Missed Chances!

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.

–  Ka-Ping Yee

Ka-Ping Yee turned down a job with Google in 1998, the year the search engine incorporated.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.

This sort of thing happens when we are too judgmental and write off people as unlikely to succeed,based on appearances.