When Google Wanted To Sell To Excite For Under $1 Million — And They Passed
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Re: When Google Wanted To Sell To Excite For Under $1 Million — And They Passed
#2Even if they did sell, there's a chance that they wouldn't be as successful as today. Perhaps them NOT being locked down by some control-freak VC firm is what lead to increased success ?
Back then, if I'm not mistaken, VC firms (like the one in the story) were much more "controlling" than they are today. So, in my opinion I don't think that Google would have been as successful as they are today.
Re: When Google Wanted To Sell To Excite For Under $1 Million — And They Passed
#3>Whoops. As of today, Google’s market cap stands at $167 billion.
I doubt that if Excite had acquired Google, the market value of a google-integrated Excite would be anywhere near what Google is worth today. I think Google has been so successful because it has been able to do things in it's own unconventional way, and under a more traditional company like Excite, this creative process would have been stifled.
Re: When Google Wanted To Sell To Excite For Under $1 Million — And They Passed
#4What would be really interesting would be to know why they wanted to sell. Did they not see much future in it? Were they simply tired of working on it, after several years in grad school?
Re: When Google Wanted To Sell To Excite For Under $1 Million — And They Passed
#5What would be really interesting would be to know why they wanted to sell. Did they not see much future in it? Were they simply tired of working on it, after several years in grad school?
At the time building search engines wasn't seen as sexy or profitable. I also don't think they had much interest in running as business.
Re: When Google Wanted To Sell To Excite For Under $1 Million — And They Passed
#6I want to know why Google wanted to sell to Excite.
Re: When Google Wanted To Sell To Excite For Under $1 Million — And They Passed
#7An example of Excite's bad business judgment that matches its bad search ranking algorithms of the time.
After edit: not knowing what has motivated the downvotes, I'll note for the record that I was an active researcher on the Web at the time, and right from the beginning it was noticeable that Google returned much better search results than Excite did. Excite had some rules about ranking search results that actively penalized pages with relevant content compiled by page authors who weren't spamming. And despite efforts not to be subject to spamming (Excite was not the worst available choice at the time, and was once one of my top-three search engines), Excite could be fooled by spammers. As soon as Google came on the scene, a lot of serious researchers rapidly abandoned Excite, and Excite certainly suffered from a precipitous drop-off in favorable word of mouth from general consumers once Google was on the scene.
Re: When Google Wanted To Sell To Excite For Under $1 Million — And They Passed
#8Even if they did sell, there's a chance that they wouldn't be as successful as today. Perhaps them NOT being locked down by some control-freak VC firm is what lead to increased success ? Back then, if I'm not mistaken, VC firms (like the one in the story) were much more "controlling" than they are today. So, in my opinion I don't think that Google would have been as successful as they are today.
There's a chance? Remember, Google was years away from their breakthroughs in scalability and AdWords. Excite purchasing Google would have simply killed it before it got off the ground. Larry and Sergey just wanted a payday. They would have stuck around for the requisite 2 years or whatever and then bailed to start something else.
Re: When Google Wanted To Sell To Excite For Under $1 Million — And They Passed
#9Who cares? Google 1999 was not what Google 2010 is. Google 1999 was a slight improvement (yet to be seen) on what Excite had built search engine-wise but not what Excite was portal-wise. Look at their history: http://www.google.com/corporate/history.html
You can see this occurred before the $25m round of financing which Kleiner Perkins was a part of. So at the time it was a money losing PC-Magazine declared "search engine of choice" operating out of a garage competing in a space with Excite, Yahoo, Altavista, and many others. Google was not a business, really, until October 2000 with the launch of the incredibly successful adwords. Prior to that search was a money losing venture.
Re: When Google Wanted To Sell To Excite For Under $1 Million — And They Passed
#10Stories 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.