Indian in Google bounty hunt

By siliconindia staff writer   |   Thursday, 06 May 2004, 19:30 IST
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BANGALORE: It was a chance meeting in an elevator in Stanford in 1999 with techies Larry Page and Sergey Brin that led angel investor K Ram Shriram to invest in their start-up Google. Though there was no money in an Internet search engine those days, the science graduate from Madras University ended up buying a 2.7 per cent stake in the company, making him the sixth largest stakeholder in the privately held company, reports Hindustan Times. It’s time to cash in now. With Google about to hit the market with its IPO, Shriram’s 54 lakh shares are going to fetch him around Rs 500 crore, say industry observers. Shriram earlier worked in a senior capacity at Netscape and later became the founder director of junglee.com, which was subsequently bought by Internet retail biggie Amazon. Shriram could rake it in by tendering his shares in the maiden IPO or by selling his shares in the market after the scrip gets listed on Nasdaq or the New York Stock Exchange — wherever the company decides to list its shares. The long-awaited IPO — though from a non-dividend paying company with aggressive competitors like Yahoo and Microsoft — will be a mix of fresh equity offer as well as sale of shares by the existing private investors. Google proposes to adopt an unusual auction-based public offer to assess the market demand for its shares and to set the issue size and price for retail investors. "It is very likely that the number of shares offered by the selling stockholders will increase if the price range increases in the IPO," states Google Inc in its filing before the Securities and Exchange Commission. Striking gold Angel’s stake: K Ram Shriram bought 2.7% of the start-up Google in 1999. He is now a director Payback time: When the Google IPO hits the market, he could easily make Rs 500 crore Silicon sultan: Shriram is an oldtimer in Silicon Valley. A senior techie in Netscape, he was later a founder director of junglee.com