A guy named George Bell could have bought Google for $750,000. He said no. Google is worth $4 trillion today.
Bell wasn't an idiot. He was the CEO of Excite, a search engine that back in 1999 was way bigger than Google. The deal had a catch. Google's co-founder Larry Page wanted Excite to throw out their own search technology and replace it with Google's. Bell had hundreds of engineers who built Excite from scratch. He couldn't fire them all because two Stanford grad students said they had a better algorithm. His reasoning was sound. The outcome was a disaster.
Three years later, the guy running Yahoo did almost the same thing with bigger numbers. Terry Semel offered $3 billion for Google in 2002. Google said $5 billion. Semel walked over the $2 billion gap. Today Google is worth roughly 800 times what he refused to pay.
In 2000, the founders of Netflix flew to Dallas and offered to sell their whole company to Blockbuster for $50 million. The Blockbuster CEO almost laughed them out of the room. He called Netflix a niche business and said the dot-com hype was overblown. Netflix is worth around $390 billion today. Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy in 2010.
Kodak is the one that hurts the most. In 1975, a young engineer at Kodak named Steve Sasson built the world's first digital camera. It weighed eight pounds, was the size of a toaster, and took 23 seconds to save a single black-and-white photo to a cassette tape. He showed it to his bosses. Their reaction was: cool, but don't tell anyone. They patented the technology and shelved it. Kodak's executives wanted to wait for a perfect digital camera before they competed with their own film business. By the time they got serious about digital, the Japanese had taken over the market. Kodak filed for bankruptcy in January 2012. At its peak, the company controlled 90% of the US film market and employed 145,000 people.
Now look at what Microsoft did in July 1981. IBM was about to launch the personal computer. They needed an operating system. Microsoft didn't have one. So Bill Gates went to a small Seattle hardware shop that had cobbled together something called QDOS, which stood for "Quick and Dirty Operating System." Yes, that was the real name. Gates bought the rights for $50,000, slapped "MS-DOS" on it, and licensed it to IBM weeks before the PC launched. He didn't build a perfect operating system, and he didn't wait for someone to make one. He grabbed what was on the shelf and shipped it.
Excite, Yahoo, Blockbuster, and Kodak each had more money, bigger market share, and in some cases, the better technology. They all wanted the cleaner shot. Microsoft picked up the magazine that was lying around and started firing.
The next $4 trillion company is being passed on right now. Someone is reading the pitch and finding a perfectly reasonable reason to wait.
a man who waits for the perfect shot will die with a full mag