EXCITE Rejected Chance To Buy Google For $1m
 

This is a story not much known about but it's been confirmed quite recently. Some years ago (Khosla, an Indian billionaire VC) was helping GOOGLE to sell their entire business to EXCITE for about $1 million dollars. EXCITE turned it down - maybe this is one of the worst decision in corporate history.

Over subsequent years, Excite went to crap. Today GOOGLE is a website everyone knows about and is now worth $167 Billion dollars.

When Google Wanted To Sell To Excite For Under $1 Million ? And They Passed | TechCrunch

It's hard to tell what would have happened. It was back in 1999, so lets say Page and Brin sells it to Excite and leave the company and makes something else.. there was no AdSense (release 2003) and AdWords (2000) back then.. not talking about youtube, gmal etc etc

Google was inspired for Adwords by Overture's business model and that's what made Adwords such a big success and I think a high chance that model would have been adopted. However, agreed that its very difficult to know how things would have turned out without recent management.....

What a huge decision, however, if purchased, would excite have been worth so much now as google is. Or would they have made many bad choices & actually created a failure of google :2 cents:

Completely agree, Google today is made up of a very very large team of smart and innovative people.

That's very true but also.... if EXCITE had acquired GOOGLE, the story would have been more about what Excite might have taken out of the market place rather than anything else - simply because an acquisition usually included non-compete legislation and Brin and Page probably would have gone on to do something else.

Which could have meant that quite possibly Page and Brin, in their next business would not have been anywhere near as successful...... but Google would either have been successful or would have died an early death (probably the later).

The way I look at it - net outcome could have been zero for both parties :1orglaugh

Blockbuster had the chance to buy Netflix for very little as well. Same deal not only did they lose out but they eventually were put out of business by them.

Their reason for passing on NetFlix was they believed people ENJOYED the experience of leaving their house and going to rent a movie LOL.

i feel more bad for the guy that sold 10% of Apple for like 600 bucks

Damn straight and we know a song about that:

https://gfy.com/fucking-around-and-pr...le-1976-a.html

But he didn't really have a chose right?

Excite disappeared and Google would have gone with it if they'd owned it. Easy as that to predict IMHO.

god know what would be with that "google"

i don't know - can you force someone to sell his shares?

Excite managed to fuck up everything they touched. They owned a major web portal and were one of the first cable internet providers (ISP) in the USA. They went bankrupt ...