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You don't need to be an entrepreneur like Jan Koum or a venture capitalist like Sequoia's lead partner for WhatsApp, Jim Goetz, to hit the jackpot. Angel investors can win big as well. In his first year of angel investing, digital media entrepreneur Jason Calacanis invested less than $100,000. Although he bet on only five startups, he was good at picking winners. One of his investments was Thumbtack, an online marketplace that was valued at over $1 billion in 2015. Another was a new private car service that customers could summon using their mobile phone. It was called Uber. The return multiple from the first two years of my investing is actually 1,500 times, an astonished Calacanis observed in 2017. His returns may seem absurd, and they are, but he is not alone. In 1990, St. Francis High School in Mountain View, California, the same Mountain View where Jan Koum later founded WhatsApp, began making small investments in local startups at the urging of two parents who worked in venture capital. It turned out to be more lucrative than a bake sale or a church carnival. In 1996, the Catholic school made a $2.1 million return on a $25,000 investment in a high-tech startup named Advanced Fiber. In 2012, lightning struck again. St. Francis invested $15,000 in a messaging app created by three fraternity brothers at nearby Stanford University. When Snapchat went public in 2017, St. Francis owned stock worth $34 million, over 2,200 times its initial investment. The social impact of the world's fastest-growing startups goes far beyond the wealth they create for lucky nonprofits like St. Francis. Their products reduce drunk driving, reverse chronic disease, increase access to education, and make it easy and free to communicate with almost anyone in the world. They also create more jobs than the Fortune 500. In some countries, those jobs are life-changing. Rapidly growing startups like Alibaba, PayPal, and Cisco helped power a global economic boom that, according to the World Bank, reduced the worldwide poverty rate from 34.8% in 1990 to 10.7% in 2016. It's an amazing but true testament to the power of free enterprise. Over 1 billion people escaped extreme poverty in just 25 years. Even if you didn't escape poverty, your life was almost certainly transformed by the world's fastest-growing startups during the past three decades. Their products play a huge role in our daily lives, from our morning cup of coffee, to the technology we use at work, to the streaming videos we watch before falling asleep at night. It's easy to forget how many aspects of modern life originated with a few intrepid startup founders brainstorming around a kitchen table or tinkering in a garage.
