Hello and welcome. You are listening to Patrick Boyle on Finance, a podcast exploring ideas from quantitative finance, examining events occurring in markets right now and financial history to see what lessons can be taken away, including interviews with some of the most interesting people in the world of finance. To learn more about the podcast, visit onfinance.org.

It's always good to learn from your own mistakes, but it's possibly better to learn from

other people's mistakes. So in today's video, let's look at some of the most expensive mistakes made

by some of the biggest and best known companies out there, some of which are quite funny.

And if nothing else, you can feel good that whatever mistakes you've made at work, they're

probably not as big as any of these.

Now, one of the biggest missed opportunities in business history happened

back in 1999 when Excite was a distant number two to Yahoo in terms of search traffic

on the internet. Excite was seen at the time as the technology play of the two companies, as it was a true search

engine while Yahoo was more of a web directory. There were dozens of search engines competing

at the time and most were busy transforming themselves into what was known as internet

portals, a sort of front page of the internet, as this was the business

model favoured by investors at the time. Larry Page and SearchBryn had a research project

initially named Backrub because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance

of a website to rank it in search. This was later

renamed Google and even later Alphabet, a term that we all use today. Back in 1999, Larry Page approached

the management of Excite, offering to sell his search engine for $750,000 plus some shares

in Excite. The total deal would have been worth around $1.6 million. At the time, Page wanted

to get back to his doctoral studies at Stanford and figured that his search algorithm would increase

Excite's revenues by about $130,000 every day. So if he implemented his technology and worked

at Excite for just a few months, he figured he should be compensated for his time, and thus he came

up with the $1.6 million price for

...