This episode of the My First Million podcast features a conversation with Michael Saylor, the CEO of MicroStrategy, who discusses his company’s massive investment in Bitcoin and his philosophy on corporate treasury management. Saylor explains why he views Bitcoin as a superior, scarce digital asset that serves as a solution to the “treasury problem” faced by companies holding cash in an inflationary environment. The discussion also touches on the importance of brand and domain ownership, as well as Saylor’s perspective on the risks and rewards of corporate strategy.
Topics: Bitcoin, MicroStrategy, Corporate Treasury, Asset Inflation, Domain Names, Business Strategy, Cryptocurrency
Introduction [00:00]
Shaan Puri: For everyone, 7.8 billion people, for 100 million companies, for everyone with money on earth, and everyone that earns a salary on earth. This is the big idea of the podcast. You have to…
Michael Saylor’s Bitcoin Strategy [00:23]
Shaan Puri: What’s up everybody? We got a special guest in the house, Michael Saylor. The… have you heard the nickname they give you on YouTube? The GigaChad? Have you seen this one?
Michael Saylor: I might have heard it once or twice.
Shaan Puri: So, Michael, um… go ahead, Shaan.
Shaan Puri: I was going to ask you, have you heard this nickname that they give that they gave Michael Saylor? The crypto… the crypto community, you know, sort of give it and take it away. You know, they are extremely passionate and devoted, but they are also, you know, just nuts online. Like my my Twitter mentions are unusable now. I’m sure Michael’s are the same, just because of that group. But they are funny also. So they they nicknamed him the GigaChad because he is sort of like, you know, probably the most credible, established person and company with MicroStrategy to adopt Bitcoin in a major, major way and really is driving the kind of institutional pickup of it. So, if you’re listening to this, you never heard of Michael Saylor, the reason to listen to this is pretty interesting guy, had a really interesting career, but most notably, uh, in most known now for basically using his company, MicroStrategy, and buying about $2 billion worth of Bitcoin, or they own $2 billion worth of Bitcoin. Bought about… I don’t know, how much you guys put in? Half a billion or a billion?
Michael Saylor: No, um, we uh, we bought uh, 2.2 billion worth of Bitcoin. We own about five, a bit more than 5 billion, depending upon the day. Wow. More than 5 billion in Bitcoin.
The Ship Behind Michael Saylor [01:57]
Shaan Puri: Okay. All right. So you uh, you you have a for the not everyone’s going to be able to see this, but you have a ship behind you.
Michael Saylor: Right.
Shaan Puri: Uh, like a huge, what what is that?
Michael Saylor: It’s an antique handmade model, a 19th century model of a 17th century galleon. Like uh, I think a model of the Amsterdam, a galleon that sailed out of Amsterdam in the 17th century. And it was uh, it was made in the 19th century. So it’s a very interesting piece.
Are You a Car Guy? [02:37]
Shaan Puri: Are you a car guy?
Michael Saylor: I have a bunch of cars, but no, I’m not a car guy.
Shaan Puri: What’s the coolest one you have?
Michael Saylor: I probably I probably I lean toward SUVs. I have a bunch of SUVs. I had a had a a Lexus convertible that I used to love, that I drove a lot, but I I don’t really drive a lot.
The Treasury Problem [02:59]
Shaan Puri: So you can give Sam a grade. Sam just sold his company, came into a bunch of money, and he bought what? What did you buy, Sam?
Sam Parr: Okay, so I was driving it all this weekend and I’ve been getting made fun of. I can’t believe people are making fun of me. Do you know what an AMG station wagon is? Like a Mercedes AMG?
Michael Saylor: I can imagine.
Sam Parr: Okay, so basically there’s Mercedes, which is everyone knows Mercedes, and then there’s AMG, which is like a subsidiary, and they basically put race car engines in the cars. Um, and I bought this, but the problem about fast cars and cool cars is that they’re like super unpractical mostly. And but I wanted something that was like kind of fast and fun to drive, but I wanted it to be more practical. And there’s this thing called an AMG E63 wagon. It’s a station wagon. It looks like a mom car, except you can put your dog in the back and it has five seats and but it still goes 0 to 60 in 3 seconds. So I bought a souped up station wagon. Like the one of the fastest cars on the road, but it’s a station wagon. That’s my that’s currently what I’m driving right now.
Michael Saylor: Whatever works for you.
Sam Parr: Well, I was looking for someone to geek out on it, but I guess that you’re you’re I would have I for some reason I pegged you as a car guy, but I guess I’m wrong.
Michael Saylor: I’m more into boats and planes than cars.
Planes and Aircraft [04:14]
Shaan Puri: What do you what what what does that mean if you’re into planes?
Michael Saylor: Well, I like I like aircraft because if an aircraft can go Mach 89 or Mach 85, you’re allowed to legally fly it that fast. Whereas What is Mach 8? Like 2,000 miles an hour? No, Mach 85 would be like like 500 knots, like or something like that. So the point is like airplanes can fly at their full speed and and yachts or boats can go at their full speed over the water. But an automobile that could go 160 miles an hour, you don’t very often get to do that legally. So, so I I like vehicles that you can operate at their design point legally and safely.
Bitcoin and Corporate Strategy [05:04]
Shaan Puri: What planes do you have?
Michael Saylor: I have a Global Express XRS.
Shaan Puri: Fucking A.
Shaan Puri: Um, before we get into Bitcoin stuff and because Sean’s been talking about you for like a year now, uh, because he was following a MicroStrategy and and all that, but um, you own a a ton of domain names, right?
Michael Saylor: Yeah, I bought a bunch.
Shaan Puri: Like how many do you own now? Or how many have you?
Michael Saylor: Well, I mean, I won’t count all the I mean, I own hundreds and hundreds, but the ones that are our top level primary domain names, about 16. Like uh, like words in the English language that everybody understands. Like I own Emma, uh, Frank, I own my own name. I own michael.com. I also own my nickname, mike.com. Uh, so like my personal website, I’ve got it on michael.com. You just type michael.com, you see all the stuff about me. Uh, Hope.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, Sam, go go to hope.com, see where that takes you.
Michael Saylor: Go to hope.com. Yeah, well, actually, Bitcoin is hope. So if you type hope.com, you’ll get everything there is to know about Bitcoin. Oh my god. Because I actually repathed hope to all of our Bitcoin resources and materials. Uh, Speaker. I I owned voice.com and I sold it for $30 million a couple years ago. That’s the largest uh naked domain sale in the history of domains.
The Voice.com Story [06:36]
Shaan Puri: Tell the tell the short version of that story. The the story is kind of crazy. I’ve heard it once before, but I I would assume Sam and most people have not heard the story of selling voice.com. You bought all these early on in the web. You kind of recognized, oh, these are these are probably going to be valuable to own these names. There’s only one, you know, there’s only one owner of each of these names. You you own it and you hold it for a really long time, like over a decade. And uh, at some point, you decide, okay, maybe we should see if somebody wants to buy some of these. So tell the story of selling voice.com real quick.
Michael Saylor: Well, yeah, we I bought all these domains because I thought, wouldn’t it be great to own a part of the English language? I mean, owning hope or owning voice. I mean, eventually there’ll be a Google voice or there’ll be, you know, some some Telco company that’ll want to launch some service and what a great domain on uh to launch on the on a word like voice.com. So we held them a long time and and uh, I think at some point we were looking for joint ventures, we were looking to commercialize them and we did commercialize a bunch. For example, I created a company called alarm.com. And alarm.com is now publicly traded on NASDAQ. It’s like a four or five billion dollar market cap company. And and you can guess what it does. It actually integrates your home alarm into the internet. You know, and I created another company called angel.com and we sold that for a bit more than $100 million and that was actually a speech interactive voice response like Siri or Alexa before Siri and Alexa came along. And uh, so I had voice and I was holding it and we were looking for some kind of good uh commercialization and someone out of the blue, they contacted us, one of the domain brokers, and they said, well, you know, do you want to sell it? We’ll give you $150,000. And uh, and I, you know, I was like, someone came to me and said they offered $150,000. I said, no. So I thought nothing of it because I just I couldn’t see the point. A week later, they come back and said, well, they doubled it to $300,000. I said, tell them no. So a couple days later, they go, well, the broker is really insistent uh and so they went to $600,000. I said, no. So they said, well, what should you say? I said, don’t tell anything. Tell them, you know, like we’re not interested. It’s got to be something serious. So they they went to 1.2 million. I said, tell them no. I said, well, they want to know what you want for it. I said, um, well, send them a note or something and just tell them I said, it’s like it’s it’s the word voice in the English language, right? So it’s going to have to be something you know, north of uh I don’t know, I don’t think I said seven or eight eight figures, but I just said a lot of money. Um, and so it went on and they doubled it again to two and a half million. And then uh and then uh 5 million and then around 10 million. Then I said they said I had like 18 people in my office. They’re like, or not eight but eight eight people they’re like looking at me like, aren’t you are you going to take the money? It’s like a lot of money now. I said, uh, no, send them back uh at this point, send them back an a note pointing out that this is like the word voice in the English language and it’s and it’s it’s worth a billion dollars to the right company. And uh they said, well, you going to give them a response? I said, uh, okay, tell them 30 million. Tell them I’ll take 30 million for it. Because I thought like if I didn’t give them some number, they would stop negotiating after uh, you know, five nos. So I said tell them 30 million. I don’t want to sell it for 30 million. I want to sell it for 100 million or more, but I guess I’ll say 30 million. So that so at that point they said, well, you know, they offered you I think they up their their offer to like um 12 million. I said, tell them uh no, but if you want, I’ll I’ll take a meeting with them. So when it got to 12 million, I said I’d get on the phone for half an hour. So then we got on the phone and the call started with someone saying, well, how about 22 million? And I said, um, let me explain. This is like my daughter. Like I’m willing to I’m willing to like marry her off, but only to a man that values her more than I value her. So I value this domain, you know, at 30 million. And so if you don’t want to give me the 30, you know, I’m going to regret after I sell it anyway. I’ll have sellers remorse, but I would I would do it just to make the market. But if you don’t want to value it at 30, I’ll just keep it. And they’re like, uh, okay, we’ll give you 30. I said, okay.
