How Two Smart Investors Missed Google – and What the Winners Saw
Better founders, a preferred product, and accelerating demand outweighed the missing business model
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The greatest investment David Cowan never made was sitting in a garage he was actively trying to avoid.
A college friend had rented her garage to two Stanford students building a new search engine. She repeatedly tried to introduce them. Cowan was not interested.
Bessemer Venture Partners – where Cowan is a partner – now recounts the moment on its own website. Faced with another pair of students carrying another internet idea, Cowan asked how he could leave the house “without going anywhere near your garage.”
The students were Larry Page and Sergey Brin; the search engine was Google.
That is painful to read today.
But Cowan was no amateur. He went on to fund early rounds that led to more than 30 IPOs, with wins including Twitch, Rocket Lab (RKLB), and Skybox Imaging. He remains one of the most accomplished technology investors of his generation.
That is what makes the story useful.
Any fool can miss Google.
So can one of the best venture capitalists in the world.
Bessemer’s Anti-Portfolio: The Startups It Passed On
Most investment firms bury their mistakes.
Bessemer built a webpage for them.
It calls the collection its “anti-portfolio” – a public record of extraordinary companies the firm had a chance to back and declined.
Google is there. So are Apple (AAPL), Airbnb (ABNB), eBay (EBAY), Meta (META), FedEx (FDX), Intel (INTC), PayPal (PYPL), Tesla (TSLA), and Zoom (ZM).
Bessemer passed on Apple shares at a $60 million valuation because the price looked “outrageously expensive.”
It dismissed eBay after looking at the early merchandise – stamps, coins, and comic books – and deciding the opportunity made no sense.
It passed on PayPal because of the inexperienced team and regulatory risk.
And it passed on Federal Express seven times.
In hindsight, each decision looks absurd.
At the time, several were reasonable.
A venture fund that backs every strange pitch will own far more failures than Googles. The useful question here is what sits underneath the “no.”
Was the investor rejecting the price? The market? The founders? The timing?
Or was an old mental model making a new opportunity look smaller than it really was?
Why Excite Rejected Google for $750,000
Bessemer was not the only sophisticated organization to pass on Google. Excite also had an opportunity to buy it.
In 1999, Excite was one of the internet’s major search and portal companies. Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla later recalled that Page and Brin were prepared to sell Google for $1 million. Khosla helped negotiate the price down to roughly $750,000.
Still, Excite declined.
Former Excite CEO George Bell later said the economics were acceptable. His problem was the condition attached to them.
According to Bell, Page wanted Excite to remove its existing search technology and replace it with Google’s. Excite ran side-by-side tests and did not see enough differentiation to justify uprooting work done by hundreds of engineers.
Another account, published in Steven Levy’s In the Plex, says Google’s results may have been too effective for Excite’s portal model: Better answers would send people away more quickly, while Excite made money by keeping users on its pages. Bell disputes that version.
Either way, the sticking point was bigger than $750,000.
Google challenged the way Excite already operated. That made the pass defensible.
It also made it catastrophically wrong.
The Startup Investing Mistake: Treating the Present as the Ceiling
Excite evaluated Google by how well it fit the portal business it already understood.
Bessemer judged eBay by the stamps, coins, and comic books being sold on its site.
That is one of the hardest parts of investing before a ticker exists.
The company is unfinished. Its first product may look narrow. Its business model may be missing. And the financial statements tell you what the company is today – not what it could become.
That creates a dangerous temptation: using the present as the ceiling.
A marketplace beginning with coins and comic books can look like a hobbyist niche.
A search engine with no clear revenue model can look like the eighteenth entrant in an overcrowded market.
Sometimes, that skepticism is right. And sometimes, the strange little wedge opens into an enormous market.
The hard part is knowing which one you are looking at.
What the Investors Who Said Yes Saw
Andy Bechtolsheim saw Google differently.
In August 1998, the Sun Microsystems co-founder wrote Page and Brin a $100,000 check before Google had even been formally incorporated. That money helped move the founders from their Stanford dorms into the garage Cowan later tried to avoid.
The following year, Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins led a $25 million financing round.
Kleiner’s retrospective says Page and Brin arrived with a 17-page presentation containing only two pages of numbers. Google had no established business model and no complete management team.
But it did have three things: remarkable founders, a product producing better search results, and exceptional timing.
Demand had grown so quickly that Google strained Stanford’s network. Its 1999 funding announcement said traffic was rising 50% per month through word of mouth, while roughly 100 million web searches were already being performed each day.
The investors who said yes weighted the evidence differently.
They focused on the people capable of navigating uncertainty.
They focused on a product users preferred before the company knew exactly how it would make money.
And they focused on a market whose need was compounding faster than the existing players understood.
People. Product. Timing.
You have heard me call that framework PPT.
Google is one of the cleanest examples of why it matters.
Why Pre-IPO Access Is Not an Investment Edge by Itself
For decades, most individual investors never had to wrestle with these decisions – because they were never invited into the room.
Off-market deals largely belonged to venture firms, institutions, wealthy accredited investors, founders, employees, and their networks.
The public arrived later, after the company had a ticker, analyst coverage, and years of evidence.
That velvet rope is beginning to move.
Certain offerings can now reach non-accredited investors through regulated pathways, subject to investment limits, disclosure requirements, and resale restrictions.
That creates opportunity.
It also creates responsibility.
Bessemer and Excite both had direct paths to Google. Both said no.
Moving the velvet rope changes who gets to look. It does not make the decision easy.
The Bottom Line
Bessemer’s anti-portfolio makes uncertainty visible – even for professionals with extraordinary access, experience, and networks.
That is the honest promise behind my newest service: Venture Capital Investor.
I cannot give you a process that never misses. But I can give you a disciplined way to examine the people, product, timing, terms, risks, and potential upside before you make a decision.
I just applied that framework live at The 2026 AI Megadeal Event, where I walked through one specific off-market AI opportunity.
You will see who is building the company, what its technology does, why the timing matters, and which risks could derail the thesis.
I also explained how the offering works and revealed the deal recommendation – completely free.
The opportunity is expected to close within a matter of weeks. It could reach capacity even sooner.
No responsible investor can promise you the next Google. Anyone who does should immediately lose your trust.
What I can promise is to show you the work.
Because access is only the invitation.
Judgment determines what happens after you walk through the door.
And in a market where one exceptional winner can reshape an entire portfolio, that process matters enormously.
It only takes one. But first, you have to recognize it.