Google nearly sold for $750,000. Seven years later it paid over $1.1M for its first garage

On September 8, 2006, Google bought a one-story house in Menlo Park, California. The record puts it at 1,900 square feet and the price somewhere between $1.1M and $1.3M. Eight years earlier, in September 1998, the two founders had rented the garage there for $1,700.

Between those two dates sits another number. Around the start of 1999, Google was reportedly close to being sold, whole, for roughly $750,000. The buyer would have been Excite, then a major portal. The story is well known and usually ends with a moral about Excite passing up a bargain.

The person on the other side of the table, though, does not talk about price. What follows traces each founding-era number back to whoever made it public.

From a dorm research project to a $1,700 garage

The official history says Google Inc. was officially born with Bechtolsheim’s $100,000 check. The S-1 filed for the IPO dates incorporation to September 1998. Side by side, the check comes before the company.

The garage’s owner, Susan Wojcicki, later became Google’s sixteenth employee and then YouTube’s CEO. The month after buying the house, Google bought that same YouTube for $1.65B in stock.

The $750,000 story has two narrators

The first is the investor Vinod Khosla. On stage at a TechCrunch event in 2010, he said Google had been willing to sell for under a million dollars and Excite did not want to buy. The write-up frames what follows with “the story goes”: the founders asked for $1M, Khosla talked them down to $750,000, and Excite CEO George Bell turned down both. In this version the story is about price.

The second is Bell himself. On a 2014 podcast he said he remembered the terms as $750,000 in cash plus something like 1% of Excite, and that the economics were fine for Excite. He was vague on timing, “maybe 1998,” and recalled Google as three or four people still inside Stanford. The reason he gave for the deal falling apart was Page’s condition. If they came to work at Excite, all of Excite’s search technology had to be ripped out and replaced with Google’s. Excite had hundreds of engineers at that point, and Bell said he could not stomach the cultural risk.

The two versions agree on one thing only, the $750,000. In the investor’s version price killed the deal, while in the account of the man who said no it was the terms. A sale that was not decided by price ended up remembered only by its price.

The year it nearly sold, revenue was $220,000 and the loss was $6.08M

Laying out the selected financial data from the S-1 (in thousands of dollars) shows the scale around the time of the near-sale.

The Excite talks fall at about the point where the 1999 row begins. The $25M round and the 3.5 million daily searches were still ahead, and the company amounted to three or four people and a search engine out of a lab. Judged as a price for the company as it stood then, $750,000 cannot be called clearly too low or clearly too high.

Revenue jumped roughly 87-fold in 2000, and profit arrived in 2001. Seen from later, the $750,000 episode happened just before this table starts. Yet whenever it gets told, it is set beside the table’s last row.

What set the price was not Google’s insides but who Excite was

Bell’s account shows what was actually setting the price. The quality of Google’s technology was not the point. Bringing it in would have meant discarding Excite’s own search, built by hundreds of engineers.

The same $750,000 is a cheap component for a company with no search of its own, and a condition of self-denial for a company that has one. The desk reads this breakdown not as a failure of Excite’s judgment but as a case of the buyer’s position setting the price. What a business is worth is set less by what the seller built than by who the buyer is.

The same structure shows up in much smaller sales. Traffic Think Tank turned down nearly every approach that came in 2020, then sold for $1.8M in 2023, and the buyer, Semrush, named “brand and content” as the purpose of the purchase. MENTA was its founder’s thirtieth side project, and its shares went to Lancers at 1.4 million yen in monthly revenue. In both, the record shows what the buyer wanted before it shows a price.

The recollections come 11 and 15 years after the fact

The limits come first. No contemporaneous document exists to confirm the Excite negotiation. What exists is an investor’s remark from 2010 and the principal’s account from 2014, both told more than a decade later. The timing does not line up, “early 1999” against “around 1998,” and the price comes in two versions too, a cut from $1M in one and $750,000 cash plus about 1% of the stock in the other.

The $1,700 garage rent carries no stated period in the record. Many articles call it monthly, but only the bare figure is used here. The house price is recorded only as a range of $1.1M to $1.3M. The S-1 figures are full-year values and do not describe the company at the moment of the talks.

The numbers that can be checked against documents, by contrast, are clear. The $100,000 check and the year the founders met sit in the company’s official history, the month of incorporation and each year’s revenue in statutory filings, and the YouTube price in the acquisition disclosure.

$750,000 was never Google’s price

What remained on the desk after laying all this out was how the $750,000 gets handled. Whenever it is told, the figure stands in as “Google’s price” and gets set beside 2003 revenue of $961.87M. Read the way the man who declined describes it, though, it comes closer to the number that late-1990s Excite put on the condition of giving up its own search team.

The $1.1M-plus paid in 2006 is larger than that number. A company that nearly sold bought back the place it had occupied at the time, for more than it had been offered then. The founding legend keeps the $750,000, and the books keep the $1.1M-plus.