Today, Google—founded by the former Stanford students Larry Page and Sergey Brin—is worth over $1.5 trillion. There’s no way to tell whether Excite would have gone on to be as successful as Google if George had bought the students’ algorithm that day. However, passing on it is now considered one of the worst business decisions in history, one that eventually contributed to the company’s collapse. The root cause is that George didn’t understand power laws on a deep enough level and how they related to the problems he was facing. He didn’t see how the exponential growth of the internet would
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