The Godfather of Domains: How Andrew Rosener Built an $800M Digital Real Estate Empire

[SPEAKER_00]: I think gold, bitcoin, and domain names are literally the three greatest investments that you can make for the next decade.
[SPEAKER_00]: Many of the biggest brands that you would have heard of, big domains, were responsible for that.
[SPEAKER_00]: We are the ones that got x.com for Elon and many other of his company names.
[SPEAKER_00]: If that domain has any value whatsoever, somebody's willing to buy it for some price, whether it's 10 bucks or 10 bucks or 10 bucks.
[SPEAKER_00]: Everybody in every business and every walk of life is going to want or need their domain.
[SPEAKER_00]: What's your name?
[SPEAKER_00]: Duane games really are.
[SPEAKER_00]: It almost every facet like digital real estate overall over the last 15 years.
[SPEAKER_00]: We've done $800 million in domain sales.
[SPEAKER_00]: seven companies that were worth a billion dollars or more that had zoom in their name and they're going to come to me They're going to want to buy it and they're going to pay me millions of dollars with me and did they oh, yeah You want to own Bitcoin you want to own gold and you want to own don't need him You want things that can't be increased in supply
[SPEAKER_02]: Today, on misunderstood, we are talking about a form of real estate, most people never think about.
[SPEAKER_02]: Not beachfront or city blocks, but the digital kind, domain names.
[SPEAKER_02]: My guest, Andrew Rosner, is known as the godfather of domain brokering.
[SPEAKER_02]: He's the founder and CEO of media options, the world's top domain brokerage, responsible for some of the biggest digital asset deals in history.
[SPEAKER_02]: Think Zoom.com, prime.com, x.com, and more.
[SPEAKER_02]: He's built a company worth hundreds of millions of dollars with just six people.
[SPEAKER_02]: What's fascinating about Andrew isn't just his success, it's the way he sees the internet.
[SPEAKER_02]: To him, a great domain name is the ultimate storefront.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's where your brand lives, where trust begins, and where value compounds.
[SPEAKER_02]: We talk about what makes a name truly great.
[SPEAKER_02]: The psychology behind why certain words and combination stick and why, even in 2025, it's not too late to invest in this digital real estate.
[SPEAKER_02]: Because while some people are still chasing trends, Andrew is quietly owning the ground they're built on.
[SPEAKER_02]: From selling scallops to selling some of the most recognizable names on the web, his story is about seeing opportunity where others see noise and proving that sometimes the most misunderstood
[SPEAKER_02]: I absolutely love this conversation.
[SPEAKER_02]: I know you will, too.
[SPEAKER_02]: So even if this seems like a complicated topic or something you normally wouldn't be as interested in listening to, I promise you, this is one to get excited about.
[SPEAKER_02]: And now let me introduce you to Andrew Rosner.
[SPEAKER_02]: so Andrew it's such a pleasure to have you here on misunderstood.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you for joining me.
[SPEAKER_02]: Where are you?
[SPEAKER_00]: So I am sitting in Lisbon, Portugal.
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, that's amazing.
[SPEAKER_02]: But yes, you're from America.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm from Rhode Island.
[SPEAKER_02]: From Rhode Island.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, how did you end up in Portugal?
[SPEAKER_00]: Uh, that is a long story.
[SPEAKER_00]: But um,
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's see, I was in the fish business in Rhode Island.
[SPEAKER_00]: I actually graduated from college with a degree in database, design, sort of a hybrid business, computer science thing, realized that was absolutely not what I was going to do with my life.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then that was after starting a software business and all this, and but I was like, okay, this is not what I'm doing in my life.
[SPEAKER_00]: uh... got a call uh... from uh... a guy that later became my boss and mentor uh... peter murky trailing two days of the column and he uh... uh... uh... uh... say they want to come sell seafood and i thought definitely not i basically told me go pound sand and he said well uh... give you a thousand bucks to come and hang out with me for the day and see what this is all about took him up in the offer
[SPEAKER_00]: And the office was in Newport, Rhode Island, right in the harbour, beautiful place.
[SPEAKER_00]: This was June, and you know, so it was a great place to be for the summer.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I said, okay, let's go try this out for a few months.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he and I hit it off and locks to our short.
[SPEAKER_00]: I turned out I was,
[SPEAKER_00]: exceptionally good at sales and I grew that business.
[SPEAKER_00]: I actually love to this day.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love that business.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just not as lucrative as my current business, but I absolutely love that business every part of it and almost every part.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I did that.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, I'm just curious.
[SPEAKER_02]: What was your day to day of that?
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, one of the things I loved about it is that that business, there was nothing you do after hours, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So it was like, you know, I showed up in a clock in the morning, 80, 30, and yeah, eight, we started both of the early, and it started eight the morning, you know, basically first mission in the day was to figure out what the price was, really, it's a commodity business, what's the price, what's the market prices that day for the various sizes, the various
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it was basically like a fact gathering mission for the first hour or two of the day.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then, and many of our customers that's what they were doing, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And so we've got to do some fact gathering, you know, price.
[SPEAKER_00]: price discovery and then basically create a price sheet, fire that off to all their customers and then the next few hours you're sort of servicing customers and then the back after the day was basically cold calling new customers.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, wow, and it's restaurants or what we were selling, you know, larger quantities.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we're selling to like food distributors, how about we import export of like full containers.
[SPEAKER_00]: From, you know, China or two China, we're selling to Belgium, France, Germany a little bit, but mostly a lot of import from Japan, a lot of import from China.
[SPEAKER_00]: of import from Argentina, Chile, Peru, Canada, and then, you know, just next door to where we were, and Newvetford is the largest producer of scallops in America.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's actually the second largest producing seafood port in America.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think number one is Anchorage, Alaska.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's where I'm from, by the way.
[SPEAKER_00]: Ah, it's interesting.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I can appreciate that it's number one of the world for in America, for, you know, dollar-wise production of seafood, and then number two is being made for Massachusetts.
[SPEAKER_00]: Wow, and so we had some operations up there, but third part.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right, so we sat in a beautiful little office on the hardware in Newport, Rhode Island.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, people think about, yeah, I love to kind of tell me, she'd say I was a fishmonger and I was, but, you know,
[SPEAKER_00]: I wasn't touching fish.
[SPEAKER_00]: I talked to them.
[SPEAKER_02]: So you weren't involved in the packing of it and the icing it and all that stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, most of our customers believe that we were because we had our own labels, but there was all being produced and packed by third parties.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was being stored by third parties, processed by third parties, and then we would sell under our label.
[SPEAKER_00]: But we literally relied five or six people sitting in a little office in the in Newport
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, talking about frozen scallops on the phone all day amazing guys is some other, you know, lobster and squid and some other things, but yeah Okay, so eventually you get out of that and now what you're known is the godfather of domain brokering so can you tell me how you got from one to the other?
[SPEAKER_00]: So I We actually back up so in college right I was studying this sort of database, you know
[SPEAKER_00]: pure science and this was right at the emergence of the sort of consumer internet.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we're in the mid late 90s and
[SPEAKER_00]: I learned about the internet and I learned that if you wanted to be on the internet it started with a domain name and so, you know, the way I'm hyperactive and and I have a million ideas a minute all the time and it's a gift and a curse and so basically I thought, wow, I've all these ideas I want to put them out of the internet and to do that step one data domain name.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I had no ambition or no idea of like, oh, I'm buying you domain name because it's valuable.
[SPEAKER_00]: I just thought this is a ways to a means.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I just started buying them for all the stuff.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I'm sorry, just so that for people listening and for people that do not follow this at all, domain name means website address, correct?
[SPEAKER_00]: correct correct you are well there's you know people refer to them in different ways you are well website and address um uh but yeah domain names you know it's like google dot com or apple dot com but totally different than what you're getting when you find your handle on instagram or twitter totally different right with it with a handle on social media platform
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't actually owe it, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: You have a right to use it from the platform, but you don't owe it.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can, you know, we've seen this with cancer culture, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: You can be shut down.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you just feel like, oh, we don't like what you're saying on my platform and, you know, you're done.
[SPEAKER_01]: All right.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whereas with the domain name, you owe it, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: This is, I mean, it's actually, it's much deeper than just being canceled, you know, when, even if you have a very successful platform, as you do on YouTube, we're on other social media platforms.
[SPEAKER_00]: uh, you don't own that data.
[SPEAKER_00]: The platform does, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't actually even own that relationship with the follower or with the customer or whatever it might be, the platform does, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, you have a relationship with with with with that customer or with that follower at the pleasure of the platform and they can
[SPEAKER_00]: with your follower unless they have another way to get to you.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I think that's actually a great way of highlighting the value of a domain name, one of the utilities and value points.
[SPEAKER_00]: So anyways, that's what we buy and sell.
[SPEAKER_00]: And at that time, I was just collecting these things with the idea that, oh, if another idea that I would love to explore or build or launch,
[SPEAKER_00]: So I was buying things that were around sort of some of my interests in my hobbies and ideas.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, like, I lived in Newport in the province of Rhode Island.
[SPEAKER_00]: I had some domains related to Providence and with Newport.
[SPEAKER_00]: I had, you know, what ultimately led me into the domain brokerage business.
