As TechCrunch's Disrupt conference starts to wind down, Silicon Valley investor Vinod Khosla provided some interesting insight into the early days of the dot-com boom.
Khosla was a partner at venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins, who backed web-portal Excite in early 1999. At the time, Google was just starting to find its feet and was busy scouring the market for investors.
Apparently the CEO of Excite was offered the opportunity to purchase the search start-up for the knock-down price of $1 million, which he turned down. After discussions with Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Khosla managed to convince the pair to go back to Excite with an offer of only $750,000. Obviously, the proposal was rejected again, and the rest is history.
Fast forward a little over a decade and Google's market capitalisation is estimated at $167 billion, while Excite was purchased by Ask Jeeves in 2004.
As ever, hindsight is 20:20.
In other Google news, company VP Marissa Mayer announced that Google Instant was getting a few upgrades, as well as being rolled out into new territories. Keyboard navigation will be introduced in the next few days, alongside instant results for new portals, including news and video. Twelve new countries will also be getting access to the revamped search site, including Canada, Belgium, Ireland, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Mexico and Switzerland.