The “Bill of the Week” Segment [11:46]
Sam Parr: So 30, you went you got a 30 from 100k.
Michael Saylor: So they did like double seven or eight times and I eventually they started 150k I think and we ended it and I said 30, we ended at 30. But but the point was I didn’t really need the money. It was a matter like if I had at the point maybe 600 million in cash in the bank and the company the MicroStrategy was is a multi-billion dollar company. So I was like a million’s not going to move the needle for me. 100,000’s not going to move the needle for me. 5 million, 10 million’s not going to move the needle one way or the other. So there’s no point in doing it unless it was something material.
Are You a Car Guy? (Revisited) [12:27]
Shaan Puri: Were you uh like you know, the eight people in your office were were they like your coworkers or Uh I mean they’re business development, the people that wanted the commission on the deal, you know?
Shaan Puri: So like any any most Like it’s a big deal, right? They want to like do the deal and and the only way you get 30 million is to like say no to 22 million, right? And everything Well, like any reasonable, most reasonable people, which the reason you are where you are is you’re many would probably consider you not reasonable, right? I mean, you have you’re you’re you’re an extreme personality type and that’s why you you’re very successful. But any reasonable person would say, what are you an idiot? Like you paid very nothing for this. Take it. Were you but were you always that like uh always My my view on it is that in the English language is going to be important to the human race for a thousand years and in a thousand years from now, voice will probably still have value. Just like a lot of like hope. It’s a valuable word forever. I mean, until you murder everyone that speaks the English language. If you think about how valuable it is, I my my real view is is I think people are are crazy for spending hundreds of millions of dollars on ad campaigns to market a brand that’s a misspelling of a normal word. It’s like I got to convince you how to sell in with like two Ys and a Z, you know, and I’m like, why would you do that? Because in the modern era of spell checkers, when you try to type these crappy brands that are misspelled, the, you know, your iPhone unspells it for you or properly spells it. So try going to a website that’s a misspelling of a name. Most brands and most brand consultants, I just disagree with them all. They, you know, they charge you a lot of money to come up with a misspelling of a common word and then you spend half a billion dollars marketing the brand. A much better idea would be buy the word hope or angel or alarm or alert or voice. Even if you got to pay 100 million or 200 million or 500 million dollars, because if I see your your ad and you tell me that, you know, your brand is alert.com, I can remember it in one second. I can spell it in one second. You leap immediately to the top of the Google search engine. So I just I I always view domains as being undervalued and then market people spend hundreds of millions of dollars of going crappy marketing to send someone to a place they can’t spell that they can’t remember. I think the world will gradually come around to that point of view, but they’re not there yet. But that so that was my view. Like I didn’t want to sell it to tell you the truth. Like if you owned the word angel or the word alarm or the word hope or voice, like the truth is Google should have paid a billion dollars for the word voice. Tell tell the tell the short version of that story. The the story is kind of crazy. I’ve heard it once before, but I I would assume Sam and most people have not heard the story of selling voice.com. You bought all these early on in the web. You kind of recognized, oh, these are these are probably going to be valuable to own these names. There’s only one, you know, there’s only one owner of each of these names. You you own it and you hold it for a really long time, like over a decade. And uh, at some point, you decide, okay, maybe we should see if somebody wants to buy some of these. So tell the story of selling voice.com real quick. Well, yeah, we I bought all these domains because I thought, wouldn’t it be great to own a part of the English language? I mean, owning hope or owning voice. I mean, eventually there’ll be a Google voice or there’ll be, you know, some some Telco company that’ll want to launch some service and what a great domain on uh to launch on the on a word like voice.com. So we held them a long time and and uh, I think at some point we were looking for joint ventures, we were looking to commercialize them and we did commercialize a bunch. For example, I created a company called alarm.com. And alarm.com is now publicly traded on NASDAQ. It’s like a four or five billion dollar market cap company. And and you can guess what it does. It actually integrates your home alarm into the internet. You know, and I created another company called angel.com and we sold that for a bit more than $100 million and that was actually a speech interactive voice response like Siri or Alexa before Siri and Alexa came along. And uh, so I had voice and I was holding it and we were looking for some kind of good uh commercialization and someone out of the blue, they contacted us, one of the domain brokers, and they said, well, you know, do you want to sell it? We’ll give you $150,000. And uh, and I, you know, I was like, someone came to me and said they offered $150,000. I said, no. So I thought nothing of it because I just I couldn’t see the point. A week later, they come back and said, well, they doubled it to $300,000. I said, tell them no. So a couple days later, they go, well, the broker is really insistent uh and so they went to $600,000. I said, no. So they said, well, what should you say? I said, don’t tell anything. Tell them, you know, like we’re not interested. It’s got to be something serious. So they they went to 1.2 million. I said, tell them no. I said, well, they want to know what you want for it. I said, um, well, send them a note or something and just tell them I said, it’s like it’s it’s the word voice in the English language, right? So it’s going to have to be something you know, north of uh I don’t know, I don’t think I said seven or eight eight figures, but I just said a lot of money. Um, and so it went on and they doubled it again to two and a half million. And then uh and then uh 5 million and then around 10 million. Then I said they said I had like 18 people in my office. They’re like, or not eight but eight eight people they’re like looking at me like, aren’t you are you going to take the money? It’s like a lot of money now. I said, uh, no, send them back uh at this point, send them back an a note pointing out that this is like the word voice in the English language and it’s and it’s it’s worth a billion dollars to the right company. And uh they said, well, you going to give them a response? I said, uh, okay, tell them 30 million. Tell them I’ll take 30 million for it. Because I thought like if I didn’t give them some number, they would stop negotiating after uh, you know, five nos. So I said tell them 30 million. I don’t want to sell it for 30 million. I want to sell it for 100 million or more, but I guess I’ll say 30 million. So that so at that point they said, well, you know, they offered you I think they up their their offer to like um 12 million. I said, tell them uh no, but if you want, I’ll I’ll take a meeting with them. So when it got to 12 million, I said I’d get on the phone for half an hour. So then we got on the phone and the call started with someone saying, well, how about 22 million? And I said, um, let me explain. This is like my daughter. Like I’m willing to I’m willing to like marry her off, but only to a man that values her more than I value her. So I value this domain, you know, at 30 million. And so if you don’t want to give me the 30, you know, I’m going to regret after I sell it anyway. I’ll have sellers remorse, but I would I would do it just to make the market. But if you don’t want to value it at 30, I’ll just keep it. And they’re like, uh, okay, we’ll give you 30. I said, okay.
Bitcoin and Corporate Strategy (Continued) [11:46]
Sam Parr: So 30, you went you got a 30 from 100k.
Michael Saylor: So they did like double seven or eight times and I eventually they started 150k I think and we ended it and I said 30, we ended at 30. But but the point was I didn’t really need the money. It was a matter like if I had at the point maybe 600 million in cash in the bank and the company the MicroStrategy was is a multi-billion dollar company. So I was like a million’s not going to move the needle for me. 100,000’s not going to move the needle for me. 5 million, 10 million’s not going to move the needle one way or the other. So there’s no point in doing it unless it was something material.