[SPEAKER_00]: I bought these domain names around Pottenegraham.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's a black-footed pig, which is native to the Iberian Peninsula, which is, you know, Spain, and Portugal, where I live now.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that ham at that time in particular was the most expensive meat in the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was cherished and it could not be imported into the United States.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I had, you know, experienced it in my orchestra, Spain, it's a ballet or a
[SPEAKER_00]: And I, when I tasted, I was like, this is incredible.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the best thing I've ever had.
[SPEAKER_00]: How do we not have this in the US?
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I bought the menu and just got thought, oh, I mean, the fish business.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't have import, you know, products.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to import this in the US to sell it.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I found out that it was actually banned by the FDA.
[SPEAKER_00]: They treated it like they treat French cheese, which is to say that they don't think that it's fit for human consumption.
[SPEAKER_00]: Wow.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that was sort of that, then I did a back burn.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then one day, I'm driving to my office.
[SPEAKER_00]: I had to drive across the new port bridge.
[SPEAKER_00]: At that point, I had moved from Newport to Providence.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I'm driving across the new port bridge and I'm listening to NPR radio.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they said that George Bush was about to receive the first
[SPEAKER_00]: the FDA position, and they were now allowing this thing to be important, and there was one importer in Virginia, and he, uh, uh, Latienda, Latienda.com, give a little shout out.
[SPEAKER_00]: Here's a good guy.
[SPEAKER_00]: And, uh, he was an importer of like specialty Spanish products.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so he had fought for years to get this approved and it worked with one factory in Spain, that it
[SPEAKER_00]: and he was the first importer and he basically had him not play and he was started distributing the U.S. to all the top restaurants and chefs and whatnot and so
[SPEAKER_00]: I got to my office and I said, I got to look up this guy and you know, I got to speak of them.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you know, with solo because I wanted to buy a ham, literally this stuff, I was like, this, this, the best thing I ever had, I haven't had it since I was in Spain, how do I get a ham?
[SPEAKER_00]: So I called them up and we chatted and you know, we were just kind of talking shop because we're both in the food and pork business.
[SPEAKER_00]: And, uh,
[SPEAKER_00]: As we were talking, you know, I realized he was at this real online e-commerce focus, but, you know, e-commerce wasn't like it was really just starting at that point, this was 2001.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, or two.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so we got to talking and I realized, I said, you know, by the way, I own, you know, these domain names all around Pothineka, I think I'd five or six, you know, of the best names around that, that ham.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he said, you know, you could sort of hears proverbial jaw drop and I knew I have a self-guid.
[SPEAKER_00]: I knew it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I knew I had it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he was like, how much you want?
[SPEAKER_00]: And what I didn't know was like, I know clue what this thing was worth.
[SPEAKER_00]: Is it worth $500?
[SPEAKER_00]: Is it worth $100?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, I don't know if, but what I wanted was ham.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I said, well, I don't know, but I'll trade you for a ham.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he just got a done.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, so let me actually back up for a second.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'd already asked him, can I buy a ham?
[SPEAKER_00]: And he laughed at me.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's like, look, my next slide, I remember now, but it was like the next 11 containers are already pre-sold.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I get you can get one, but it's next year and it's like, I think it was, I don't want to talk out of class.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's been a long time, and I don't have the greatest memory, but it was like,
[SPEAKER_00]: $5,000 a pound or something or a kilo a while you know these are like five seven kilo five or five seven pound legs you buy a whole leg of him yeah at least on the foot it's still attached right and um uh and so these were very expensive so they were valuable yeah oh very valuable that time he had a monopoly and it was it was absurdly expensive
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I didn't listen going back to this sort of negotiation.
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't know what these things were worth, but I wanted a hand.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I said, well, I'll train you for the hand.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I feel like without hesitation, you just said, done.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I thought, oops, I only sold that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I was like, and I'm five grand.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he goes, done.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was like, okay, well, I, you know, deal with, let's do it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, tell me.
[SPEAKER_02]: We're glad not saying you aren't ham for life.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, what a be nice.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know that he would have grew to that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I would have made a big commitment, but maybe maybe he was pretty excited to get this name But he was a phenomenally guy.
[SPEAKER_00]: I I try to live my life with almost zero press.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have very few wrists, but He was a very nice guy and he not only set me damn you know really showed up my door like it looked like a coffin
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh my god.
[SPEAKER_00]: They wouldn't box at huge.
[SPEAKER_00]: And, but he sent me like a case of really good real Halloween.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he sent me the carving set, you know, the holder for the leg of the hand, and the special carving knife.
[SPEAKER_02]: And point being he saw the value in the domain and wanted to give you whatever he could to compensate.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think it was amazing.
[SPEAKER_02]: And did the ham live up to the height coming from America?
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm telling you for 30 days, my wife and I all we did was eat ham and we ate ham and drank real hot.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was basically our diet for 30 days.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think we ate the whole thing in about a month
[SPEAKER_02]: I love that story.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that was really it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was really that was the light bulb moment for me that was like, whoa, these things are valuable.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then this is like a really decent, terroristic little niche, black-footed pig ham.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, partner, it's like, most of the world doesn't even know what exists.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this guy's willing to put some real value on the table for these domains, everybody in every business and every walk of life is going to want or need their domain.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that was sort of the moment.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's coincided with my wife's German when we married she had said like I'm willing to live in the US for four years and so I had like this shot clock and and that shot clock was running up and I need to come up with an idea of how I could make a living somewhere else and I had a really job like I was making a lot of money I was you know in my 20s making
[SPEAKER_00]: three, $400,000 a year, way more than any of my friends were making.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, you know, it was a great job, and I knew that I was going to basically be walking away from it really in the next year.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, I kind of thought, wow, maybe I can turn this into a business.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I started being even more aggressive and buying more domains and learning about the industry.
[SPEAKER_02]: And just like, if I know, when you're saying you're buying these domains, where are you buying them from and how much we're like.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so a great question.
[SPEAKER_00]: So at that time, I didn't even know that there was an industry here, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like I was like, people by the means for their business, they own one, maybe two.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it started.
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't know there was like, don't mean collectors.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there was, you know.
[SPEAKER_00]: But was it like go daddy back then that just had a. Yeah, so yeah, but go to it was relatively new on the scene, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: At that time, network solutions was kind of almost a monopoly.
[SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, so that was new ever seen they were starting to grow quite rapidly, you know, they have their provocative commercials coming down online and
[SPEAKER_00]: uh... and the industry was kind of just starting to blossom but i didn't even know what existed never less than anybody else and um... but i happened to through actually through a representative of a co-daddy i learned that there was this whole industry this auction houses and theirs you know forums all my forms of people are you know
[SPEAKER_00]: sharing ideas and you know these things competitive and the other people drop catching and there's always different facets of the business.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I got really fascinated that when deep down the rabbit hole learned as much as I could and I started buying more and more names mostly in auctions.
[SPEAKER_00]: So these options, just to sort of clarify, when you let a domain expire, if that domain has any value whatsoever, like, and for it to not go to auction, and it really has to be like, garbage.
[SPEAKER_00]: If it has any value whatsoever, somebody's willing to buy it for some price, whether it's 10 bucks or 10 brand.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so every day there are thousands and thousands of domains, I probably should know the number, but there's thousands, maybe tens of thousands of domains every day they go to auction across various platforms and maybe five major ones like dropketch.com, godaddy, auctions, memejet.com, snapnames.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's, you know, those are the major ones.
[SPEAKER_00]: And back then, it didn't go for a lot because there was only, let's say, a couple hundred people in the world that were involved in this business.
[SPEAKER_00]: Today, there's probably, I don't know, 10,000, that rough estimate, and there's probably a few hundred, maybe 300, 400, that have really made
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, not necessarily like executives of big companies in the space, but I mean like, you know, domain investors.
[SPEAKER_00]: And, um, uh, so I started up just as another domain investor and as I started accumulating domains, uh, and I invested all basically all of my savings into these things, uh,
[SPEAKER_00]: I realized, like, who's selling them to the people that are actually going to use them?
[SPEAKER_00]: And there really wasn't anybody doing a red job of playing matchmaker between the people that have all these domains.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the businesses that ultimately need them, or should want them, whether they know or not.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_00]: And at that time, most of them didn't know they should have it, or should want it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So again, I, you know, the skill set I had was I was a great salesman and above all else.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I said, all right, I'm going to basically become like a real estate broker, but for domains, which we, you know,
[SPEAKER_00]: treat like digital real estate.
[SPEAKER_00]: The domain names really are.
[SPEAKER_00]: It almost every facet.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can make the analogy between domain names and physical commercial real estate.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the principles of the same, the metrics are more or less the same.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a...
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, there's a mirror analogy in the real estate business to the domain.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I started just picking up the phone and calling companies and, you know, saying, hey, you want to buy this domain.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I remember one of the first ones I sold, you know, outbound was like, you know, maritimerisk.com.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I sold to like a big
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, and then I sold pizza.net was the first like six-figure domain sale that I made.
[SPEAKER_00]: And pizza.net was kind of famous because it had, well, famous.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, it had made a cameo in the movie The Net with Senator Bullock, way back in the day.
[SPEAKER_00]: 1994, I want to say.
