The Failure of Larry Page and Sergey Bryn

Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Bryn rejected an offer from Excite to license their PageRank algorithm. The move has become infamous in business lore as one of the great missed opportunities of all time. "This was Page and Bryn's intellectual fearlessness demonstrating itself for the first time in a competitive setting," says former Excite CEO George Bell. 'They thought nothing of going to an established search company and telling them that their existing products sucked,' he adds.