
When Google Wanted To Sell To Excite For Under $1 Million — And They Passed - wherespaul
http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/29/google-excite/
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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.

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willheim
Who 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.

~~~
redstripe
They may not have had revenue in 1999 but they were by far the best search
engine. Prior to discovering them I was using altavista, lycos, and when
really frustrated, a random 3rd search engine. I quickly switched to exclusive
google use within a very short time of finding the service. This was a company
to be excited about because they were miles ahead of the entrenched
competition.

If excite didn't see value in them it's because they were too busy pushing
their portal garbage (along with everyone else).

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hajrice
Even 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.

~~~
dasil003
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.

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ryanwaggoner
It would have been funny for the Google guys to send George Bell a really nice
bottle of wine on the Google IPO date with a note that said "Thanks
George...we couldn't have done it without you."

Or would this have just been mean?

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kul
What's also interesting to think of is all the other potential multi-billion
dollar businesses that do not exist today because of early acquisitions?
Delicious? We sold Auctomatic at a time when building on the ebay platform and
ecommerce generally was seen as 'dirty' (this was 2007-2008), I often wonder
what we could have made of it if we'd stuck with it.

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tokenadult
An 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.

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kloncks
I want to know _why_ Google wanted to sell to Excite.

~~~
hajrice
My guess is that they were a bit stressed out that they weren't really hitting
jackpot at the time, especially as they are today. It was early 1999, they
didn't really have _that_ many good income sources at that moment(if I'm not
mistaken, they didn't even have Adsense launched back then).

They went to these guys wanting to cash out and probably lay low for a year or
two ... after which I'm sure they'd be back on their feet with something new.

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mrbird
What 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?

~~~
gsmaverick
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.

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guelo
Thank goodness they didn't sell. Their rejection narrowly avoided them
becoming another "dipshit" company and forced them to build something great.

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cvg
nice example of how luck is a factor in business success