[SPEAKER_00]: Senator Bullock had that movie The Net and, you know, it was the first time in a movie.
[SPEAKER_00]: Somebody went online in order of pizza to order pizza on pizza.net.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that then, that net was actually the more mainstream domain extension because that's more than calm much more because it was like network, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you were online, it was about networking.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, that was what I was going to ask you.
[SPEAKER_02]: Was it more or less valuable than pizza.com?
[SPEAKER_00]: So in 94.net was probably more valuable than the pizza.com, but very shortly thereafter than in the later 90s.com over took that net and it's never really changed.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'll go away.
[SPEAKER_02]: I have a bunch of questions.
[SPEAKER_02]: This is so fun.
[SPEAKER_02]: Let's go.
[SPEAKER_02]: So first you realized the things that we're going to be valuable or might be valuable.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like you're talking about this maritime thing you knew that somewhere along the line, somebody would find that valuable.
[SPEAKER_02]: But then in looking at, like, let's say you wanted Andrew.com, for example, or Rachel.com.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, if those were taken, how, well, that's a whole
[SPEAKER_00]: Great question.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, I mean, what I will say personally as a domain investor, with my domain investor hat on, is that I try to buy things that are going to be valuable in the past and the present and in the future, I don't want to buy things that have, let's say, an expiration date.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want things that have shelf life.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, could a brand name have an expiration date as opposed to like something that represents the brand?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so we, we, we, we, we have what we call brandables.
[SPEAKER_00]: We have Generic, and we have descriptive, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And so you've got things like kind of car insurance.com, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Car insurance.com is a descriptive domain, it describes the industry, but it's also the term that people actually search for where they go to Google, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And so for a very long time, especially in the early days, that was enormously valuable for SEO, search engine optimization.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you had carsures.com, it was like almost automatic that you'd be at the top of Google, right, instead of trying more traffic for you, and that therefore made it very valuable.
[SPEAKER_00]: What drove the value domains is change over time.
[SPEAKER_00]: We can get to that later.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I always try to focus on things that I thought would always be valuable.
[SPEAKER_00]: There are other people that have been successful and many others that have not been successful, trying to chase trends.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, the teenagers are using them.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're trying to go to the hottest new tournament was used on the nightly news, or they're chasing trends.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, whether that's AI or whether that was metaverse or whether that was crypto or whether it was, you know, whatever came before that, they were always chasing some new trend, whereas I was trying to buy every green type of stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_00]: And, um,
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, one of the ways, you know, there's a lot of tools that we use most of these tools were built for companies for SEO and we use those tools to sort of see, okay, how many people are searching for this term and the more people that are searching for that term, the more mine share that term has, the more valuable the domain is so we get the corresponding domain is.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So that's interesting that when people are trying to come up with a name for their business, I mean, now someone who's been through this and seen this, would it be better for these people to create a brand with a name that is descriptive like that of a keyword?
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's a cost benefit analysis, okay?
[SPEAKER_00]: So the cost is that if you, if you just make something up, I don't know, blupio.com, okay?
[SPEAKER_00]: Blupio.com could be a reasonable brand.
[SPEAKER_00]: No reason ever heard of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It will be very easy to trademark.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so you can dominate and control that whole name space.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_00]: But you now need to go spend probably millions and millions of dollars to ingrain that brand into the mind of consumers.
[SPEAKER_02]: Right, because they're not, unless they know you and they know the name to search, they're not finding that automatically.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like Google did or like GoDaddy did, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: GoDaddy had to hire Dana, you know, Danica Patrick and, you know, all the beautiful women to come on screen and just shoot these provocative commercials in order to ingrain the GoDaddy brand into the minds of consumers and get that relationship to domain names because nobody ever heard the brand.
[SPEAKER_00]: It would have been a much closer and easier association, but harder to get a trademark or almost impossible to trademark.
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, you can't, let's say, dominate.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can't flood the zone, you know, on that namespace.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right?
[SPEAKER_00]: You're going to have a competition that's domain dot something else.
[SPEAKER_00]: Or, you know, it's just not, it's a strong domain name, but it's not necessarily a strong brand.
[SPEAKER_02]: I got it.
[SPEAKER_02]: I got it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_02]: So you...
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, you actually created something that's now called the Rosner equation.
[SPEAKER_02]: Can you describe to people what that is?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, to be clear, I'm not the one that named it the Rosner equation, but I did create the formula.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, after a few years of, of, of,
[SPEAKER_00]: pounding my head against the wall, trying to sell these domain names to companies, and mostly didn't get it.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're like, why would I spend tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars to buy this domain?
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm perfectly fine, but they may not have got, which has two hyphens in it, or some weird prefix.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, it was an uphill battle trying to convince them.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so at some point, I think, okay, it's very clear that these are valuable.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so there has to be something that's driving that value.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if there's something that's driving that value, when I can understand what that thing is, then I can measure it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if I can measure it, then I can basically create a metric to say, this domain is worth x.
[SPEAKER_00]: And at a minimum, what that does it gives me the ability to anchor the value on some indisputable press.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then for then, we can negotiate, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And for very, maybe you don't have the budget, maybe it's not the right timing, maybe you're just not willing to pay that price, but at least we can't dispute that it's worth that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And what I've said all the time is that price and value are two very different things, and particularly in the domain name world, but in basically any, let's say,
[SPEAKER_00]: In the industry where price discovery is not clear, there's not a lot of liquidity, then price almost never equals value.
[SPEAKER_00]: So generally, the price will fall below value.
[SPEAKER_00]: Today, it's quite often on the best domain names that the price exceeds value because there's many people trying to chase that same domain or because there's many companies that all want to shorten their brand to that domain.
[SPEAKER_00]: And because more and more people understand how valuable it is.
[SPEAKER_00]: COVID was sort of a turning point for the whole industry because once everything went online, everybody sort of realized like, oh wait, this is my store now.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is my office now.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, wait, the place I can dedicate with my employees, even, is not my domain name through my email or through a, you know, assembly that has my brand in it or, you know, whatever, right?
[UNKNOWN]: And so,
[SPEAKER_00]: more and more people realize that actually their company's brand was their domain name.
[SPEAKER_00]: In a digital world, your brand is your domain.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you're not calm, then the brand is kind of in comfort, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because
[SPEAKER_00]: If you're let's say dot XYZ or your dot AI, well, then that kind of has to become a part of your brand because otherwise people just assume dot com Apple can only just be apple because they're they have apple dot com Amazon because they're Amazon dot com otherwise you'd have to take or Amazon XYZ or Amazon AI or you know whatever might be.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: So anyways, Rosa equation, what I realized was that, you know, I tried to work always from first principles and I thought about what is it doing?
[SPEAKER_00]: A domain is a way of getting a human being with some kind of intent to a destination on the internet that can fulfill that intent, whether it's e-commerce, whether it's news, whether it's media, whatever it might be.
[SPEAKER_00]: better that domain name is at getting that person from their intention to their destination, the more valuable that domain name is.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we can measure that value based on how many people are trying to get to that destination.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if we look at cars coming back to car insurance, you know, I don't know, maybe there's 4,500,000 people a month that just type car insurance into Google.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's in the US alone.
[SPEAKER_00]: And every time somebody does that, and then they click on a link, if it's a paid link in Google, then that advertisers paying Google like somewhere between, let's say $150 and maybe $500 per click, depending on the location, depending on the time of day, depending on the whole bunch of factors, it's a very expensive click.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so what if you were carassurance.com, and you'd have to pay Google.
[SPEAKER_00]: feels you could rank number one, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: This was the order.
[SPEAKER_00]: You said the thing is evolved over time, but this is a good way of understanding where, you know, how it works and where it came from.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you think, okay, well, that's just for easy numbers and for the sake of public math, right, it looks stupid.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's call it $100 per click and let's say 500,000 people per month search for car insurance.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, so 500,000 times a hundred dollars a click is $5 million, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So no, $50, $50 million.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's, is that right?
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's very expensive, whatever it is.
[SPEAKER_00]: Very expensive, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like, okay, well, that's how much it costs per month for advertisers to get that traffic on the website.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you rank number one in Google, organically, without paying Google, you can expect to get somewhere between 20, 25% of the clicks.
[SPEAKER_00]: So let's just say, you know, take whatever that number was, let's just say it's five million bucks.
[SPEAKER_00]: By five, that's 20% and a million bucks, okay?
[SPEAKER_00]: That's one million dollars for one month that you're saving.
[SPEAKER_00]: We'll apply that plan to 12.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now you have $12 million in annual savings.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then it's really easy from there.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like, okay, in your industry,
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, if you were doing an an ad if you're buying another business, how many year multiple would you pay for that business?
[SPEAKER_00]: And in most businesses, it's going to be anywhere from three to eight years, okay?
[SPEAKER_00]: And I like to be conservative, so let's say three to five.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's say three, okay?
[SPEAKER_00]: So a three year multiple of that $12 million in savings is $36 million.
[SPEAKER_00]: So basically what you're doing is you're decreasing your cost of customer acquisition by $36 million over a three year period of time.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, you know, for all the geeks out there, they're going to come in, they're going to beat me up on my public math.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're going to beat me up on some of the logic.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm trying to give a very backing up and simplify version.
