San Francisco | Andreas Bechtolsheim doesn’t like to waste time. The entrepreneur made one of the most celebrated investments in the history of Silicon Valley – the initial $US100,000 that bankrolled a search engine called Google in 1998 – while on the way to work one morning. It took just a few minutes.

Twenty one years later, Bechtolsheim may have seized a different kind of opportunity. He got a phone call about the imminent sale of a tech company and allegedly traded on the confidential information, according to charges filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The profit for a few minutes of work: $US415,726.