Seven Hundred and Fifty Thousand Dollars: The Day Excite Said No to Google

In early 1999, two Stanford PhD students walked into the offices of Excite — then one of the most-visited websites on the internet — and offered to sell their search engine for less than a million dollars. The CEO, a former Emmy-winning television producer named George Bell, turned them down. The students were Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The search engine was Google.

This episode reconstructs that decision from the inside: who was actually in the room, what the real sticking point was (it wasn't the price), the one board member who pushed back and got nowhere, and what became of Excite in the thirty months that followed — from a forty-billion-dollar market cap to Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Then the episode turns to the question that's harder to answer than it looks: would Google have survived inside Excite anyway? The evidence, from Wired's 2002 postmortem to Bell's own 2015 CNBC account, points somewhere more complicated than the headline suggests.