they hadn't yet filed the legal papers to establish their company.

If the story is true, Bechtolsheim did more than give ...

Get The Google Way now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.