I had a similar experience when I was 14 years old. At the time I was running a very popular trivia web site that had been featured on Yahoo and in a few magazines. A guy e-mailed me and said he liked my site. He asked if he could pay me a small fee to run a banner ad for his new business. I told him I appreciated the offer, but I didn't think it was allowed under the Geocities terms of service.

I was really into discovering new web sites at the time and had not heard of this company. I looked at the guy's site to see what it was about. I remember thinking it was ugly design and a stupid idea. Not much longer after that, the company began to take off. The guy that had e-mailed me was Pierre Omidyar and the site was EBay. I've tried to look at new businesses with an open mind since then.