{"id":185344,"date":"2011-01-22T02:41:29","date_gmt":"2011-01-22T10:41:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/?p=9310"},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"-0001-11-30T08:00:00","slug":"open-thread-january-22nd-2011","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gnxp.com\/WordPress\/2011\/01\/22\/open-thread-january-22nd-2011\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Thread – January 22nd, 2011"},"content":{"rendered":"

Google is in the news, with Larry Page’s ascension. Generally when I hear people compare Larry Page and Sergey Brin it is Page who is described as the “Big Think” guy. But these guys didn’t always think big. Stupid Business Decisions: Excite Rejects Google’s Asking Price<\/a>:<\/p>\n

In 1999, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google (GOOG), decided that their creation was interfering with their studies and offered it to a slew of companies (including the defunct Alta Vista, which passed, and Yahoo (YHOO), which also passed, but had a strong enough product that they were able to stay afloat with their own technology). An offer was then made to Excite\u2019s George Bell, who deemed the asking price of $1 million too high. Vinod Khosla of Kleiner Perkins went back for another attempt — this time for $750,000 — and was thrown out of Bell\u2019s office.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

George Bell<\/a> still seems to be around. I guess when you achieve a certain level of success truly stupid decisions don’t matter. Whatever happened to “skin in the game”? But notice that Page and Brin actually thought about selling their idea for $1 million dollars in 1999! Bell wasn’t the only one who was lacking vision and genuine perspective. It should remind us that genuine innovation is by its nature hard to predict.<\/p>\n

Also, Kambiz Kamrani<\/a> is back blogging at Anthropology.net<\/a>. Too bad he won’t be blogging chicken genetics! And another interesting blog, For what they were… we are<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Google is in the news, with Larry Page’s ascension. Generally when I hear people compare Larry Page and Sergey Brin it is Page who is described as the “Big Think” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-185344","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pawqfx-Mdq","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gnxp.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gnxp.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gnxp.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gnxp.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gnxp.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185344"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.gnxp.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185344\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gnxp.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gnxp.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gnxp.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}