Amazing story via Redditor zestyping, a.k.a. Ka-Ping Yee, which easily shot up to the top of a thread about “the most expensive story you ever made at work”: He turned down a job with Google in 1998, the year the search engine incorporated.
I met both Carl Page and Larry Page at a party hosted by a Stanford friend of mine in 1998. Carl gave me his card for eGroups and said “we’re hiring”. Larry gave me his card for Google—a flimsy bit of paper obviously printed by bubble jet—and said “we’re hiring”.
I said, “Nah, who needs another search engine?” and went to graduate school.
I still have the card.
Yes, the above was actually Larry Page’s business card in 1998.
Considering that Bonnie Brown, the in-house masseuse who Google hired in 1999 to knead the occasionally stressed shoulders of the 40 employees who worked there at the time, became a multimillionaire when the company went public, and that by 2007 Google had already minted more than 1000 millionaires, it’s a safe bet that Yee missed out on more than the chance to knock Altavista and Lycos off their mighty perches. Good for him for retelling the story with good humor, though.
