[ChainOfFools]

Google itself, according to the opinions of its own creators (and vinod khosla who was urging them to sell it), if their own actions are anything to judge them by:

> In 1999, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were looking to sell Google to search engine Excite for about $750,000. But Excite's CEO George Bell passed on the offer

And you can add the CEO of excite to that list too I suppose. So pretty much a short list of the who's who of the internet in 1999 didn't think Google was worth even a million dollars.

I would enjoy finding a collection of backstage tales like this that collectively serve to undermine the broad and unsubstantiated belief - our current generation's disguised version of the great man theory - that Superior Visionaries always know just how dominant their ideas will be (and who deserve to be proportionately rewarded for their vision and boldness and risk-taking blah blah blah) to the humble desk jockeys and implementers who end up working for them.