Are You a Car Guy? (Revisited) [12:27]
Shaan Puri: Were you uh like you know, the eight people in your office were were they like your coworkers or Uh I mean they’re business development, the people that wanted the commission on the deal, you know?
Shaan Puri: So like any any most Like it’s a big deal, right? They want to like do the deal and and the only way you get 30 million is to like say no to 22 million, right? And everything Well, like any reasonable, most reasonable people, which the reason you are where you are is you’re many would probably consider you not reasonable, right? I mean, you have you’re you’re you’re an extreme personality type and that’s why you you’re very successful. But any reasonable person would say, what are you an idiot? Like you paid very nothing for this. Take it. Were you but were you always that like uh always My my view on it is that in the English language is going to be important to the human race for a thousand years and in a thousand years from now, voice will probably still have value. Just like a lot of like hope. It’s a valuable word forever. I mean, until you murder everyone that speaks the English language. If you think about how valuable it is, I my my real view is is I think people are are crazy for spending hundreds of millions of dollars on ad campaigns to market a brand that’s a misspelling of a normal word. It’s like I got to convince you how to sell in with like two Ys and a Z, you know, and I’m like, why would you do that? Because in the modern era of spell checkers, when you try to type these crappy brands that are misspelled, the, you know, your iPhone unspells it for you or properly spells it. So try going to a website that’s a misspelling of a name. Most brands and most brand consultants, I just disagree with them all. They, you know, they charge you a lot of money to come up with a misspelling of a common word and then you spend half a billion dollars marketing the brand. A much better idea would be buy the word hope or angel or alarm or alert or voice. Even if you got to pay 100 million or 200 million or 500 million dollars, because if I see your your ad and you tell me that, you know, your brand is alert.com, I can remember it in one second. I can spell it in one second. You leap immediately to the top of the Google search engine. So I just I I always view domains as being undervalued and then market people spend hundreds of millions of dollars of going crappy marketing to send someone to a place they can’t spell that they can’t remember. I think the world will gradually come around to that point of view, but they’re not there yet. But that so that was my view. Like I didn’t want to sell it to tell you the truth. Like if you owned the word angel or the word alarm or the word hope or voice, like the truth is Google should have paid a billion dollars for the word voice. Tell tell the tell the short version of that story. The the story is kind of crazy. I’ve heard it once before, but I I would assume Sam and most people have not heard the story of selling voice.com. You bought all these early on in the web. You kind of recognized, oh, these are these are probably going to be valuable to own these names. There’s only one, you know, there’s only one owner of each of these names. You you own it and you hold it for a really long time, like over a decade. And uh, at some point, you decide, okay, maybe we should see if somebody wants to buy some of these. So tell the story of selling voice.com real quick. Well, yeah, we I bought all these domains because I thought, wouldn’t it be great to own a part of the English language? I mean, owning hope or owning voice. I mean, eventually there’ll be a Google voice or there’ll be, you know, some some Telco company that’ll want to launch some service and what a great domain on uh to launch on the on a word like voice.com. So we held them a long time and and uh, I think at some point we were looking for joint ventures, we were looking to commercialize them and we did commercialize a bunch. For example, I created a company called alarm.com. And alarm.com is now publicly traded on NASDAQ. It’s like a four or five billion dollar market cap company. And and you can guess what it does. It actually integrates your home alarm into the internet. You know, and I created another company called angel.com and we sold that for a bit more than $100 million and that was actually a speech interactive voice response like Siri or Alexa before Siri and Alexa came along. And uh, so I had voice and I was holding it and we were looking for some kind of good uh commercialization and someone out of the blue, they contacted us, one of the domain brokers, and they said, well, you know, do you want to sell it? We’ll give you $150,000. And uh, and I, you know, I was like, someone came to me and said they offered $150,000. I said, no. So I thought nothing of it because I just I couldn’t see the point. A week later, they come back and said, well, they doubled it to $300,000. I said, tell them no. So a couple days later, they go, well, the broker is really insistent uh and so they went to $600,000. I said, no. So they said, well, what should you say? I said, don’t tell anything. Tell them, you know, like we’re not interested. It’s got to be something serious. So they they went to 1.2 million. I said, tell them no. I said, well, they want to know what you want for it. I said, um, well, send them a note or something and just tell them I said, it’s like it’s it’s the word voice in the English language, right? So it’s going to have to be something you know, north of uh I don’t know, I don’t think I said seven or eight eight figures, but I just said a lot of money. Um, and so it went on and they doubled it again to two and a half million. And then uh and then uh 5 million and then around 10 million. Then I said they said I had like 18 people in my office. They’re like, or not eight but eight eight people they’re like looking at me like, aren’t you are you going to take the money? It’s like a lot of money now. I said, uh, no, send them back uh at this point, send them back an a note pointing out that this is like the word voice in the English language and it’s and it’s it’s worth a billion dollars to the right company. And uh they said, well, you going to give them a response? I said, uh, okay, tell them 30 million. Tell them I’ll take 30 million for it. Because I thought like if I didn’t give them some number, they would stop negotiating after uh, you know, five nos. So I said tell them 30 million. I don’t want to sell it for 30 million. I want to sell it for 100 million or more, but I guess I’ll say 30 million. So that so at that point they said, well, you know, they offered you I think they up their their offer to like um 12 million. I said, tell them uh no, but if you want, I’ll I’ll take a meeting with them. So when it got to 12 million, I said I’d get on the phone for half an hour. So then we got on the phone and the call started with someone saying, well, how about 22 million? And I said, um, let me explain. This is like my daughter. Like I’m willing to I’m willing to like marry her off, but only to a man that values her more than I value her. So I value this domain, you know, at 30 million. And so if you don’t want to give me the 30, you know, I’m going to regret after I sell it anyway. I’ll have sellers remorse, but I would I would do it just to make the market. But if you don’t want to value it at 30, I’ll just keep it. And they’re like, uh, okay, we’ll give you 30. I said, okay.
The “Bill of the Week” Segment (Continued) [11:46]
Sam Parr: So 30, you went you got a 30 from 100k.
Michael Saylor: So they did like double seven or eight times and I eventually they started 150k I think and we ended it and I said 30, we ended at 30. But but the point was I didn’t really need the money. It was a matter like if I had at the point maybe 600 million in cash in the bank and the company the MicroStrategy was is a multi-billion dollar company. So I was like a million’s not going to move the needle for me. 100,000’s not going to move the needle for me. 5 million, 10 million’s not going to move the needle one way or the other. So there’s no point in doing it unless it was something material.
Are You a Car Guy? (Revisited) [12:27]
Shaan Puri: Were you uh like you know, the eight people in your office were were they like your coworkers or Uh I mean they’re business development, the people that wanted the commission on the deal, you know?
