Would you buy Google for $750,000?

byiZED

560 followers

9 years ago

Hi,

This isn’t a joke! But that was In 1999.

Read through for a funny little bit of cyber history.

Back then, Google was not the juggernaut that it has now become.

In 1999, during the heyday of the Dot.Com bubble, there were roughly 10 million websites (compared to estimated 1 billion+ today!). Hard to believe, but Google was then in Beta version! Yahoo was number 1, dominating the scene with Altavista and Excite (the same Excite, to be acquired by Ask)

Anyway, after they created Google in 1996 (under the odd name BackRub), founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, then still students, deemed their project too time-consuming, which would be detrimental to their studies. So they called Excite, trying to sell their business for the measly price of $1 million (well, that’s still pretty big for most of us :)

In what may be qualified as the worst business decision ever, Excite’s CEO, George Bell, rejected the offer... even Page and Brin were willing to drop the price down to $750,000!

Now, Alphabet Inc., an umbrella under which all things Google gravitate, is the most valuable conglomerate in the world, worth about $ 500 billion! *

*$498 billion to be exact ($2 billion becomes suddenly unnoticeable :)

Why am I telling you this? I don’t know, maybe because I’ve just bought a website when the opportunity cropped up, so nobody can call me dumb if ever it develops Google syndrome :)

Stay tuned!

ZED.