[SPEAKER_02]: But how do you get to the value of what then you charge for this door domain, correct?
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it's easy to then say like cargers.com, it's worth $36 million.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think actually it sold for $36 million dollars.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh wow.
[SPEAKER_00]: So,
[SPEAKER_00]: That's kind of the way to think about it is that a domain name is a way of it's a proxy for trust on the internet.
[SPEAKER_00]: When somebody sees a great domain name, they inherently generally trust that brand.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so what are you doing when you have increased trust?
[SPEAKER_00]: You're increasing your conversion rate.
[SPEAKER_00]: So on the one hand, your domain name is going to help you increase customer acquisition through increased traffic, and then it's going to help you increase your conversion rate on that traffic by increasing trust, perceived trust.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then the rest is up to you.
[SPEAKER_00]: You guys think that I have a good product.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just a good idea, you know, media, design, all the other things that come with a good business.
[SPEAKER_00]: But what we as a, you know,
[SPEAKER_00]: representing domain names, what we can do for you is help you get more organic traffic.
[SPEAKER_00]: and increase the conversion on that traffic.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that decreases your cost of customer acquisition, which is one of the most important metrics that every business measures.
[SPEAKER_00]: How do you get more people to listen to your podcast?
[SPEAKER_00]: There's some formula that you think about or consciously or unconsciously, that has a dollar value.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that dollar value can be mirrored in the value of the domain name that can help you do that.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, so here's my next question with that because there's throughout decades, let's say that I've been looking first of all, let's talk about your own names right if I go to Rachel you could tell calm actually someone else owns it, which I think is crazy yeah and I was told that like that's considered squatting or something and you explain that rule to me and they said that that's illegal and I could actually get it for free is that true.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's very nuanced, okay?
[SPEAKER_00]: I will preface this with the I am not a lawyer.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't play what I'm the internet.
[SPEAKER_00]: So this is not legal advice if you, you know, you should seefully live advice if you need it, okay?
[SPEAKER_00]: But generally speaking, there are two ways to approach this.
[SPEAKER_00]: There is a law which addresses cybersecurity.
[SPEAKER_00]: uh... it was introduced i believe in nineteen ninety-sevenish six ninety-six ninety-seven ninety-eight some of that that is that just for for names or for businesses to that's for so it's specifically for trademarks if you have a trade mark which does not necessarily need to be registered there are common law marks just even if you don't have your name registered as a trademark which you probably don't most people don't right
[SPEAKER_00]: you are still using it commercially and so you have common law of rights to your name because you use it as a business name.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so because you are operating a business under that name, you have common law of rights to that name.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so yes, you have rights that you could pursue.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if that person cannot demonstrate that they have rights to own that name, meaning they're
[SPEAKER_00]: Then you have, let's say, enforceable rights.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, there are nuances to that.
[SPEAKER_00]: For example, if that person is a fan, there is the public, there is sort of public to me.
[SPEAKER_00]: When it comes to names, you can buy the name of celebrity.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can even buy the name of some brands.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, there's, I think, a classic case would like the Ford Mustang, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: If you, someone who's a major fan of Ford Mustangs and they started an online forum where people came together to talk about their Ford Mustang and share pictures and whatever, and they weren't monetizing it.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was no monetization, they weren't selling ads, people weren't paying a subscription, and so it was just basically a fan site.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if people are using it for that reason, then that is a legitimate use.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're not using it commercially, they're using it actually in the shadow of you and your brand.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so if that person wants to fan site, that would be considered legitimate
[SPEAKER_00]: As long as they've monetized, if they were monetizing off of your brand, then too, you've got a great case.
[SPEAKER_00]: And, again, I said there's two ways to approach this.
[SPEAKER_00]: One is the life, call it, you know, civil law, okay, which is, you know, I'm going to go final this cybersquadding lawsuit against you, which bears, I think, a minimum of $100,000 fine, and you get the domain.
[SPEAKER_03]: Mm-hmm.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you went, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: But then there's also this really simplified approach that came later because brands didn't want to rate the, you know, a lawsuit can take a long time and it costs a ton of money on both sides.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so brands advertisers wanted a simplified way to get these domains that people were squatting on.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then at that time there was a lot of people squatting and abusing this, this, this abusing these domains and abusing these brands.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what came out of that was a kind of like we call it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I wanted to say arbitrage, but no.
[SPEAKER_00]: What's like instead of a court, instead of going to court, you can go to arbitration or arbitration.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm I will tell you I'm not as sharp as I might usually be because I'm doing a detox this month, I'm doing a silver October and as a part of that, I stopped drinking coffee and I'm like an 8 to 10 coffee a day kind of guy so you know my brain is like at a five or a six where it's normally racing at like a 12.
[SPEAKER_02]: We look great.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_00]: I feel great.
[SPEAKER_00]: The first five days was pretty rough, but I feel great.
[SPEAKER_00]: I actually feel really good.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, you have a good glow.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_00]: So they came up with this thing called a UDRP, uniform dispute resolution protocol.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that's what it's done.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, pretty sure that's what it stands for.
[SPEAKER_00]: UDRP and what that is is basically an arbitration process where a bunch of intellectual property attorneys are these arbiters and they
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I think it's like you cost somewhere between 10 to 10 if you want one, you can select if you want one or three panel of judges and then you can file a case and the whole process takes anywhere from two to four months, let's say sort of relatively fast.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you basically file a case, you say, you have to prove three things, you have to say, look, this domain name is confusingly similar or exactly my brand, which I have a trademark for, or I have otherwise civil rights for, they are using it in a way to abuse my brand and at the time that they bought it,
[SPEAKER_00]: they bought it knowing that I existed and with the intent of either abusing my brand or trying to sell it to me.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you could prove those three elements, then you win and you get them made it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it cost you, you know, a few grand.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe cost you, it's like $25 and you've met cost 35 grand for a word.
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
[SPEAKER_02]: So it falls within the trademark issues too.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I mean, I feel like we've heard something.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's not so important.
[SPEAKER_02]: outside of court.
[SPEAKER_02]: Right, but I mean, it's interesting because I think we've heard a couple of these things where I'm forgetting the name of her makeup line with the girl who's married to Justin Bieber.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm also forgetting her name.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, Haley Bieber.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, has like a makeup line and there was a whole issue with that and the trademark and the domain name.
[SPEAKER_02]: But anyways, I don't know.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's funny that you bring you bring you bring the Bieber stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: I, you know, I'm true.
[SPEAKER_00]: My name's Andrew Rosenner,
[SPEAKER_00]: mostly, and I own Drew.com, and Justin Bieber for whatever reason, I think his middle name is Drew.
[SPEAKER_00]: He launched this whole brand, this clothing brand, and this whole lifestyle brand called Drew.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so anyways, we've been approached a few times by various lawyers who I think represent him trying to buy the name.
[SPEAKER_00]: I feel bad, like, but, you know, like, dude, domain name.
[SPEAKER_02]: Wait, what are you doing with what are you doing with your background?
[SPEAKER_00]: I use it for email, you know, it's my personal email and, you know, I've got a very basic bio site that is very old that needs to be updated, actually.
[SPEAKER_00]: I text you some of the sort of projects that's on the side burner here that we're working on.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to do an updated version of it, but I love it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love owning it.
[SPEAKER_02]: But so this is what I'm saying.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's why I said Andrew.com.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, that makes sense.
[SPEAKER_02]: But so, but now there's a major value because Justin Bieber wants it.
[SPEAKER_02]: That that obviously creates value too, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, if somebody's sure.
[SPEAKER_02]: So it's just like a man.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's only one and you can't have the, you know, don't worry.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have another one.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, so is there a number that it becomes do it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So generally speaking, I would tell you that everything has a price.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, if there's one thing that I have learned in this business and said, that is not a cliche.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: everything has a press.
[SPEAKER_00]: I do.
[SPEAKER_02]: Except for Drew.com.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, but, you know, Drew.com is tricky.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, I've been offered $2 million for it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I told them flat out, no, no way.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I mean, like, look, I, it's my personal email.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's high to so many different things.
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, again, like domains are my thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know what, domains are.
[SPEAKER_00]: All my success has been built on domains.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so like for me to sell Drew.com is kind of like, I don't know, it's almost like a sell out.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it would take a serious number, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: What a great story.
[SPEAKER_02]: That would be.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you want a serious number just and you know, hit me up, you know where to find me.
[SPEAKER_02]: Exactly.
[SPEAKER_02]: Or maybe you could help broker a different one like Drew Clothing.com
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: So you know, even it's never heard of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, exactly.
[SPEAKER_02]: Um, okay.
[SPEAKER_02]: So when when the average person, though, is going to start there, a little business, small business, big business, whatever it is, they go on go daddy or one of these sites and they're looking for what's available.
[SPEAKER_02]: And they will see these things and it's like a dollar or whatever.
[SPEAKER_02]: And it might be similar to what they want so they go with it.
[SPEAKER_02]: There are times when they really want something, it's not available and it says call this number and we can broker it for you whatever.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's happening to me before.
[SPEAKER_02]: And for example, when we were looking at, I think our website is misunderstood podcast.
[SPEAKER_02]: We really wanted misunderstood spelled with MISS, understood.com.
