Stanford University is fertile ground for startups. It's also a fertile ground for also-rans. Brian Lent, now CEO of mobile-search startup Medio.com, missed out on the chance to join both Yahoo and Google on the ground floor. Having declined a job offer from Yahoo cofounders David Filo and Jerry Yang — "You couldn't pay me enough money to work for a company called Yahoo!" — Lent then passed on Google: "We all said, 'There will never be another Yahoo!'" Lent had that much right: Larry Page and Sergey Brin must be quite glad their company is not another Yahoo.