Google Envy

The Mercury news did a great job of dissecting Google’s S1 to determine how much employees would make out of the Google IPO.

As it turns out, employees hold options on 16.6 million shares. If Google ends up going public at $100 per share, that’s $1.7 billion dollars of paper wealth, spread between 1,900 employees. That’s nearly $1,000,000 per employee. I shudder to think what that will do to the real estate market in Palo Alto!

I have the fortune (good or ill–you can decide) to have personally known a number of Stanford folks before they became centi-millionaires, including Google’s employee #1 and original CTO, and most of the founding team at PayPal.

While it’s hard not to feel envious, I’ve eventually settled on the following rationalization: Regardless of my own financial situation, I’d like as many of my friends as possible to become absurdly wealthy. A) That’s just one more potential angel investor; B) That’s one less person that will ever ask me for help or money; and C) Hey, guess who’s picking up the check the next time we go out to dinner!