Shaan Puri: So like any any most Like it’s a big deal, right? They want to like do the deal and and the only way you get 30 million is to like say no to 22 million, right? And everything Well, like any reasonable, most reasonable people, which the reason you are where you are is you’re many would probably consider you not reasonable, right? I mean, you have you’re you’re you’re an extreme personality type and that’s why you you’re very successful. But any reasonable person would say, what are you an idiot? Like you paid very nothing for this. Take it. Were you but were you always that like uh always My my view on it is that in the English language is going to be important to the human race for a thousand years and in a thousand years from now, voice will probably still have value. Just like a lot of like hope. It’s a valuable word forever. I mean, until you murder everyone that speaks the English language. If you think about how valuable it is, I my my real view is is I think people are are crazy for spending hundreds of millions of dollars on ad campaigns to market a brand that’s a misspelling of a normal word. It’s like I got to convince you how to sell in with like two Ys and a Z, you know, and I’m like, why would you do that? Because in the modern era of spell checkers, when you try to type these crappy brands that are misspelled, the, you know, your iPhone unspells it for you or properly spells it. So try going to a website that’s a misspelling of a name. Most brands and most brand consultants, I just disagree with them all. They, you know, they charge you a lot of money to come up with a misspelling of a common word and then you spend half a billion dollars marketing the brand. A much better idea would be buy the word hope or angel or alarm or alert or voice. Even if you got to pay 100 million or 200 million or 500 million dollars, because if I see your your ad and you tell me that, you know, your brand is alert.com, I can remember it in one second. I can spell it in one second. You leap immediately to the top of the Google search engine. So I just I I always view domains as being undervalued and then market people spend hundreds of millions of dollars of going crappy marketing to send someone to a place they can’t spell that they can’t remember. I think the world will gradually come around to that point of view, but they’re not there yet. But that so that was my view. Like I didn’t want to sell it to tell you the truth. Like if you owned the word angel or the word alarm or the word hope or voice, like the truth is Google should have paid a billion dollars for the word voice. Tell tell the tell the short version of that story. The the story is kind of crazy. I’ve heard it once before, but I I would assume Sam and most people have not heard the story of selling voice.com. You bought all these early on in the web. You kind of recognized, oh, these are these are probably going to be valuable to own these names. There’s only one, you know, there’s only one owner of each of these names. You you own it and you hold it for a really long time, like over a decade. And uh, at some point, you decide, okay, maybe we should see if somebody wants to buy some of these. So tell the story of selling voice.com real quick. Well, yeah, we I bought all these domains because I thought, wouldn’t it be great to own a part of the English language? I mean, owning hope or owning voice. I mean, eventually there’ll be a Google voice or there’ll be, you know, some some Telco company that’ll want to launch some service and what a great domain on uh to launch on the on a word like voice.com. So we held them a long time and and uh, I think at some point we were looking for joint ventures, we were looking to commercialize them and we did commercialize a bunch. For example, I created a company called alarm.com. And alarm.com is now publicly traded on NASDAQ. It’s like a four or five billion dollar market cap company. And and you can guess what it does. It actually integrates your home alarm into the internet. You know, and I created another company called angel.com and we sold that for a bit more than $100 million and that was actually a speech interactive voice response like Siri or Alexa before Siri and Alexa came along. And uh, so I had voice and I was holding it and we were looking for some kind of good uh commercialization and someone out of the blue, they contacted us, one of the domain brokers, and they said, well, you know, do you want to sell it? We’ll give you $150,000. And uh, and I, you know, I was like, someone came to me and said they offered $150,000. I said, no. So I thought nothing of it because I just I couldn’t see the point. A week later, they come back and said, well, they doubled it to $300,000. I said, tell them no. So a couple days later, they go, well, the broker is really insistent uh and so they went to $600,000. I said, no. So they said, well, what should you say? I said, don’t tell anything. Tell them, you know, like we’re not interested. It’s got to be something serious. So they they went to 1.2 million. I said, tell them no. I said, well, they want to know what you want for it. I said, um, well, send them a note or something and just tell them I said, it’s like it’s it’s the word voice in the English language, right? So it’s going to have to be something you know, north of uh I don’t know, I don’t think I said seven or eight eight figures, but I just said a lot of money. Um, and so it went on and they doubled it again to two and a half million. And then uh and then uh 5 million and then around 10 million. Then I said they said I had like 18 people in my office. They’re like, or not eight but eight eight people they’re like looking at me like, aren’t you are you going to take the money? It’s like a lot of money now. I said, uh, no, send them back uh at this point, send them back an a note pointing out that this is like the word voice in the English language and it’s and it’s it’s worth a billion dollars to the right company. And uh they said, well, you going to give them a response? I said, uh, okay, tell them 30 million. Tell them I’ll take 30 million for it. Because I thought like if I didn’t give them some number, they would stop negotiating after uh, you know, five nos. So I said tell them 30 million. I don’t want to sell it for 30 million. I want to sell it for 100 million or more, but I guess I’ll say 30 million. So that so at that point they said, well, you know, they offered you I think they up their their offer to like um 12 million. I said, tell them uh no, but if you want, I’ll I’ll take a meeting with them. So when it got to 12 million, I said I’d get on the phone for half an hour. So then we got on the phone and the call started with someone saying, well, how about 22 million? And I said, um, let me explain. This is like my daughter. Like I’m willing to I’m willing to like marry her off, but only to a man that values her more than I value her. So I value this domain, you know, at 30 million. And so if you don’t want to give me the 30, you know, I’m going to regret after I sell it anyway. I’ll have sellers remorse, but I would I would do it just to make the market. But if you don’t want to value it at 30, I’ll just keep it. And they’re like, uh, okay, we’ll give you 30. I said, okay.
The “Bill of the Week” Segment (Continued) [11:46]
Sam Parr: So 30, you went you got a 30 from 100k.
Michael Saylor: So they did like double seven or eight times and I eventually they started 150k I think and we ended it and I said 30, we ended at 30. But but the point was I didn’t really need the money. It was a matter like if I had at the point maybe 600 million in cash in the bank and the company the MicroStrategy was is a multi-billion dollar company. So I was like a million’s not going to move the needle for me. 100,000’s not going to move the needle for me. 5 million, 10 million’s not going to move the needle one way or the other. So there’s no point in doing it unless it was something material.
Are You a Car Guy? (Revisited) [12:27]
Shaan Puri: Were you uh like you know, the eight people in your office were were they like your coworkers or Uh I mean they’re business development, the people that wanted the commission on the deal, you know?
Shaan Puri: So like any any most Like it’s a big deal, right? They want to like do the deal and and the only way you get 30 million is to like say no to 22 million, right? And everything Well, like any reasonable, most reasonable people, which the reason you are where you are is you’re many would probably consider you not reasonable, right? I mean, you have you’re you’re you’re an extreme personality type and that’s why you you’re very successful. But any reasonable person would say, what are you an idiot? Like you paid very nothing for this. Take it. Were you but were you always that like uh always My my view on it is that in the English language is going to be important to the human race for a thousand years and in a thousand years from now, voice will probably still have value. Just like a lot of like hope. It’s a valuable word forever. I mean, until you murder everyone that speaks the English language. If you think about how valuable it is, I my my real view is is I think people are are crazy for spending hundreds of millions of dollars on ad campaigns to market a brand that’s a misspelling of a normal word. It’s like I got to convince you how to sell in with like two Ys and a Z, you know, and I’m like, why would you do that? Because in the modern era of spell checkers, when you try to type these crappy brands that are misspelled, the, you know, your iPhone unspells it for you or properly spells it. So try going to a website that’s a misspelling of a name. Most brands and most brand consultants, I just disagree with them all. They, you know, they charge you a lot of money to come up with a misspelling of a common word and then you spend half a billion dollars marketing the brand. A much better idea would be buy the word hope or angel or alarm or alert or voice. Even if you got to pay 100 million or 200 million or 500 million dollars, because if I see your your ad and you tell me that, you know, your brand is alert.com, I can remember it in one second. I can spell it in one second. You leap immediately to the top of the Google search engine. So I just I I always view domains as being undervalued and then market people spend hundreds of millions of dollars of going crappy marketing to send someone to a place they can’t spell that they can’t remember. I think the world will gradually come around to that point of view, but they’re not there yet. But that so that was my view. Like I didn’t want to sell it to tell you the truth. Like if you owned the word angel or the word alarm or the word hope or voice, like the truth is Google should have paid a billion dollars for the word voice. Tell tell the tell the short version of that story. The the story is kind of crazy. I’ve heard it once before, but I I would assume Sam and most people have not heard the story of selling voice.com. You bought all these early on in the web. You kind of recognized, oh, these are these are probably going to be valuable to own these names. There’s only one, you know, there’s only one owner of each of these names. You you own it and you hold it for a really long time, like over a decade. And uh, at some point, you decide, okay, maybe we should see if somebody wants to buy some of these. So tell the story of selling voice.com real quick. Well, yeah, we I bought all these domains because I thought, wouldn’t it be great to own a part of the English language? I mean, owning hope or owning voice. I mean, eventually there’ll be a Google voice or there’ll be, you know, some some Telco company that’ll want to launch some service and what a great domain on uh to launch on the on a word like voice.com. So we held them a long time and and uh, I think at some point we were looking for joint ventures, we were looking to commercialize them and we did commercialize a bunch. For example, I created a company called alarm.com. And alarm.com is now publicly traded on NASDAQ. It’s like a four or five billion dollar market cap company. And and you can guess what it does. It actually integrates your home alarm into the internet. You know, and I created another company called angel.com and we sold that for a bit more than $100 million and that was actually a speech interactive voice response like Siri or Alexa before Siri and Alexa came along. And uh, so I had voice and I was holding it and we were looking for some kind of good uh commercialization and someone out of the blue, they contacted us, one of the domain brokers, and they said, well, you know, do you want to sell it? We’ll give you $150,000. And uh, and I, you know, I was like, someone came to me and said they offered $150,000. I said, no. So I thought nothing of it because I just I couldn’t see the point. A week later, they come back and said, well, they doubled it to $300,000. I said, tell them no. So a couple days later, they go, well, the broker is really insistent uh and so they went to $600,000. I said, no. So they said, well, what should you say? I said, don’t tell anything. Tell them, you know, like we’re not interested. It’s got to be something serious. So they they went to 1.2 million. I said, tell them no. I said, well, they want to know what you want for it. I said, um, well, send them a note or something and just tell them I said, it’s like it’s it’s the word voice in the English language, right? So it’s going to have to be something you know, north of uh I don’t know, I don’t think I said seven or eight eight figures, but I just said a lot of money. Um, and so it went on and they doubled it again to two and a half million. And then uh and then uh 5 million and then around 10 million. Then I said they said I had like 18 people in my office. They’re like, or not eight but eight eight people they’re like looking at me like, aren’t you are you going to take the money? It’s like a lot of money now. I said, uh, no, send them back uh at this point, send them back an a note pointing out that this is like the word voice in the English language and it’s and it’s it’s worth a billion dollars to the right company. And uh they said, well, you going to give them a response? I said, uh, okay, tell them 30 million. Tell them I’ll take 30 million for it. Because I thought like if I didn’t give them some number, they would stop negotiating after uh, you know, five nos. So I said tell them 30 million. I don’t want to sell it for 30 million. I want to sell it for 100 million or more, but I guess I’ll say 30 million. So that so at that point they said, well, you know, they offered you I think they up their their offer to like um 12 million. I said, tell them uh no, but if you want, I’ll I’ll take a meeting with them. So when it got to 12 million, I said I’d get on the phone for half an hour. So then we got on the phone and the call started with someone saying, well, how about 22 million? And I said, um, let me explain. This is like my daughter. Like I’m willing to I’m willing to like marry her off, but only to a man that values her more than I value her. So I value this domain, you know, at 30 million. And so if you don’t want to give me the 30, you know, I’m going to regret after I sell it anyway. I’ll have sellers remorse, but I would I would do it just to make the market. But if you don’t want to value it at 30, I’ll just keep it. And they’re like, uh, okay, we’ll give you 30. I said, okay.