[SPEAKER_02]: But when I looked last, I don't think anyone was actually using it or maybe it was a clothing line.
[SPEAKER_02]: I can't really remember.
[SPEAKER_02]: It was something sort of irrelevant, not to be rude.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, but it wasn't, I think we may have called them or called someone to to figure it out.
[SPEAKER_02]: We didn't get anywhere and I wanted to start the website, so I just went with misunderstood podcast, whatever.
[SPEAKER_02]: Um, so the question is, is this where someone like you comes in that you do big and small or are you only working with Elon Musk and his friends doing big, uh, domain.
[SPEAKER_00]: So on the domain acquisition side, our business is more or less 50 50.
[SPEAKER_00]: So let's say half of the half of the business is, you know, representing uh, companies to help them get their domain names.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, we, we are the ones that got X dot com for Elon and,
[SPEAKER_00]: many other of his company names you know we've gotten zoom dot com which you know we're hurting this on zoom dot com we sold to zoom you know many of the biggest brands that you would have heard of big domains we're responsible for that we do quite a large percentage of the market
[SPEAKER_00]: But on the domain acquisition side, we actually do a ton of domain acquisitions for small brands.
[SPEAKER_00]: We really don't care on the acquisition side.
[SPEAKER_00]: We'll help companies like, we literally, we just did a deal for five grand.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's funny because it's actually for a enormous company.
[SPEAKER_00]: But you know, the domain was five grit and so it's not particularly valuable and but it was for them for that moment.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we basically will help big small and everywhere in between other domain acquisition side.
[SPEAKER_00]: On the main sale side, we really only work on the world's best communities.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we're talking, you know, I used to say $100,000 in up.
[SPEAKER_00]: Today it's more like $250,000 in up.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so most of our sales are probably $500,000 in up.
[SPEAKER_00]: Our average sale is probably close to $1,000,000.
[SPEAKER_00]: Give her a take 20%.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, um, you know, we've got sales on the outbound sales side, you know, anywhere for what's a two 250 grand do, you know, $15 million dollars.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, um, we're quite picky on the domains on this outbound selling side.
[SPEAKER_00]: But on the acquisition side, we don't care.
[SPEAKER_00]: Good bad doesn't matter what the main is.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, we have a minimum fee, um, 2500 bucks, you know, it's pretty reasonable.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, so we explained this to me with, for example, Zoom.
[SPEAKER_02]: Did they come to you?
[SPEAKER_02]: They already had their brand name and you happened to own it or you knew how to find it or you were like, let's sum up with a random name like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, in the case of Zoom.com, I am happy to own it and they came to me.
[SPEAKER_02]: How did you own that?
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, were they in business?
[SPEAKER_00]: We own a lot of very valuable domains.
[SPEAKER_02]: But Helen, was Zoom in business when you, when you bought it?
[SPEAKER_00]: No.
[SPEAKER_02]: But you just figured this random word is going to be valuable.
[SPEAKER_00]: all words available.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe not today, but at some point.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, but that's got to be one of your best stories of like I picked a random word and it happened to be what everyone come that word comes out of every I mean, you know, you have the most commercial zoom zoom.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, you know, there's zoom.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, maybe.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, the zoom zoom is actually a very, you know, it's actually a very popular branding term and so
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't remember, but I think at that time, there was like seven companies that were worth a billion dollars or more that had Zoom in their name or their name was Zoom.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it was like, at some point, one of these companies needs to upgrade their brand and they're going to come to me and they're going to want to buy it and they're going to pay me millions of dollars for the main.
[SPEAKER_02]: And did they?
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, good for you.
[SPEAKER_02]: I love that.
[SPEAKER_02]: And the same thing with with
[SPEAKER_02]: love that.
[SPEAKER_02]: And talk about work, can you talk about working with Elon or do you have like an idea?
[SPEAKER_00]: No, I really don't like to, you know, I don't respect, I don't, I don't like to not about working with him.
[SPEAKER_02]: But I mean, picking the name acts is that something you guys helped pick?
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, when I get there, you on, um, Elon was your original, well,
[SPEAKER_00]: actually there was this lawyer that originally owned it like the early 90s and then Elon bought it from him and was building basically a competitor to PayPal.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it was that Peter Teele was building PayPal, that Elon was building X.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were both trying to do the same thing, then they joined forces, he had an epic battle over who, you know, which name they were going to choose, was it going to be called X or was it going to be called PayPal?
[SPEAKER_00]: They went with PayPal, but then
[SPEAKER_00]: then they sold the company eBay and then eBay spun it off and it went public on its own.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then the, you know, I don't want to go into the details of how to deal happen, but you know, ultimately then, you know, I got a knock saying, hey, do you have somebody that might want to buy X?
[SPEAKER_00]: Uh, I kind of thought Elon might want it and he did and he bought it, um, but that was actually, I want to say like, 2017.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's actually way before Elon launched X or Ray before he bought Twitter, you know, uh, he had this thing and wasn't, I mean, I don't know what he might have been using it for email.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have no idea what he was using.
[SPEAKER_00]: But from the time he bought it, it was basically dormant for years until he turned it into whatever he knows sex.com.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: All right.
[SPEAKER_02]: So you've done a ton of these deals.
[SPEAKER_02]: Was there one story or is there one story from a major deal that really sticks with you that you are allowed
[SPEAKER_00]: I have so many stories, I have so many stories.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, in my line of work, you kind of, you know, we're all the bodies are buried on the internet.
[SPEAKER_02]: Right, I know.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have to give it some thought.
[SPEAKER_02]: Let me give some thought.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, so I know something there.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have some research, but like, I do have a lot of MBA, so it's a little tricky to like figure out.
[SPEAKER_02]: Think about it as being as we finish this up and if it's something, okay, um, I want to talk about scaling your PR team tells me that you've built an $800 million business with just six people.
[SPEAKER_02]: Is that true?
[SPEAKER_00]: We've done $800 million in domain sales over the last whatever it is for 15 years.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we sell these days.
[SPEAKER_00]: They say in the last two or three years, we do roughly $100 million in domain sales a year.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was one man, Teebo, my wife actually started it with me, so it was me and my wife.
[SPEAKER_00]: My wife, my wife, my graduate, pitched my grandmother's slapping my hand saying, my wife and I.
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, I went to Iowa in the early days and then we realized, you know, we got a separate tuition state and then it was basically just me and then I hired my first employee and it was just the tool of us for, I don't know, three or four years and then I hired my first, you know, other broker, uh, Chris Cyker, so Chris joined me, I want to say maybe it's
[SPEAKER_00]: And so then, we're just three of us today, and we're, I guess, six.
[SPEAKER_02]: So with the secret to that, scaling with such a low head.
[SPEAKER_00]: And all my competitors are like, you know, 60 people are, you know, they're not even close.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like we do, you know, we're like, heading shoulders selling more domains than any buddy else in the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: And all of our competitors are like much bigger in terms of the team size in terms of administrative staff.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know what my secret is other than, um, I know
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm more passionate than most people I've ever met in any business and I
[SPEAKER_00]: think most of the people that work with me also reflect that attitude, and we're really efficient.
[SPEAKER_00]: I would say we're really bad at customer service.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's really one of the first things I tell people when they want to have an initial conversation whether they should hire us.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't really do customer service.
[SPEAKER_00]: The reason you're hiring me is either to help you get a
[SPEAKER_00]: It's, I'm not gonna be your friend.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't wanna be your friend.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not here to like chat.
[SPEAKER_02]: You don't need the daily check-ins.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't wanna daily check.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you need to daily check in, I got another phone number to give you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, I'm not gonna hold your hand.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's not what I do.
[SPEAKER_00]: I am like a special ops.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, we are, I say that a little bit, we're like, sealed team six for domains.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, you hire us, you give us a mission, we go do that mission, and you will not hear from us until the mission is complete, or we need more feedback, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: That's it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that's where we operate, and it's super efficient.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, people get really caught up in marketing.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't do marketing.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've never marketed.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't do advertising.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't do marketing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Out of people.
[SPEAKER_00]: I do.
[SPEAKER_00]: because we're really good at what we do and then our customers tell their friends who are also successful entrepreneurs or executives.
[SPEAKER_00]: Man, I'm having trouble with this domain thing, and you know, somebody squatted on my domain, and they were, oh, I've got got.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so, you know, but do they also come to you and say, I need help with creating a name.
[SPEAKER_02]: Can you help me?
[SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes, yep, yep, back in the day, it used to be very common.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Day, less so.
[SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, I mean, I'm saying, you know,
[SPEAKER_00]: few times a month, we got somebody that comes in.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not my favorite, just because, you know, it turns into a fishing expedition.
[SPEAKER_00]: Somebody says, come in, you know, I've got a budget of X, you know, I'm looking for a domain.
[SPEAKER_00]: What can you do for me?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like, all right, well, let's, you know, here's some ideas, we'll go through these iterations if you're the branding ideas, and we're good at it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we, you know, we have a really good overview of the market, and if you go to a branding company, I always laugh because people still do this.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think the literally the worst company in the world is a brandy company like you go to a brandy company you pay them a hundred grand 250 grand sometimes 500 grand to come up with a brand and it's okay Rachel here's the brand for you it's going to be you know the podcast
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, they give you a little piece of paper to describe the brand, it gives you sort of, you know, outline of what's the, you know, all the details around the brand, you know, a board of the brand and the rest is up to you and it's not that, you know, they might have cleared it to say that you can get a trademark for this brand in your field, that's it, they don't know if the domain is available, they don't care if the domain is available and they don't realize it really.
