Former Excite.com CEO Explains Why He 'Passed On' Acquiring Google For Under $1 Million

In 1999, Google Inc GOOGL founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page wanted to sell the company for less than $1 million as it was taking too much of their ‘study time'. However, the CEO of Excite.com, the company they wanted to sell Google to, rejected their offer.

George Bell, Former Excite.com CEO was on CNBC recently to discuss why he passed on the opportunity to acquire Google.

"My recollection is that the price was closer to $250,000 to $500,000 and 1 percent of Excite, which was then a public company, but the issue it's interesting is not the terms," Bell said.

"Larry Page actually insisted on one deal point, which was that we would have to rip out all of the Excite search technology and replace it with Google. At the time, Google was a company of 5 or 6 people."

He continued, "For about a month we ran common and arcane search terms, side by side, produced by the Excite engine and by the Google engine and we looked at the results and we said to ourselves, ‘are there any material differences here?' and we actually concluded that there really weren't and Google was very, very young in those days."

"But in any case, we concluded that the substantial differences were very few and we passed on the chance to buy it because it was my decision, I suppose in the end as the CEO, that we would have actually to rip out a lot of the central parts of our culture as a company. We were really a technology search driven company and I didn't feel that that was a people risk at the time that I wanted to take."