"The frontman of the Black Eyed Peas spent the early 2000s driving his pop-rap group into the cultural zeitgeist and plowing some of those earnings into budding tech startups in the Bay Area. He joined one of Twitter's early funding rounds, and he put money into Tesla before Elon Musk became CEO, the musician told SFGATE in a wide-ranging interview at San Francisco's Dreamforce conference on Wednesday."
"And he had an offer from the new-to-the-scene Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky, to put $200,000 into the first major funding round of his budding San Francisco startup. Will.i.am had questions for Chesky, he recounted on Wednesday. He'd been getting "pampered" in luxe hotels with the group and wondered if Airbnb would provide amenities. Room service? No. Concierges? No. "OK, what about spas and massages and s-t?" he remembers asking Chesky, who shrugged away the question: "'Nope. Nope, this is just a house.'""
Will.i.am invested in early funding rounds of Twitter and Tesla and later placed capital into startups such as Pinterest, OpenAI, Anthropic, Dropbox, Hugging Face, and Runway. In 2009 he declined a $200,000 opportunity to invest in Airbnb after questioning whether the service offered hotel-style amenities; the pitch was described as "just a house." A friend later estimated that the foregone shares could now be worth $3 billion to $5 billion, or up to $10 billion with avoided dilution. Will.i.am continues to pursue tech interests with his startup FYI.AI using Nvidia chips.
Read at SFGATE
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