Answer: Excite
In the early days of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin severely undervalued their budding organization. The search engine and information behemoth Google, with an estimated current net worth of 300 billion dollars, was once put on the bargaining table in discussions with rival search engine Excite for a paltry million dollars. Excite CEO George Bell rejected the offer and, even after the duo countered with an offer of $750,000, he still turned them down.
So what would motivate Page and Brin to even put Google on the table? They worried that tweaking and managing Google was taking too much time away from their research. Today, with Google’s market valuation in the billions of dollars, they have more than enough capital and free time to research whatever their hearts desire.