After saying no, the former partner got another offer from his broker at Goldman.

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In the early 1990s, he got an offer from a Kansas-based networking interoperability company and dropped out of the University of Houston to take that job.

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When I got the offer, I got congratulations emails or calls from 6 people, including the head of the office that offered me the job.

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And since more and more campuses offer free cable hookups, students have got hundreds of channels to choose from.

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While his friends from the Vienna University of Economics and Business got set up in corporate apartments, Mr. Hollein turned down an offer from McKinsey, rented a place in Hell's Kitchen and set out to learn all he could about curating and marketing art.

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There were a number of immediate consequences on the offer, including speculators who apparently got the news ahead of time and tried to profit from it.

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Six months later, you field an offer from a dot-com and you're itching to bail, but you've got this debt hanging over your head.

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