[SPEAKER_00]: branding today, the digital world has to start with the main.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not available.
[SPEAKER_00]: Don't even bother telling me that that's my brand.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so we are brand, we're delayed first.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we don't want to talk about a brand unless the domain can be acquired.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe it's a use, but it's used by some of this underutilizing it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we think you can afford, or it's in your budget, to,
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, help them get onto a new domain or rebrand their business also or, you know, or just to acquire the domain name that matches that print.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we're domain first.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then we work backwards from there into what, you know, what options are off your brand.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we go through these iterations of various ideas.
[SPEAKER_00]: We generally will provide the list of, let's say, 20 different domain names.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we'll say, why don't we even care if any of these are like,
[SPEAKER_00]: the right fit for you.
[SPEAKER_00]: What I want to know is, what are the ones you hate and what are the ones that sort of are in the direction you like, if any?
[SPEAKER_00]: And that way I can sort of gauge, because it's very difficult for people to tell me what they want.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if I give them a list of just a bunch of options and say, you know, kind of score these, like, I hate this, I hate this, this is okay, kind of love this, this isn't a perfect fit but this is the direction I'm going, hate this.
[SPEAKER_00]: then I know from experience, you know, which direction to take that exercise and then create a new list that are more like the ones that they highlighted and then we'll go through that and we'll go through two, three, four iterations of that sometimes many more and it can be a very time-consuming process and we don't charge the only thing we charge for is the domain acquisition.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it can be a fishing expedition because it's like, okay, we've narrowed down some of these domains.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now we have to go out and get pricing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's say maybe five domains or 10 domains that in itself can be time consuming.
[SPEAKER_00]: We narrow it down, you know, now we've got a list of let's say five that how, you know, they're priced within the budget you've given me.
[SPEAKER_00]: You pick one, we negotiate it, we close the deal, we get paid a percentage based on the actual final deal.
[SPEAKER_00]: If we aren't successful, we get paid nothing.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's not my favorite, but we do those exercises a couple times a month.
[SPEAKER_02]: God.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, where do you see the digital asset world in five or 10 years?
[SPEAKER_02]: Where are we headed?
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's Bitcoin and crypto like is everything going to be dot bit or
[SPEAKER_00]: Great questions related basically let's say domain names digital assets up and to the right meaning if you're looking at a chart and you're looking at the price or value it's going you know it's a it's an exponential curve up and to the right and the reason for that obviously perousel you're you know you're selling your own book well you know I've been doing this for roughly 30 years 27 years and
[SPEAKER_00]: It's only gone up into the right since day one.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that's all we're gonna continue because look, you still have, I think, something like 60% of the world, but it's not online.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so every year, something like 5% or 10% more of the world goes online, that's more competition.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the people that started to bottom gradually worked the way up to the top.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the people that get to the top, they need great brands and he great domains.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I always tell people like, it's fine to start with a dot XYZ or a dot co or a dot AI or whatever.
[SPEAKER_00]: I call a training wheels.
[SPEAKER_00]: You need to crawl before you run and so start with that, see if your business gets
[SPEAKER_00]: And then if it does, you should put on to big boy pants and upgrade to the.com.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's where we can help you.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, it's just more and more of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And more businesses are digital, less businesses are brick and mortar.
[SPEAKER_00]: Since COVID, as I mentioned, you know, more and more people don't even go to an office.
[SPEAKER_00]: the place you meet your investor, the place you meet your customer, your vendor, everything is digital.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so as that trend continues and it will continue, that is a certainty.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just applying to that right we're not there's only so many semantically meaningful words semantically meaningful brands with a calm on the end of it right and so that supply is constructed this spill over goes into all these other extensions or people put a prefix or a suffix
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, you couldn't get this understood so you said misunderstood podcasts, right, but maybe some under a Sunday you want to upgrade to misunderstood and that's that's the life cycle of a brand.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it's just more and more competition for the top and so, you know, it's it's, you know, the fat end of the curve is messy.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's all the alternative extensions, which gets into that, you know, dot bit right.
[SPEAKER_00]: So.
[SPEAKER_00]: In 2026, I can, and I don't want to get too technical to get bored, but I can, is the governing body of the internet.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's one of the most important organizations in the world that nobody's ever heard of, and they control.
[SPEAKER_00]: basically the internet, but they control that whole naming space, okay?
[SPEAKER_00]: And so in 2012, they opened that up and allowed brands to apply for their dot brand, some brands got their dot brand, like, you know, dot Google, right Google actually just wrote an article last week about
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, you know, how brands should own their dot brand.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, um, dot Amazon.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Amazon, for example, has been in a legal battle with, like, the countries that actually, you know, control and surround the Amazon basin, rainforest, um, whether that Amazon, the business can own dot Amazon, or whether dot Amazon should be protected for the use of, you know,
[SPEAKER_00]: and important, you know, global resource.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it's been a giant little battle.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think maybe recently Amazon baby won that and they haven't made much of concessions.
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, they're going to make huge stories.
[SPEAKER_02]: Because we know it would be like Amazon dot Amazon.
[SPEAKER_02]: Is that what it is?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, doesn't make a lot of sense, like, I don't think anybody's ever going to say, you know, oh, isn't that great if I'm Amazon dot Amazon, like that's redundant and silly.
[SPEAKER_02]: But maybe it's like good things that Amazon or something exactly.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, exactly.
[SPEAKER_00]: Secondary tertiary brands and services, maybe internal use.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a whole bunch of different reasons why it is actually useful.
[SPEAKER_00]: It also becomes kind of interesting for email, but
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, email that Amazon, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: That's cool, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that is fun.
[SPEAKER_02]: I like that.
[SPEAKER_02]: So you're saying it's not too late, though, to be an investor.
[SPEAKER_02]: The people can still get involved and buy things, but not necessarily going on like what I said before, like a go daddy, but on going to these options, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so let me just quickly finish that thought because I want to finish no, I just want to answer the question you had originally asked, which is about, you know, got bit, for example, just doesn't exactly.
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, I can't have now opened up the window in 2026.
[SPEAKER_00]: There will be a new round for people to apply.
[SPEAKER_00]: So anybody that wants to can pay a $200,000 application fee.
[SPEAKER_00]: And uh, yeah, that's $220 or something.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like last time there was 180, now it's $200, something.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you pay this application fee.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, it's quite a process.
[SPEAKER_00]: You've got to hire, you know, domain attorney probably or, you know, be our very services that do this.
[SPEAKER_00]: They call them registry services.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you hire one of these people.
[SPEAKER_00]: You fire your application whether it's your dot brand or some other dot one average in error right in the case of dot bit for example I think dot bit and dot BTC dot bitcoin dot crypto dot you know whatever all of these things I think these are going to be some of the most competitive.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's say domain extensions in this next round and when more than one part in wants the same extension, it goes to an auction.
[SPEAKER_00]: and these things can go for a lot of money.
[SPEAKER_00]: The last round for example, multiple parties want to dot web, arguably dot web is maybe the second best, with a generic, tomato extension after dot com, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just simple, it doesn't have any implication.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just a web destination.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so,
[SPEAKER_00]: That ended up going for, I don't remember the exact number again.
[SPEAKER_00]: I probably should if I was drinking my coffee, I probably would remember I don't know, I think it was like It was over a hundred million dollars So 120, 140 million dollars if this thing went for right, but you know, very sign Want it and very sign is a public company there the ones it
[SPEAKER_00]: control the contract for dot com dot net dot TV.
[SPEAKER_02]: Um, if you are paying that to them, who the government or whoever you said is on.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, in this, this time around, it looks like that money will go to I can't.
[SPEAKER_02]: I can.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: Which is, you know, a non-governmental organization, you know, that sort of governance, the, the, the internet and looks out for, you know, consumers and commercial enterprises that utilize that internet.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the last round, however, there was all these third party auctions and there was some very clever, the guy that created the auction mechanism, actually want to know well prize a few years ago, but they created this very clever auction mechanism whereby basically the winning bitter paid whatever the second highest bitter.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whatever the second highest bid was, the winning bidder paid that price, not the bid they made, but the price of the second highest bidder, and then the money, some portion of it went to I can't, but the vast majority of the line share got distributed on a pro-rata basis to all the other people that participated in the auction.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you were a loser in the auction, you were still a winner.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, you know, don't really smart money, which, unfortunately, I was not a part of, I was super against this, but I was like, I was thinking about it like a domain investor, and I was like, hey,
[SPEAKER_00]: That horse, I don't need it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, why don't you need that horse?
[SPEAKER_00]: So that didn't share them.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like, yeah, I don't need it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I was thinking about how like a domain investor, which was the 100% wrong attitude from a registry business perspective.
[SPEAKER_00]: This was the greatest cash machine opportunity
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't even, I mean, basically it's you're getting a monopoly on a name space.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you can charge indefinitely and collect passive income on the return of the renewals, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's quite incredible opportunity.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's why, you know, 200 grams, a lot of money, but you know, for a well-healed investor or business, it's really a tremendous opportunity.
