“I got into Google by accident,” he said. “I was in a restaurant playing with some kids.” The kids happened to belong to a high-profile investor whom Shaq declines to name.
“He said, ‘Shaq, I like you, I got something for you,’” the basketball star recalls. “I looked at it.”
Shaq already knew about Google, and it seemed like a good business to him. He remembered hearing Amazon founder Jeff Bezos say that, if you invest in things that make the world a better place, it’ll always be a good deal. A search engine, type in anything you want, and it pops up? That’s gonna be the business of the future, Shaq thought. After his agent introduced him to fellow Google investor Ron Conway—a pioneer of Silicon Valley angel investing thanks to his early outlays in the search giant and others including PayPal, Twitter, Dropbox, and Airbnb—Shaq plowed in some cash. (Conway politely declined to be interviewed.)
Google went public on August 19, 2004, jumping 18% in its first day of trading; Shaq wouldn’t reveal the precise valuation at which he got into Google, but it was well ahead of regular investors. Within a decade, a $1 investment had turned into $15. Shaq had figured out one of the key advantages of his fame: leveraging celebrity to get in on winning companies before they’re publicly traded.
“It was presented to me, I knew it was gonna hit,” he explained. “My only regret is that I wish I would have bought more.”
In the years that followed, Shaq became a serial endorser-owner, appearing in commercials for companies including Lyft, Ring, and Vitaminwater. Why? “They gave us a lot of stock,” he said. As Ring founder Jamie Siminoff sought local subsidies to deploy his product as a crime-stopping tool—the company touted one pilot program in Los Angeles that slashed burglaries by “as much as 55%,” though that number was questioned in a report by the MIT Technology Review—Shaq’s rolodex from his law enforcement days proved perhaps even more valuable than his fame. If Siminoff happened to be talking to Shaq about an initiative in the Miami area, for example, his biggest investor would hand him the phone moments later—and the city’s chief of police would be on the line.
Meanwhile, Ring had developed an even more high-profile admirer: Amazon, which started investing in Ring after turning its attention to Alexa and the connected home in late 2013. The two companies worked together on a number of products. Though Siminoff wasn’t really looking to sell, he changed his mind when Amazon offered more than $1 billion.
Boosted by that deal, Shaq’s fortune has been estimated well into the hundreds of millions, though he won’t get into detail on precise amounts. “My mother would be disappointed if I talk about numbers,“ he said. “It makes it seem like bragging, and I don’t want to do that.”
But like an increasing number of his peers, he confirms that even as a retired athlete, his best years in the venture capital world now rival the best years of his playing career. Even if he won’t say it, Chris Rock probably would: Shaq’s investments have finally vaulted him from rich to wealthy.
Excerpted from A-list Angels: How a Band of Actors, Artists, and Athletes Hacked Silicon Valley by Zack O’Malley Greenburg, published on March 10 by Little, Brown and Company. Copyright © 2020 by Zack O’Malley Greenburg. Reprinted with permission of Little, Brown and Company. All rights reserved.
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