1999: Offer by Google to sell itself rejected by Excite
According to Justin Rohrlich, writing for Minyanville.com, later 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 $180 billion company by 2010 was labeled by Rohrlich a "stupid business decision".[3]
