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News & Updates - Tuesday, November 1, 2005

Passing on Yahoo! & Google Founder Shares For The Next Big Thing

Everybody who has ever worked a day in tech has a coulda-woulda-shoulda story. If you are ever feeling down because you could have sold your Global Crossing shares at the top of the market or you should of bought and sold domain names, Brian Lent should make you feel better. According to the Seattle PI, in 1994 Lent hooked up with Google co-founder Sergey Brin to create Mining Data at Stanford, which become Google. Lent had several chances to join Google when it was in the research phase. But Lent said he chose not to because he "didn't really see a great business opportunity there."

Lent also reportedly turned down the Number 1 employee position at Yahoo!, grading the company's business plan a D-minus because the service at the time did not automatically index Web pages. To be fair, Lent did sign on to Junglee which was certainly a success and was bought by Amazon.

Credit goes to Lent for keeping his head in the game. He is now CEO of a hot Seattle-based mobile search company called Medio that plans to announce $11M in financing from Frazier Technology Ventures, Mohr Davidow Ventures, Dot Edu Ventures and others. Murphy's Law for Lent: some lame airport parking company owns the Medio.com domain so consumers will have to remember to logon to Mediosystems.com.

Read - Venture Capital: Aiming to establish mobile search (Seattle PI)