The “Bill of the Week” Segment (Continued) [11:46]
Sam Parr: So 30, you went you got a 30 from 100k.
Michael Saylor: So they did like double seven or eight times and I eventually they started 150k I think and we ended it and I said 30, we ended at 30. But but the point was I didn’t really need the money. It was a matter like if I had at the point maybe 600 million in cash in the bank and the company the MicroStrategy was is a multi-billion dollar company. So I was like a million’s not going to move the needle for me. 100,000’s not going to move the needle for me. 5 million, 10 million’s not going to move the needle one way or the other. So there’s no point in doing it unless it was something material.
Are You a Car Guy? (Revisited) [12:27]
Shaan Puri: Were you uh like you know, the eight people in your office were were they like your coworkers or Uh I mean they’re business development, the people that wanted the commission on the deal, you know?
Shaan Puri: So like any any most Like it’s a big deal, right? They want to like do the deal and and the only way you get 30 million is to like say no to 22 million, right? And everything Well, like any reasonable, most reasonable people, which the reason you are where you are is you’re many would probably consider you not reasonable, right? I mean, you have you’re you’re you’re an extreme personality type and that’s why you you’re very successful. But any reasonable person would say, what are you an idiot? Like you paid very nothing for this. Take it. Were you but were you always that like uh always My my view on it is that in the English language is going to be important to the human race for a thousand years and in a thousand years from now, voice will probably still have value. Just like a lot of like hope. It’s a valuable word forever. I mean, until you murder everyone that speaks the English language. If you think about how valuable it is, I my my real view is is I think people are are crazy for spending hundreds of millions of dollars on ad campaigns to market a brand that’s a misspelling of a normal word. It’s like I got to convince you how to sell in with like two Ys and a Z, you know, and I’m like, why would you do that? Because in the modern era of spell checkers, when you try to type these crappy brands that are misspelled, the, you know, your iPhone unspells it for you or properly spells it. So try going to a website that’s a misspelling of a name. Most brands and most brand consultants, I just disagree with them all. They, you know, they charge you a lot of money to come up with a misspelling of a common word and then you spend half a billion dollars marketing the brand. A much better idea would be buy the word hope or angel or alarm or alert or voice. Even if you got to pay 100 million or 200 million or 500 million dollars, because if I see your your ad and you tell me that, you know, your brand is alert.com, I can remember it in one second. I can spell it in one second. You leap immediately to the top of the Google search engine. So I just I I always view domains as being undervalued and then market people spend hundreds of millions of dollars of going crappy marketing to send someone to a place they can’t spell that they can’t remember. I think the world will gradually come around to that point of view, but they’re not there yet. But that so that was my view. Like I didn’t want to sell it to tell you the truth. Like if you owned the word angel or the word alarm or the word hope or voice, like the truth is Google should have paid a billion dollars for the word voice. Tell tell the tell the short version of that story. The the story is kind of crazy. I’ve heard it once before, but I I would assume Sam and most people have not heard the story of selling voice.com. You bought all these early on in the web. You kind of recognized, oh, these are these are probably going to be valuable to own these names. There’s only one, you know, there’s only one owner of each of these names. You you own it and you hold it for a really long time, like over a decade. And uh, at some point, you decide, okay, maybe we should see if somebody wants to buy some of these. So tell the story of selling voice.com real quick. Well, yeah, we I bought all these domains because I thought, wouldn’t it be great to own a part of the English language? I mean, owning hope or owning voice. I mean, eventually there’ll be a Google voice or there’ll be, you know, some some Telco company that’ll want to launch some service and what a great domain on uh to launch on the on a word like voice.com. So we held them a long time and and uh, I think at some point we were looking for joint ventures, we were looking to commercialize them and we did commercialize a bunch. For example, I created a company called alarm.com. And alarm.com is now publicly traded on NASDAQ. It’s like a four or five billion dollar market cap company. And and you can guess what it does. It actually integrates your home alarm into the internet. You know, and I created another company called angel.com and we sold that for a bit more than $100 million and that was actually a speech interactive voice response like Siri or Alexa before Siri and Alexa came along. And uh, so I had voice and I was holding it and we were looking for some kind of good uh commercialization and someone out of the blue, they contacted us, one of the domain brokers, and they said, well, you know, do you want to sell it? We’ll give you $150,000. And uh, and I, you know, I was like, someone came to me and said they offered $150,000. I said, no. So I thought nothing of it because I just I couldn’t see the point. A week later, they come back and said, well, they doubled it to $300,000. I said, tell them no. So a couple days later, they go, well, the broker is really insistent uh and so they went to $600,000. I said, no. So they said, well, what should you say? I said, don’t tell anything. Tell them, you know, like we’re not interested. It’s got to be something serious. So they they went to 1.2 million. I said, tell them no. I said, well, they want to know what you want for it. I said, um, well, send them a note or something and just tell them I said, it’s like it’s it’s the word voice in the English language, right? So it’s going to have to be something you know, north of uh I don’t know, I don’t think I said seven or eight eight figures, but I just said a lot of money. Um, and so it went on and they doubled it again to two and a half million. And then uh and then uh 5 million and then around 10 million. Then I said they said I had like 18 people in my office. They’re like, or not eight but eight eight people they’re like looking at me like, aren’t you are you going to take the money? It’s like a lot of money now. I said, uh, no, send them back uh at this point, send them back an a note pointing out that this is like the word voice in the English language and it’s and it’s it’s worth a billion dollars to the right company. And uh they said, well, you going to give them a response? I said, uh, okay, tell them 30 million. Tell them I’ll take 30 million for it. Because I thought like if I didn’t give them some number, they would stop negotiating after uh, you know, five nos. So I said tell them 30 million. I don’t want to sell it for 30 million. I want to sell it for 100 million or more, but I guess I’ll say 30 million. So that so at that point they said, well, you know, they offered you I think they up their their offer to like um 12 million. I said, tell them uh no, but if you want, I’ll I’ll take a meeting with them. So when it got to 12 million, I said I’d get on the phone for half an hour. So then we got on the phone and the call started with someone saying, well, how about 22 million? And I said, um, let me explain. This is like my daughter. Like I’m willing to I’m willing to like marry her off, but only to a man that values her more than I value her. So I value this domain, you know, at 30 million. And so if you don’t want to give me the 30, you know, I’m going to regret after I sell it anyway. I’ll have sellers remorse, but I would I would do it just to make the market. But if you don’t want to value it at 30, I’ll just keep it. And they’re like, uh, okay, we’ll give you 30. I said, okay.
The “Bill of the Week” Segment (Continued) [11:46]
Sam Parr: So 30, you went you got a 30 from 100k.
Michael Saylor: So they did like double seven or eight times and I eventually they started 150k I think and we ended it and I said 30, we ended at 30. But but the point was I didn’t really need the money. It was a matter like if I had at the point maybe 600 million in cash in the bank and the company the MicroStrategy was is a multi-billion dollar company. So I was like a million’s not going to move the needle for me. 100,000’s not going to move the needle for me. 5 million, 10 million’s not going to move the needle one way or the other. So there’s no point in doing it unless it was something material.