[SPEAKER_00]: So let's say, I don't know, I bet you there will be
[SPEAKER_00]: bit or dot BTC or dot Bitcoin.
[SPEAKER_00]: There'll be 200 companies trying to get dot crypto.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you know, probably crypto dot com will try to get dot crypto.
[SPEAKER_02]: No, and just so I'm understanding, they're paying the $200,000 fee just to apply to get into this.
[SPEAKER_02]: But then they have to, uh, just table six.
[SPEAKER_02]: Got it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_02]: Got it.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's just, that's just, you know, that's just a, you know, they've got to come to the table with the money to really get this.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, you know, if you're, I don't know,
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm just looking for looking around, you know, I forget some vitamins on my desk, Nordic.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: So let's say you want to get dot Nordic and you're the only one that wants dot Nordic.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's probably not going to be a lot of competition without Nordic.
[SPEAKER_02]: But like my fiance's in the security world, like he has four companies.
[SPEAKER_02]: Maybe they want dot security.
[SPEAKER_02]: Whatever.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think there's already that security, but if there isn't, then definitely there will be companies that want that security.
[SPEAKER_02]: But now so if there is just using this example, somebody that owns it, is that when somebody like you as a broker comes in and then start getting involved in that after they go through the whole process or no brokers aren't doing that anymore.
[SPEAKER_00]: Uh, so again, so what I work on is the stuff to the left of the dog.
[SPEAKER_02]: I got it.
[SPEAKER_02]: I got it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_00]: So this is really new trolley to part the to the right of the dot.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: The dot com is to the right of the dot.
[SPEAKER_00]: Apple is to the left of the dot.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that totally different.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so you're going to have these auctions, these are very controlled, you know, things.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's no brokers and there are middlemen that let's say, going to the customers, but it's not really a broker.
[SPEAKER_02]: So once it's owned, it's really owned.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, once you've got it and as long as you follow, you know, stay within the terms of, you know, there are guidelines provided to you by I can that you have to abide by, you know, you have to be licensed and bonded and all this stuff and you have to manage the registry and, you know, there's there's a lot to this you have, you know, privacy laws and you're up and you have to abide by those you have privacy laws and you're in the US that are different abide by those and you have.
[SPEAKER_00]: Take down notices for a legal content and take down notices for people and infringing on copyright and you have to control all this and so, you know, there is an administrative element to this that is controlled and it's, you know, it's regulated but You own that entire namespace and everybody that wants, you know, a friend of mine owns dot XYZ
[SPEAKER_00]: That has turned out to be incredibly successful namespace because for whatever reason, a lot of these web three slash crypto businesses have adopted dot XYZ as their own for whatever reason.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so there's just been this explosion.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, even Google, the pair of company of Google alphabet,
[SPEAKER_00]: They were the first major company to use the ZOTXYZ and they got ABC.xyz, which they thought was sort of a tongue-in-cheek, fun way of, you know, being the primary, web address for Alphabet.
[SPEAKER_03]: Mm-hmm.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just a pair of companies.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, um...
[SPEAKER_00]: And so since then that XYZ got my more and more popular and then you've got a very healthy, you know, speculative domain investor community that chases after done XYZs, you've got businesses using them and so, you know, that's become a very healthy, very large new face.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know the number, but let's say there's a million.
[SPEAKER_00]: XYZ domains registered and let's say on average that cost.
[SPEAKER_00]: eight bucks ten bucks, you know, that means space pulls in.
[SPEAKER_00]: 10 million, and I bet it's actually quite a bit more than that, because many of these costs much more than we're new ever year.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_00]: 10 million plus in basically passive income.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, if you want to market that XYZ, or you want to market your domain extension to the broader universe, to try to get more people to register it, and you've got more kidding costs, and you've got some employees.
[SPEAKER_00]: But most of the people I know, they run these registries with a pretty limited,
[SPEAKER_00]: staff and you know they're using a third party back end and software and you know there's some legal costs and so it's it's a pretty good business it's a cash machine but you gotta have something people want uh i bought one i had dot uh dot quagos
[SPEAKER_00]: I used to live in Panama for a long time.
[SPEAKER_00]: And when I left the first civil business, actually, we moved to Panama for 10 years.
[SPEAKER_00]: And not in the center eight years ago, I was fortunate.
[SPEAKER_02]: But by the way, on a side note with that, I just want to tell you, I just got back from Panama.
[SPEAKER_02]: I went and did stem cells in Panama at a place.
[SPEAKER_03]: Amazing, yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: All the origins.
[SPEAKER_02]: I fell in love with Panama.
[SPEAKER_02]: First of all, I didn't even know where Panama was on a map.
[SPEAKER_02]: OK.
[SPEAKER_02]: It was so amazing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the fact that the Americas,
[SPEAKER_02]: I am not a foodie.
[SPEAKER_02]: I could eat lucky charms and be totally fine.
[SPEAKER_02]: They had the best food I've ever had.
[SPEAKER_02]: I love the people.
[SPEAKER_02]: It was just such an amazing place to go.
[SPEAKER_02]: So sorry, that's my back going.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it was even better back when I when I moved there and I moved there until late and it was just amazing.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's amazing, amazing, amazing place to live.
[SPEAKER_00]: I still my daughter was born in Panama.
[SPEAKER_00]: She's got pandemic and passport.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a it's a it's a place very near
[SPEAKER_00]: But I like Portugal even more, but yes, Panama is amazing and great restaurants Panama is not anything like what people imagine It's not at all You've got Caribbean and the Pacific you've got some of the best surfing in the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: You've got you know It's it's really cool place.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, best fishing full stop.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love fishing
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I've never seen anything like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I would go out to an office and you'd plan a mile.
[SPEAKER_00]: I would catch like 30 to nine to hours.
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, no way.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's pretty.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I didn't mean to interrupt you.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's right.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I did lose my training thought.
[SPEAKER_02]: Where was I?
[SPEAKER_02]: Shut now I did too.
[SPEAKER_02]: You were talking about something good.
[SPEAKER_02]: We were talking about, well, originally, I guess I had asked if it's too late for investors and people to get involved.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's where you were kind of wrapping up with that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: So so.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that in 2026 there will be this opportunity for people to get these new remaining sanctions.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that's a great opportunity for the right people, right businesses.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think brands, I encourage them to own it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't even know if we know today exactly why you want to own it.
[SPEAKER_00]: We know some of the reasons, but I think it's
[SPEAKER_00]: particularly as we start having this AI agent world where these AI agents are sort of navigating the internet for us in various ways.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think domains are going to become a student fundamental.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think every AI agent will have its own domain name.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think every machine that's connected to the internet is whole concept of internet of things.
[SPEAKER_00]: everyone of those has an IP address and we'll have a domain name so that you can interact with it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I think the expansion of the utility of domain names is only getting started.
[SPEAKER_00]: You brought up crypto.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that look, you can take your domain name and turn it into a crypto wallet today.
[SPEAKER_00]: So using, you know, again, I don't want to geek out the like using some of the utilities on the back end of a domain name called the DNS, the domain name servers, these are specific things that A record, the text records, the, you know, C names as various things that help you point a domain name to do the thing you wanted to do to send an email to point to your, you know, AWS server to whatever.
[SPEAKER_00]: Uh, you're going to be able to basically using that turn the domain into your crypto wall.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I can have Drew.com and it's like, oh, hey, Rachel, you know, you're sending the 100 bucks a Bitcoin.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, you can send it to Drew.com.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't need to give you this long string of letters of numbers that are case sense of, you know, that's a disaster.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's like a really good way for people to lose their money.
[SPEAKER_00]: That stuff is not guilt for the mainstream yet, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: But when we are you, when people are,
[SPEAKER_00]: regular utilizing domain names for their crypto wallet, I think that becomes a really good way for people to more safely transfer crypto, whether it's Bitcoin or otherwise, between each other.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that there are, again, not a way to technically geek out, but it's going to be this geospatial way of drones that we can actually control drones using the DNS features.
[SPEAKER_00]: really crazy out there things that people are working on right now using a domain name and so the main names are going to become more valuable because they're going to have more utility and there's going to be more people, more machines, more AI agents that need them and want them and so yeah I don't think it's too late at all I mean if I thought it was too late I wouldn't still be buying domains and I'm still buying a lot of domains
[SPEAKER_02]: All right, last question, what advice would you give someone listening who wants to build wealth in this new landscape?
[SPEAKER_00]: Whew, this could be a whole podcast in and of itself.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, I think domain names are kind of like the way our parents thought of real estate or land being like the fundamental thing to put your money into, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: I had somebody once tell me, you know, you gotta put your money in the sun, meaning if you earn money, you say that, don't keep it in a bank by a land so that it's, you know, under the sun.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that was true.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's going to be less true of going forward.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that we're going to see a lot of pressure on real estate because insurance property insurance is absolutely going to increase because there's more natural disasters, there's more insurance claims, there's more fires, there's more, right, to cost rising.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so as property insurance increases,
[SPEAKER_00]: property taxes increase.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's going to put downward pressure of a value of real estate.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think property taxes are going to go up significantly because as businesses become more digital and can move, you know, you want to move from California to Texas.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why?
