Rejected a Google offer in 2008 to join a company called DataDomain. I had just finished my PhD and my co-advisor was in Data Domain so it wasn't a very hard ch

Rejected a Google offer in 2008 to join a company called DataDomain. I had just finished my PhD and my co-advisor was in Data Domain so it wasn't a very hard choice. At that point, Google also didn't assign you a team before joining so the choice was between join an unknown team at Google VS go and work for someone I knew and respected. Also, Google paid well but wasn't as crazy as things today. Learned a lot at DataDomain as it scaled from a reasonably small team to a large enterprise and eventually got acquired. Financially though, would have fared much better in Google (assuming I had stuck around).