Are You a Car Guy? (Revisited) [12:27]
Shaan Puri: Were you uh like you know, the eight people in your office were were they like your coworkers or Uh I mean they’re business development, the people that wanted the commission on the deal, you know?
Shaan Puri: So like any any most Like it’s a big deal, right? They want to like do the deal and and the only way you get 30 million is to like say no to 22 million, right? And everything Well, like any reasonable, most reasonable people, which the reason you are where you are is you’re many would probably consider you not reasonable, right? I mean, you have you’re you’re you’re an extreme personality type and that’s why you you’re very successful. But any reasonable person would say, what are you an idiot? Like you paid very nothing for this. Take it. Were you but were you always that like uh always My my view on it is that in the English language is going to be important to the human race for a thousand years and in a thousand years from now, voice will probably still have value. Just like a lot of like hope. It’s a valuable word forever. I mean, until you murder everyone that speaks the English language. If you think about how valuable it is, I my my real view is is I think people are are crazy for spending hundreds of millions of dollars on ad campaigns to market a brand that’s a misspelling of a normal word. It’s like I got to convince you how to sell in with like two Ys and a Z, you know, and I’m like, why would you do that? Because in the modern era of spell checkers, when you try to type these crappy brands that are misspelled, the, you know, your iPhone unspells it for you or properly spells it. So try going to a website that’s a misspelling of a name. Most brands and most brand consultants, I just disagree with them all. They, you know, they charge you a lot of money to come up with a misspelling of a common word and then you spend half a billion dollars marketing the brand. A much better idea would be buy the word hope or angel or alarm or alert or voice. Even if you got to pay 100 million or 200 million or 500 million dollars, because if I see your your ad and you tell me that, you know, your brand is alert.com, I can remember it in one second. I can spell it in one second. You leap immediately to the top of the Google search engine. So I just I I always view domains as being undervalued and then market people spend hundreds of millions of dollars of going crappy marketing to send someone to a place they can’t spell that they can’t remember. I think the world will gradually come around to that point of view, but they’re not there yet. But that so that was my view. Like I didn’t want to sell it to tell you the truth. Like if you owned the word angel or the word alarm or the word hope or voice, like the truth is Google should have paid a billion dollars for the word voice. Tell tell the tell the short version of that story. The the story is kind of crazy. I’ve heard it once before, but I I would assume Sam and most people have not heard the story of selling voice.com. You bought all these early on in the web. You kind of recognized, oh, these are these are probably going to be valuable to own these names. There’s only one, you know, there’s only one owner of each of these names. You you own it and you hold it for a really long time, like over a decade. And uh, at some point, you decide, okay, maybe we should see if somebody wants to buy some of these. So tell the story of selling voice.com real quick. Well, yeah, we I bought all these domains because I thought, wouldn’t it be great to own a part of the English language? I mean, owning hope or owning voice. I mean, eventually there’ll be a Google voice or there’ll be, you know, some some Telco company that’ll want to launch some service and what a great domain on uh to launch on the on a word like voice.com. So we held them a long time and and uh, I think at some point we were looking for joint ventures, we were looking to commercialize them and we did commercialize a bunch. For example, I created a company called alarm.com. And alarm.com is now publicly traded on NASDAQ. It’s like a four or five billion dollar market cap company. And and you can guess what it does. It actually integrates your home alarm into the internet. You know, and I created another company called angel.com and we sold that for a bit more than $100 million and that was actually a speech interactive voice response like Siri or Alexa before Siri and Alexa came along. And uh, so I had voice and I was holding it and we were looking for some kind of good uh commercialization and someone out of the blue, they contacted us, one of the domain brokers, and they said, well, you know, do you want to sell it? We’ll give you $150,000. And uh, and I, you know, I was like, someone came to me and said they offered $150,000. I said, no. So I thought nothing of it because I just I couldn’t see the point. A week later, they come back and said, well, they doubled it to $300,000. I said, tell them no. So a couple days later, they go, well, the broker is really insistent uh and so they went to $600,000. I said, no. So they said, well, what should you say? I said, don’t tell anything. Tell them, you know, like we’re not interested. It’s got to be something serious. So they they went to 1.2 million. I said, tell them no. I said, well, they want to know what you want for it. I said, um, well, send them a note or something and just tell them I said, it’s like it’s it’s the word voice in the English language, right? So it’s going to have to be something you know, north of uh I don’t know, I don’t think I said seven or eight eight figures, but I just said a lot of money. Um, and so it went on and they doubled it again to two and a half million. And then uh and then uh 5 million and then around 10 million. Then I said they said I had like 18 people in my office. They’re like, or not eight but eight eight people they’re like looking at me like, aren’t you are you going to take the money? It’s like a lot of money now. I said, uh, no, send them back uh at this point, send them back an a note pointing out that this is like the word voice in the English language and it’s and it’s it’s worth a billion dollars to the right company. And uh they said, well, you going to give them a response? I said, uh, okay, tell them 30 million. Tell them I’ll take 30 million for it. Because I thought like if I didn’t give them some number, they would stop negotiating after uh, you know, five nos. So I said tell them 30 million. I don’t want to sell it for 30 million. I want to sell it for 100 million or more, but I guess I’ll say 30 million. So that so at that point they said, well, you know, they offered you I think they up their their offer to like um 12 million. I said, tell them uh no, but if you want, I’ll I’ll take a meeting with them. So when it got to 12 million, I said I’d get on the phone for half an hour. So then we got on the phone and the call started with someone saying, well, how about 22 million? And I said, um, let me explain. This is like my daughter. Like I’m willing to I’m willing to like marry her off, but only to a man that values her more than I value her. So I value this domain, you know, at 30 million. And so if you don’t want to give me the 30, you know, I’m going to regret after I sell it anyway. I’ll have sellers remorse, but I would I would do it just to make the market. But if you don’t want to value it at 30, I’ll just keep it. And they’re like, uh, okay, we’ll give you 30. I said, okay.
The “Bill of the Week” Segment (Continued) [11:46]
Sam Parr: So 30, you went you got a 30 from 100k.
Michael Saylor: So they did like double seven or eight times and I eventually they started 150k I think and we ended it and I said 30, we ended at 30. But but the point was I didn’t really need the money. It was a matter like if I had at the point maybe 600 million in cash in the bank and the company the MicroStrategy was is a multi-billion dollar company. So I was like a million’s not going to move the needle for me. 100,000’s not going to move the needle for me. 5 million, 10 million’s not going to move the needle one way or the other. So there’s no point in doing it unless it was something material.
Are You a Car Guy? (Revisited) [12:27]
Shaan Puri: Were you uh like you know, the eight people in your office were were they like your coworkers or Uh I mean they’re business development, the people that wanted the commission on the deal, you know?
