D avid Cheriton is a Canadian computer scientist, mathematician, and billionaire venture capitalist. He is a tenured professor emeritus at Stanford University in the computer science department, where he has mentored numerous successful students and founded several companies. He is most famous for his incredible foresight in writing one of the very first checks to Google.

In 1998, two of his PhD students at Stanford, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, came to him with their idea for a new search engine. Cheriton, along with Andy Bechtolsheim, wrote a seed-stage check for $100,000 to the two founders. This single investment in the fledgling company, then called Google, has since grown into a multi-billion dollar fortune. Despite his immense wealth, Cheriton is famously frugal, known for his simple lifestyle. He has continued to be an active academic and an investor in other technology startups.