[ryanwaggoner]

Stories like this always annoy me, because they seem to imply that Google had some special intrinsic value at the time that was worth more than $1m. The Google that we've all been using for the last decade did not exist when this went down, and there's a possibility that the Google that Excite turned down really wasn't worth $1m at the time. The fact that it went on to grow (ie change) over the next decade into a $165b company doesn't imply anything about its worth in 1999.

EDIT: Although, I bet that scooping up the founders would have made it worth it, though their willingness to sell for $750k makes me wonder if they were the visionaries then that they appear to be now.

[auxbuss]

You're only ever a visionary in retrospect. Make that a "confirmed visionary".

Reminds me of a friend of mine when we were younger. When asked what he did, he replied, "I'm a rock start. But nobody knows it yet".

[kls]

I tend to remember that period as search really sucked, Webcrawler, Lycos and the rest where really bad. Alta Vista was the best and it was only the leader by a thin margin.

Anyway, From the day Google hit the market, and their searches actually returning something even remotely close to what you where looking for seemed like voodoo. Google exceeded the "remotely" part by usually hitting the nail on the head. Given the fact that their algorithm was not known it was not being manipulated like people try to do today. Search results where actually better back then then they are today.

Anyway to get to the point, I don't think there where too many people that thought Google was going to be anything short of "the" search engine. At lest those at the grassroot level.

I think this is the case of a executive dismissing the technical merit of a competitors product, when the other offerings where so abominable that technical merit counted.

When things are close you can win out on branding but this was a case of the buggy companies not seeing the horseless carriage decimating their market while the guy on the street could see the advantage of the new offering clearly.

[ryanwaggoner]

Anyway to get to the point, I don't think there where too many people that thought Google was going to be anything short of "the" search engine. At lest those at the grassroot level.

If that was the case, someone would have snatched them up, especially given the ridiculous valuations companies were getting in 1999.

[kls]

By 99 the market was beginning to turn, the acquisition period was behind most companies and it was beginning to look like a duck and cover environment. I would imagine that this is why they decided to pass on the purchase. It was the beginning of the end by that point.

While stocks where still climbing into 2000, I remember venture money becoming very scare in 99. In mid 99 there was a brief downturn and then stock rallied to astronomical levels through the end of 99 into 2000. I remember that brief blip as serving as a writing on the wall that the party was almost over. Things tightened up at a lot of places right after that event.

So while valuations where up, acquisitions and new ventures where down significantly. That was an strange time to be in the industry, because it seemed like everyone knew it was coming, but no one wanted to dare utter it.

[another_ali]

about the voodoo, i only started using google years after googling became synonym for searching the web. i kept using yahoo because yahoo was good!

and when gmail first came and was invite only, it made me resent google even more, they felt snobish!

a long time later i started to like them and ironically, its gmail quality that made me a believer in google

google make most of their money from ads, only time will show how long will they go, not that it matters much, because i believe you dont have to be successful for ever, becoming no 10 after you were no 1 for 20 or so years is ....

well, we can talk about it, but they lived it!

[tapp]

Funny, in contrast I almost always appreciate seeing stories like this, if only because they're good reminders of attribution bias.

Many of the startup entrepreneurs I know spend an unfortunate amount of emotional energy beating up on themselves for not having created Facebook/Twitter/name-your-favorite-uber-success-story here.

It's good to be regularly reminded that smarts and incredible work ethic are necessary but not sufficient for that kind of epic-level startup success.

[geophile]

Sure, hindsight is 20/20. But that same CEO of Excite also paid close to $1B for Blue Mountain.

[bapadna]

their willingness to sell for $750k makes me wonder if they were the visionaries then that they appear to be now.

Or perhaps they had more than one idea, and selling a preliminary collection of search algorithms to reduce personal financial pressure made sense to them given the high-risk nature of the market they were playing in.

[ryanwaggoner]

Yeah, that sounded more derogatory than I meant. I just mean they weren't as invested in the vision of Google as they appear to be now, which I think is part of their value.