Shaan Puri: So like any any most Like it’s a big deal, right? They want to like do the deal and and the only way you get 30 million is to like say no to 22 million, right? And everything Well, like any reasonable, most reasonable people, which the reason you are where you are is you’re many would probably consider you not reasonable, right? I mean, you have you’re you’re you’re an extreme personality type and that’s why you you’re very successful. But any reasonable person would say, what are you an idiot? Like you paid very nothing for this. Take it. Were you but were you always that like uh always My my view on it is that in the English language is going to be important to the human race for a thousand years and in a thousand years from now, voice will probably still have value. Just like a lot of like hope. It’s a valuable word forever. I mean, until you murder everyone that speaks the English language. If you think about how valuable it is, I my my real view is is I think people are are crazy for spending hundreds of millions of dollars on ad campaigns to market a brand that’s a misspelling of a normal word. It’s like I got to convince you how to sell in with like two Ys and a Z, you know, and I’m like, why would you do that? Because in the modern era of spell checkers, when you try to type these crappy brands that are misspelled, the, you know, your iPhone unspells it for you or properly spells it. So try going to a website that’s a misspelling of a name. Most brands and most brand consultants, I just disagree with them all. They, you know, they charge you a lot of money to come up with a misspelling of a common word and then you spend half a billion dollars marketing the brand. A much better idea would be buy the word hope or angel or alarm or alert or voice. Even if you got to pay 100 million or 200 million or 500 million dollars, because if I see your your ad and you tell me that, you know, your brand is alert.com, I can remember it in one second. I can spell it in one second. You leap immediately to the top of the Google search engine. So I just I I always view domains as being undervalued and then market people spend hundreds of millions of dollars of going crappy marketing to send someone to a place they can’t spell that they can’t remember. I think the world will gradually come around to that point of view, but they’re not there yet. But that so that was my view. Like I didn’t want to sell it to tell you the truth. Like if you owned the word angel or the word alarm or the word hope or voice, like the truth is Google should have paid a billion dollars for the word voice. Tell tell the tell the short version of that story. The the story is kind of crazy. I’ve heard it once before, but I I would assume Sam and most people have not heard the story of selling voice.com. You bought all these early on in the web. You kind of recognized, oh, these are these are probably going to be valuable to own these names. There’s only one, you know, there’s only one owner of each of these names. You you own it and you hold it for a really long time, like over a decade. And uh, at some point, you decide, okay, maybe we should see if somebody wants to buy some of these. So tell the story of selling voice.com real quick. Well, yeah, we I bought all these domains because I thought, wouldn’t it be great to own a part of the English language? I mean, owning hope or owning voice. I mean, eventually there’ll be a Google voice or there’ll be, you know, some some Telco company that’ll want to launch some service and what a great domain on uh to launch on the on a word like voice.com. So we held them a long time and and uh, I think at some point we were looking for joint ventures, we were looking to commercialize them and we did commercialize a bunch. For example, I created a company called alarm.com. And alarm.com is now publicly traded on NASDAQ. It’s like a four or five billion dollar market cap company. And and you can guess what it does. It actually integrates your home alarm into the internet. You know, and I created another company called angel.com and we sold that for a bit more than $100 million and that was actually a speech interactive voice response like Siri or Alexa before Siri and Alexa came along. And uh, so I had voice and I was holding it and we were looking for some kind of good uh commercialization and someone out of the blue, they contacted us, one of the domain brokers, and they said, well, you know, do you want to sell it? We’ll give you $150,000. And uh, and I, you know, I was like, someone came to me and said they offered $150,000. I said, no. So I thought nothing of it because I just I couldn’t see the point. A week later, they come back and said, well, they doubled it to $300,000. I said, tell them no. So a couple days later, they go, well, the broker is really insistent uh and so they went to $600,000. I said, no. So they said, well, what should you say? I said, don’t tell anything. Tell them, you know, like we’re not interested. It’s got to be something serious. So they they went to 1.2 million. I said, tell them no. I said, well, they want to know what you want for it. I said, um, well, send them a note or something and just tell them I said, it’s like it’s it’s the word voice in the English language, right? So it’s going to have to be something you know, north of uh I don’t know, I don’t think I said seven or eight eight figures, but I just said a lot of money. Um, and so it went on and they doubled it again to two and a half million. And then uh and then uh 5 million and then around 10 million. Then I said they said I had like 18 people in my office. They’re like, or not eight but eight eight people they’re like looking at me like, aren’t you are you going to take the money? It’s like a lot of money now. I said, uh, no, send them back uh at this point, send them back an a note pointing out that this is like the word voice in the English language and it’s and it’s it’s worth a billion dollars to the right company. And uh they said, well, you going to give them a response? I said, uh, okay, tell them 30 million. Tell them I’ll take 30 million for it. Because I thought like if I didn’t give them some number, they would stop negotiating after uh, you know, five nos. So I said tell them 30 million. I don’t want to sell it for 30 million. I want to sell it for 100 million or more, but I guess I’ll say 30 million. So that so at that point they said, well, you know, they offered you I think they up their their offer to like um 12 million. I said, tell them uh no, but if you want, I’ll I’ll take a meeting with them. So when it got to 12 million, I said I’d get on the phone for half an hour. So then we got on the phone and the call started with someone saying, well, how about 22 million? And I said, um, let me explain. This is like my daughter. Like I’m willing to I’m willing to like marry her off, but only to a man that values her more than I value her. So I value this domain, you know, at 30 million. And so if you don’t want to give me the 30, you know, I’m going to regret after I sell it anyway. I’ll have sellers remorse, but I would I would do it just to make the market. But if you don’t want to value it at 30, I’ll just keep it. And they’re like, uh, okay, we’ll give you 30. I said, okay.
The “Bill of the Week” Segment (Continued) [11:46]
Sam Parr: So 30, you went you got a 30 from 100k.
Michael Saylor: So they did like double seven or eight times and I eventually they started 150k I think and we ended it and I said 30, we ended at 30. But but the point was I didn’t really need the money. It was a matter like if I had at the point maybe 600 million in cash in the bank and the company the MicroStrategy was is a multi-billion dollar company. So I was like a million’s not going to move the needle for me. 100,000’s not going to move the needle for me. 5 million, 10 million’s not going to move the needle one way or the other. So there’s no point in doing it unless it was something material.
Are You a Car Guy? (Revisited) [12:27]
Shaan Puri: Were you uh like you know, the eight people in your office were were they like your coworkers or Uh I mean they’re business development, the people that wanted the commission on the deal, you know?
Shaan Puri: So like any any most Like it’s a big deal, right? They want to like do the deal and and the only way you get 30 million is to like say no to 22 million, right? And everything Well, like any reasonable, most reasonable people, which the reason you are where you are is you’re many would probably consider you not reasonable, right? I mean, you have you’re you’re you’re an extreme personality type and that’s why you you’re very successful. But any reasonable person would say, what are you an idiot? Like you paid very nothing for this. Take it. Were you but were you always that like uh always My my view on it is that in the English language is going to be important to the human race for a thousand years and in a thousand years from now, voice will probably still have value. Just like a lot of like hope. It’s a valuable word forever. I mean, until you murder everyone that speaks the English language. If you think about how valuable it is, I my my real view is is I think people are are crazy for spending hundreds of millions of dollars on ad campaigns to market a brand that’s a misspelling of a normal word. It’s like I got to convince you how to sell in with like two Ys and a Z, you know, and I’m like, why would you do that? Because in the modern era of spell checkers, when you try to type these crappy brands that are misspelled, the, you know, your iPhone unspells it for you or properly spells it. So try going to a website that’s a misspelling of a name. Most brands and most brand consultants, I just disagree with them all. They, you know, they charge you a lot of money to come up with a misspelling of a common word and then you spend half a billion dollars marketing the brand. A much better idea would be buy the word hope or angel or alarm or alert or voice. Even if you got to pay 100 million or 200 million or 500 million dollars, because if I see your your ad and you tell me that, you know, your brand is alert.com, I can remember it in one second. I can spell it in one second. You leap immediately to the top of the Google search engine. So I just I I always view domains as being undervalued and then market people spend hundreds of millions of dollars of going crappy marketing to send someone to a place they can’t spell that they can’t remember. I think the world will gradually come around to that point of view, but they’re not there yet. But that so that was my view. Like I didn’t want to sell it to tell you the truth. Like if you owned the word angel or the word alarm or the word hope or voice, like the truth is Google should have paid a billion dollars for the word voice. Tell tell the tell the short version of that story. The the story is kind of crazy. I’ve heard it once before, but I I would assume Sam and most people have not heard the story of selling voice.com. You bought all these early on in the web. You kind of recognized, oh, these are these are probably going to be valuable to own these names. There’s only one, you know, there’s only one owner of each of these names. You you own it and you hold it for a really long time, like over a decade. And uh, at some point, you decide, okay, maybe we should see if somebody wants to buy some of these. So tell the story of selling voice.com real quick. Well, yeah, we I bought all these domains because I thought, wouldn’t it be great to own a part of the English language? I mean, owning hope or owning voice. I mean, eventually there’ll be a Google voice or there’ll be, you know, some some Telco company that’ll want to launch some service and what a great domain on uh to launch on the on a word like voice.com. So we held them a long time and and uh, I think at some point we were looking for joint ventures, we were looking to commercialize them and we did commercialize a bunch. For example, I created a company called alarm.com. And alarm.com is now publicly traded on NASDAQ. It’s like a four or five billion dollar market cap company. And and you can guess what it does. It actually integrates your home alarm into the internet. You know, and I created another company called angel.com and we sold that for a bit more than $100 million and that was actually a speech interactive voice response like Siri or Alexa before Siri and Alexa came along. And uh, so I had voice and I was holding it and we were looking for some kind of good uh commercialization and someone out of the blue, they contacted us, one of the domain brokers, and they said, well, you know, do you want to sell it? We’ll give you $150,000. And uh, and I, you know, I was like, someone came to me and said they offered $150,000. I said, no. So I thought nothing of it because I just I couldn’t see the point. A week later, they come back and said, well, they doubled it to $300,000. I said, tell them no. So a couple days later, they go, well, the broker is really insistent uh and so they went to $600,000. I said, no. So they said, well, what should you say? I said, don’t tell anything. Tell them, you know, like we’re not interested. It’s got to be something serious. So they they went to 1.2 million. I said, tell them no. I said, well, they want to know what you want for it. I said, um, well, send them a note or something and just tell them I said, it’s like it’s it’s the word voice in the English language, right? So it’s going to have to be something you know, north of uh I don’t know, I don’t think I said seven or eight eight figures, but I just said a lot of money. Um, and so it went on and they doubled it again to two and a half million. And then uh and then uh 5 million and then around 10 million. Then I said they said I had like 18 people in my office. They’re like, or not eight but eight eight people they’re like looking at me like, aren’t you are you going to take the money? It’s like a lot of money now. I said, uh, no, send them back uh at this point, send them back an a note pointing out that this is like the word voice in the English language and it’s and it’s it’s worth a billion dollars to the right company. And uh they said, well, you going to give them a response? I said, uh, okay, tell them 30 million. Tell them I’ll take 30 million for it. Because I thought like if I didn’t give them some number, they would stop negotiating after uh, you know, five nos. So I said tell them 30 million. I don’t want to sell it for 30 million. I want to sell it for 100 million or more, but I guess I’ll say 30 million. So that so at that point they said, well, you know, they offered you I think they up their their offer to like um 12 million. I said, tell them uh no, but if you want, I’ll I’ll take a meeting with them. So when it got to 12 million, I said I’d get on the phone for half an hour. So then we got on the phone and the call started with someone saying, well, how about 22 million? And I said, um, let me explain. This is like my daughter. Like I’m willing to I’m willing to like marry her off, but only to a man that values her more than I value her. So I value this domain, you know, at 30 million. And so if you don’t want to give me the 30, you know, I’m going to regret after I sell it anyway. I’ll have sellers remorse, but I would I would do it just to make the market. But if you don’t want to value it at 30, I’ll just keep it. And they’re like, uh, okay, we’ll give you 30. I said, okay.
