How Excite Turned a Loss Into $6.7 Billion

A note to young leaders.

Are you working on a big, company-defining deal?

If at first you fail – hang around the hoop.

In 1995, Netscape was the world’s leading web browser – the front door to the internet. And it had just put one of the most valuable pieces of online real estate up for tender: the search button on its browser.

Excite, a young internet search company, wanted it badly. So did everyone else: Yahoo, Lycos, MCI, Infoseek, AltaVista.

Excite went all in with a bold offer – and lost. MCI won the bid.

Most people would have gone home, cursed their luck, and started working on Plan B.

But Vinod Khosla, one of the main investors behind Excite – later also an early investor in Open AI – told his team to act as though the tender wasn’t over: “Keep meeting with Netscape. Act as if you never heard ‘no’.”

Excite stayed close. They kept building, kept calling, kept showing Netscape what a partnership with them could look like.

Then the ball came off the rim. MCI, the winning bidder, couldn’t deliver on time. And because Excite was still on the court and under the basket, it was perfectly positioned to catch the rebound.

In May 1998, Excite signed one of the largest partnerships ever struck on the internet: a two-year, $70 million deal to power search and co-branded channels across Netscape’s Netcenter.

Just eight months later, Excite merged with @Home Network in a deal valued at $6.7 billion.

From losing the tender to a multi-billion-dollar exit in just over a year!

Tenders fall over. Winners fail to execute. Circumstances change.

So if you’ve just lost a big one, don’t disappear. Hang around the hoop, and stay alert.

The rebound may yet be yours.