Would You Have Turned Down An Offer to Buy Google?

Matt Marshall from SiliconBeat writes that these guys did. Jeff Ullman, a Stanford professor and adviser to both Google and Junglee, told Junglee to acquire Google. Junglee passed on the offer to buy Google.

What is interesting is Jeff Ullman's quote on Sergei. (For context, Junglee was a comparison shopping engine.)

Two of the other Junglee guys had studied or otherwise worked with the Google co-founders. "Perhaps we could take a look at merging with Google," Rakesh recalls Ullman advising the Junglee team. Rakesh passed on having a serious conversation about this, he said, because the two companies seemed to be headed in separate directions, and besides "it wasn't clear that the team would integrate well with Sergey." Rakesh called him "headstrong."

Of course, a year or so later, after Junglee had been scooped up by Amazon.com, Rakesh found himself on the plane with colleague Anand (now at Kosmix) flying from Seattle down to Silicon Valley to have a meeting with Sergey -- namely to see if he'd be willing to sell Google to Amazon. That's when Sergey responded, outrageously at the time, but humbly in retrospect: "The only kind of price we'd accept would be something with ten digits." In other words, billions.

Mr Wave Theory