[SPEAKER_00]: There's no income tax.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, that puts pressure on California because all the big businesses are leaving California and moving somewhere else because there's lower taxes.
[SPEAKER_00]: So how does California?
[SPEAKER_00]: or any other jurisdiction, any other municipality create a sustainable, predictable tax base, which they need to sustain their municipality.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, the only thing they can guarantee is that that way is not going anywhere.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so the place they have to capture that value is in property taxes.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I think property taxes are going to significantly increase over the coming decade.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that property insurance is going to significantly increase over the coming decade.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that we've already sort of hit a peak on how much of people's disposable income they can allocate to paying a mortgage and pay rent.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I think that a lot of that value from commercial real estate and to some extent residential real estate,
[SPEAKER_00]: It's going to shift into the digital real estate world.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're already seeing that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we even did a study to sort of prove that out in my opinion.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a fact.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I think that that trend will continue.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I think that in the same way that people think about investing into real estate, they should maybe start thinking about investing into domain names and other digital assets.
[SPEAKER_00]: You want things that are scarce.
[SPEAKER_00]: When the money printer is going burr and they're going to just keep increasing the money supply, you want things that can't be increased and supply so that there's more money chasing something that can't be increased.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so you want to own
[SPEAKER_00]: Bitcoin, you want to own gold and you want to own domain names.
[SPEAKER_00]: In my mind, that's the literally the magic triangle of like the next decade and beyond.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't like to think more than X5 or 10 years though, because you know, who know, maybe around Mars.
[SPEAKER_00]: Over the next decade, the way I think about it personally, again, I'm also not a financial advisor and don't pretend to be on on the internet.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the way I think about building well today and for the next decade is you want to own scarce digital assets or scarce physical assets that cannot be turned into liability.
[SPEAKER_00]: If property taxes and property insurance increase exponentially,
[SPEAKER_00]: your house that you think is this amazing asset can very quickly become a liability.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I think gold, Bitcoin, and domain names are literally the three greatest investments that you can make for the next decade, because they can't create more.
[SPEAKER_01]: Love it.
[SPEAKER_02]: And just quickly for people, again, listening, if they're looking at domain names
[SPEAKER_00]: Unacquivocally, and always building, always building.
[SPEAKER_00]: Brilliant's and trillions of dollars have been spent in graining.com into the minds of consumers worldwide.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, you look at, look at the Fortune 1000.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's not one company in the Fortune 1000 that is not.com.
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a reason for that.
[SPEAKER_02]: OK.
[SPEAKER_02]: So it's not like we're moving back to.net or.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, anybody on the Fortune 1000 aspires to be.
[SPEAKER_02]: But that's what I'm saying like misunderstood wasn't available, misunderstood podcast, but it might have been misunderstood.net was or something and I didn't want it.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I guess my question is, do you just try to extend your word?
[SPEAKER_02]: Is that more valuable in the dot com or getting the pizza dot net?
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know that I would describe it in terms of value, but I would say that in my opinion, which is a quite well informed opinion.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that...
[SPEAKER_00]: adding a prefix or adding a suffix is better than choosing an alternative extension.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's easier to re-brand later.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's easier to drop the prefix drop to suffix.
[SPEAKER_00]: That looks like an upgrade.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I think it's always better to use.com.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's also one of the things that people we talked about, but it's incredibly important and incredibly valuable is email.
[SPEAKER_00]: then what good is it?
[SPEAKER_00]: And most businesses rely on email, not just to communicate, but also like for advertising for security.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so anything except.com.net is good.org is great.
[SPEAKER_00]: But anything else, you're going to run into issues with email deliverability.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the reason is,
[SPEAKER_00]: Is this spammers now use all these alternative to made extensions to send spam because it's easier and cheaper to get them, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: You can register every couple months, there's a promotion from somebody to get a dot XYZ for a dollar, get a dot info for a dollar, get a dot horse for a dollar.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so a spammer goes out, they get a thousand domains, send out spam, cycle through these domains,
[SPEAKER_00]: becomes less deliverable with these email providers because they're just trying to control spam.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so dot com is really the only one dot org dot net because it's so old, but that that is kind of always been like the redhead is stepchild of domains.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's kind of like doesn't have to own identity anymore.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like always feels like second place.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whereas.org is like, oh, don't work.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like more of a fuzzy and I trust it, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And dot com is like, okay, commercial entity, you know, and the better, you know, the better it is, the more I trust it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Got it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, love hearing all that.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, finally, sorry, I know I've asked you to help me questions and going on forever.
[SPEAKER_02]: After all these big deals, what motivates you?
[SPEAKER_02]: What's next for you?
[SPEAKER_02]: What's like on your bucket list?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I ask myself this every day every day.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't need to do this anymore And so I ask myself why why do I and the truth is I
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm like, I'm an apex predator.
[SPEAKER_00]: I just, I love to make deals.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love making deals.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I really, I just do this because, you know, first off, I think I have the coolest to make.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think I have the coolest business in the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, for the basic, the coolest job in the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, if you think about my job every day, I'm dealing with some of the most important, some of the coolest, some of the most interesting, you know, entrepreneurs, scientists, investors in the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: Every person you could possibly think of, that's like a name brand in business, in science, in investing, like I probably is focused to them.
[SPEAKER_00]: At some point, for some reason.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I get to interact every day with really interesting people.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I can't imagine other business that would allow me to do that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's one of the things that I really love.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love chatting.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't want to keep going with questions.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think this is for my mouth.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love chatting.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love talking to people.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is a really awesome part of my business.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't love demanding clients at the part I don't love any more, but I really do love making deals.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's literally like the biggest adrenaline rush for me.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's where I get my dopamine hit.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love making deals.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love winning, I love competing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that's really what drives me.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's really what it is.
[SPEAKER_00]: At this point, I'm not particularly one like,
[SPEAKER_00]: 10 of those awards behind me, you know, there's nobody else to even come close.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm not even a competition thing anymore.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just, I do truly love what I do most days.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's not not being cliche, I'm not trying to be.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I, you know, I think if you think about what it is I do and if you love sales, you love making deals, you love interacting with interesting people.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I don't think that there is another job or another business that offers that at this level.
[SPEAKER_02]: amazing anything else do you want to conquer though that is out in the future like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like I said, I can talk about ideas.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have a lot of ideas set one set, you know, I go from one day I want to be a mushroom farmer.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I one of the things that I really I love.
[SPEAKER_00]: jewelry.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love gemstones.
[SPEAKER_00]: I can a whole bunch of gemstones back here.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love gemstones.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love jewelry.
[SPEAKER_00]: My wife is very lucky.
[SPEAKER_00]: I buy her tons and tons of very nice jewelry because I'm obsessive of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm obsessive of things that I get into.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I would love to want to jewelry company someday.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that's probably
[SPEAKER_00]: the thing that I'm most keen to probably do next, or let's say do a parallel.
[SPEAKER_00]: I would love to do what you were trying to do.
[SPEAKER_02]: Amazing.
[SPEAKER_02]: All right.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, I wish you the best of luck with that.
[SPEAKER_02]: You are very interesting dude.
[SPEAKER_02]: I love speaking to you.
[SPEAKER_02]: If people want more information or want to look you up and see what you do potentially want to hire you work and they find you.
[SPEAKER_00]: mediaoptions.com.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is our domain brokerage business.
[SPEAKER_00]: DomainShurper.com is our domain name podcast that we do once a week.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's fun.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's sometimes offensive and it's mostly about the main names and we talk about a lot of other things.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if you're not really interested in getting out on domains, it's probably not for you.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I am pretty active on Twitter or ex at Andrew Rosner or at Media Options.
[SPEAKER_00]: And yeah, that's it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Amazing.
[SPEAKER_02]: And if people want more information on what you were talking about that's starting in 2026 with those opportunities with the dot, whatever.
[SPEAKER_02]: Where can they look that up?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, you could reach out to me, we actually might get involved in helping companies get a dot brand or a dot whatever they want.
[SPEAKER_00]: We just took on one client for that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so we're kind of my CEO is an intellectual property attorney.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was very much involved in the last round.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we're thinking about, you know, expanding that a little bit.
[SPEAKER_00]: But at a minimum, we can put you in the right direction.
[SPEAKER_00]: or just Google, I can, I see a and n, G-T-L-D, generic top-level domain.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I can, G-T-L-D program, and you'll, you know, that'll open up the rabbit hole for you to go down.
[SPEAKER_02]: amazing drew thank you it was such a pleasure speaking to you getting to know you I wish you the best of luck and Can't wait to see them next big stuff.
[SPEAKER_02]: I might have to listen to one of your podcasts and see what other fun don't mean Conversations your havoc.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you very much.
[SPEAKER_00]: This was a pleasure
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you so much for listening to Ms.
[SPEAKER_02]: Understood.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm your host, Rachel, you could tell.
[SPEAKER_02]: Please be sure to subscribe to the show and give us a five-star rating and review.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Understood with Rachel, you could tell.
[SPEAKER_02]: Do you have ideas for the show or want to reach out email us at info, Ms.
[SPEAKER_02]: Understood podcast at gmail.com.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's spelled m-is-s-s-understood.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you so much, and I'll see you next time.