From the footnotes of history

In 1996, two geeks that nobody had heard of in a PhD program had to quickly find decent research papers for their thesis. Digitized research papers were just arriving at the brink of possibility.
They had to read every paper to find good ones. "This is too painful" they thought. So they stopped researching manually. Instead, they wrote a recursive program to rank research papers based on the ranking of other research papers citing them in their footnotes. This way, they could quickly find "decent" ones. Their names were Larry Page and Sergei Brin. When the Internet took off, they repurposed the program to find "decent" web pages instead, based on the decent-ness of other pages citing them via hyperlinks. And they named the program "Google". [1]
In 1998, they raised $100K in angel funding from the cofounder of Sun Microsystems and a matched amount from a Stanford Professor to improve the patentable technology, and incorporated as a company. The workload was mounting up too quickly. By 1999, they decided that Google was distracting them too much from their studies, and attempted to sell it for $1 million to get their angel investors' money back. They went to Excite (a successful search company), which negotiated their deal down to $750K and then backed out. [2] Yahoo!, one of the billionaire empires of the dot com era, was given a chance to buy Google for $1M.[3]
Yahoo, already making massive revenue in Internet webpage categorization, didn't think search was going to ever be profitable. They wanted people to spend lots of time on Yahoo content and ads, not exit quickly to their search destination page. So they passed on the offer to buy or exclusively license Google search technology in its infancy. Google, wanting to return its investor's money, was forced to escalate its commitment. They raised $25M from top VCs in Silicon Valley later in 1999. With the funding they started hiring brilliant engineers, including Google's first female engineer and employee #20, Marissa Mayer. She joined Google to invent the future, despite having much more prestigious (and probably better paid) offers at Carnegie Mellon and McKinsey.
The Internet grew exponentially, creating a stock market bubble that burst on March 2000. Yahoo! failed to keep pace with website categorization ("this is too painful" they thought), so they signed a partnership deal with Google to provide search. As the 2000 dot com bust was killing all startups, Yahoo was saving Google's life for selfish reasons. Google became a post-bubble startup.
To rid itself of dependence on Google, between 2000 and 2004 Yahoo started buying up all sorts of small search companies and integrating them into its services. In 2002, Yahoo! acquisition office estimated to be able to convince Google to sell for $5 billion. But Yahoo's new CEO thought that would amount to a speculative capitulation, especially in light of the exuberance leading to the dot com bust in his rear view mirror. "Google is worth no more than $3 billion, if that!" he argued (with some curse words in there). He decided to bet against Google and on all its enemies. By 2004, Yahoo ended its partnership with Google. That year, Google went public (IPO) to be able to raise the money to keep going.
The future is made

The darkest moments that Google experienced were mostly due to its rapid growth. In the process of scaling its culture, several times it had near-death experiences. Most of these had to do with maintaining communication lines in an organization that went from 2 individuals to several thousand within the course of a handful of years. Larry and Sergei were surprised to find, on the contrary to their predictions, that scaling free food and themed offices was the easy part; the difficulty of scaling employee motivation and communication led to having to change Google's CEO from Larry Page to Eric Schmidt, the tentative "adult supervision".

Source:

http://www.aminariana.com/essays/google

This is it in summary
cc lalasticlala

Wow

Wat a loss to yahoo

This is actually a lesson to entrepreneurs. Sometimes it's good to stick to your guns instead of selling out. If yahoo acquired google, maybe google would have gone under with them by now. and it would be a monumental loss.

delivite:
This is actually a lesson to entrepreneurs. Sometimes it's good to stick to your guns instead of selling out. If yahoo acquired google, maybe google would have gone under with them by now. and it would be a monumental loss.

Ya its also good to move with the times.. may be if yahoo was busy buying viable start ups am sure they will still be worth over $100B..

the lesson here is that no condition is permanent in dz world.
The law of diminishing return comes to mind, At the Peak of success and dominance in life, always look for the exit route or diversify.
What is NAIRALAND DOING TO REMAIN RELEVANT AND BE THE BEST INTERNET FORUM IN AFRICA IN ANOTHER 30 YEARS?

anigold:

Ya its also good to move with the times.. may be if yahoo was busy buying viable start ups am sure they will still be worth over $100B..

Yahoo buys viable startups all the time. Google just outdid them with things like search engine rankings, adsense and some other google products that require having a gmail account. And since I can remember, google mail has always been easier and lighter to access than yahoo mail. It's just like firefox and IE. Before yahoo realized what was happening, it was already too late.

Is yahoo stil makin money?

xprezboy:
the lesson here is that no condition is permanent in dz world.
The law of diminishing return comes to mind, At the Peak of success and dominance in life, always look for the exit route or diversify.
What is NAIRALAND DOING TO REMAIN RELEVANT AND BE THE BEST INTERNET FORUM IN AFRICA IN ANOTHER 30 YEARS?

Hmm!!! May God Almighty help us Entrepreneurs.

xprezboy:
the lesson here is that no condition is permanent in dz world.
The law of diminishing return comes to mind, At the Peak of success and dominance in life, always look for the exit route or diversify.
What is NAIRALAND DOING TO REMAIN RELEVANT AND BE THE BEST INTERNET FORUM IN AFRICA IN ANOTHER 30 YEARS?

I guess seun has a plan