Economics, Business, Money, Finance : The worst decision in business history

The worst decision in business history

Exite.com was once one of the biggest websites on the internet. In 1999 the creators of Google wanted to sell them their website for $750,000. Excite turned it down. Today Google is worth 2 trillion dollars. Excite is worth 10 dollars.

According to Justin Rohrlich, in 1999 two graduate students at Stanford University, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, decided that Google, the search engine they had developed, was taking up time they should have been using to study. They went to Bell and offered it to him for $1 million, but Bell rejected the offer, and later threw Vinod Khosla, one of Excite's venture capitalists, out of his office after he had negotiated Brin and Page down to $750,000. Excite's refusal to buy what became a $900 billion company by 2019 was labeled by Rohrlich a "stupid business decision". In a 2014 podcast and later again to CNBC, then-CEO of Excite, George Bell, said that the deal fell apart because Larry Page wanted Excite's search technologies to be replaced by Google's, to which Bell did not agree on.

Re: The worst decision in business history

Hey, ten dollars is ten dollars.
Not as bad but Blockbuster turning down the chance to buy NetFlix is another one.
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