When Google Wanted To Sell To Excite For Under $1 Million — And They Passed • Hacker News Board

Re: When Google Wanted To Sell To Excite For Under $1 Million — And They Passed

#21

Post by ryanwaggoner » Thu, Sep 30, 2010, 12:16 AM UTC

kls wrote: post #20

auxbuss wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

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 t…

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.

Re: When Google Wanted To Sell To Excite For Under $1 Million — And They Passed

#22

Post by another_ali » Thu, Sep 30, 2010, 12:25 AM UTC

kls wrote: post #20

auxbuss wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

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 t…

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!

Re: When Google Wanted To Sell To Excite For Under $1 Million — And They Passed

#23

Post by tapp » Thu, Sep 30, 2010, 2:10 AM UTC

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #10

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 $16…

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.

Re: When Google Wanted To Sell To Excite For Under $1 Million — And They Passed

#24

Post by geophile » Thu, Sep 30, 2010, 3:06 AM UTC

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #10

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 $16…

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

Re: When Google Wanted To Sell To Excite For Under $1 Million — And They Passed

#25

Post by kls » Thu, Sep 30, 2010, 3:14 AM UTC

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #21

kls wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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.

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.

Re: When Google Wanted To Sell To Excite For Under $1 Million — And They Passed

#26

Post by kls » Thu, Sep 30, 2010, 3:23 AM UTC

kloncks wrote: post #6

I want to know why Google wanted to sell to Excite.

Well Google truly is a garage story. Google the search engine existed before Google the company. If my memory servers me correctly there new found success caught them off guard, it happened faster than they expected. They had to incorporate and scramble for funds just to keep up with the volume that was increasing day by day. I would imagine that a sale would net them the infrastructure they desperately needed.