The “Bill of the Week” Segment (Continued) [11:46]
Sam Parr: So 30, you went you got a 30 from 100k.
Michael Saylor: So they did like double seven or eight times and I eventually they started 150k I think and we ended it and I said 30, we ended at 30. But but the point was I didn’t really need the money. It was a matter like if I had at the point maybe 600 million in cash in the bank and the company the MicroStrategy was is a multi-billion dollar company. So I was like a million’s not going to move the needle for me. 100,000’s not going to move the needle for me. 5 million, 10 million’s not going to move the needle one way or the other. So there’s no point in doing it unless it was something material.
Are You a Car Guy? (Revisited) [12:27]
Shaan Puri: Were you uh like you know, the eight people in your office were were they like your coworkers or Uh I mean they’re business development, the people that wanted the commission on the deal, you know?
Shaan Puri: So like any any most Like it’s a big deal, right? They want to like do the deal and and the only way you get 30 million is to like say no to 22 million, right? And everything Well, like any reasonable, most reasonable people, which the reason you are where you are is you’re many would probably consider you not reasonable, right? I mean, you have you’re you’re you’re an extreme personality type and that’s why you you’re very successful. But any reasonable person would say, what are you an idiot? Like you paid very nothing for this. Take it. Were you but were you always that like uh always My my view on it is that in the English language is going to be important to the human race for a thousand years and in a thousand years from now, voice will probably still have value. Just like a lot of like hope. It’s a valuable word forever. I mean, until you murder everyone that speaks the English language. If you think about how valuable it is, I my my real view is is I think people are are crazy for spending hundreds of millions of dollars on ad campaigns to market a brand that’s a misspelling of a normal word. It’s like I got to convince you how to sell in with like two Ys and a Z, you know, and I’m like, why would you do that? Because in the modern era of spell checkers, when you try to type these crappy brands that are misspelled, the, you know, your iPhone unspells it for you or properly spells it. So try going to a website that’s a misspelling of a name. Most brands and most brand consultants, I just disagree with them all. They, you know, they charge you a lot of money to come up with a misspelling of a common word and then you spend half a billion dollars marketing the brand. A much better idea would be buy the word hope or angel or alarm or alert or voice. Even if you got to pay 100 million or 200 million or 500 million dollars, because if I see your your ad and you tell me that, you know, your brand is alert.com, I can remember it in one second. I can spell it in one second. You leap immediately to the top of the Google search engine. So I just I I always view domains as being undervalued and then market people spend hundreds of millions of dollars of going crappy marketing to send someone to a place they can’t spell that they can’t remember. I think the world will gradually come around to that point of view, but they’re not there yet. But that so that was my view. Like I didn’t want to sell it to tell you the truth. Like if you owned the word angel or the word alarm or the word hope or voice, like the truth is Google should have paid a billion dollars for the word voice. Tell tell the tell the short version of that story. The the story is kind of crazy. I’ve heard it once before, but I I would assume Sam and most people have not heard the story of selling voice.com. You bought all these early on in the web. You kind of recognized, oh, these are these are probably going to be valuable to own these names. There’s only one, you know, there’s only one owner of each of these names. You you own it and you hold it for a really long time, like over a decade. And uh, at some point, you decide, okay, maybe we should see if somebody wants to buy some of these. So tell the story of selling voice.com real quick. Well, yeah, we I bought all these domains because I thought, wouldn’t it be great to own a part of the English language? I mean, owning hope or owning voice. I mean, eventually there’ll be a Google voice or there’ll be, you know, some some Telco company that’ll want to launch some service and what a great domain on uh to launch on the on a word like voice.com. So we held them a long time and and uh, I think at some point we were looking for joint ventures, we were looking to commercialize them and we did commercialize a bunch. For example, I created a company called alarm.com. And alarm.com is now publicly traded on NASDAQ. It’s like a four or five billion dollar market cap company. And and you can guess what it does. It actually integrates your home alarm into the internet. You know, and I created another company called angel.com and we sold that for a bit more than $100 million and that was actually a speech interactive voice response like Siri or Alexa before Siri and Alexa came along. And uh, so I had voice and I was holding it and we were looking for some kind of good uh commercialization and someone out of the blue, they contacted us, one of the domain brokers, and they said, well, you know, do you want to sell it? We’ll give you $150,000. And uh, and I, you know, I was like, someone came to me and said they offered $150,000. I said, no. So I thought nothing of it because I just I couldn’t see the point. A week later, they come back and said, well, they doubled it to $300,000. I said, tell them no. So a couple days later, they go, well, the broker is really insistent uh and so they went to $600,000. I said, no. So they said, well, what should you say? I said, don’t tell anything. Tell them, you know, like we’re not interested. It’s got to be something serious. So they they went to 1.2 million. I said, tell them no. I said, well, they want to know what you want for it. I said, um, well, send them a note or something and just tell them I said, it’s like it’s it’s the word voice in the English language, right? So it’s going to have to be something you know, north of uh I don’t know, I don’t think I said seven or eight eight figures, but I just said a lot of money. Um, and so it went on and they doubled it again to two and a half million. And then uh and then uh 5 million and then around 10 million. Then I said they said I had like 18 people in my office. They’re like, or not eight but eight eight people they’re like looking at me like, aren’t you are you going to take the money? It’s like a lot of money now. I said, uh, no, send them back uh at this point, send them back an a note pointing out that this is like the word voice in the English language and it’s and it’s it’s worth a billion dollars to the right company. And uh they said, well, you going to give them a response? I said, uh, okay, tell them 30 million. Tell them I’ll take 30 million for it. Because I thought like if I didn’t give them some number, they would stop negotiating after uh, you know, five nos. So I said tell them 30 million. I don’t want to sell it for 30 million. I want to sell it for 100 million or more, but I guess I’ll say 30 million. So that so at that point they said, well, you know, they offered you I think they up their their offer to like um 12 million. I said, tell them uh no, but if you want, I’ll I’ll take a meeting with them. So when it got to 12 million, I said I’d get on the phone for half an hour. So then we got on the phone and the call started with someone saying, well, how about 22 million? And I said, um, let me explain. This is like my daughter. Like I’m willing to I’m willing to like marry her off, but only to a man that values her more than I value her. So I value this domain, you know, at 30 million. And so if you don’t want to give me the 30, you know, I’m going to regret after I sell it anyway. I’ll have sellers remorse, but I would I would do it just to make the market. But if you don’t want to value it at 30, I’ll just keep it. And they’re like, uh, okay, we’ll give you 30. I said, okay.
The “Bill of the Week” Segment (Continued) [11:46]
Sam Parr: So 30, you went you got a 30 from 100k.
Michael Saylor: So they did like double seven or eight times and I eventually they started 150k I think and we ended it and I said 30, we ended at 30. But but the point was I didn’t really need the money. It was a matter like if I had at the point maybe 600 million in cash in the bank and the company the MicroStrategy was is a multi-billion dollar company. So I was like a million’s not going to move the needle for me. 100,000’s not going to move the needle for me. 5 million, 10 million’s not going to move the needle one way or the other. So there’s no point in doing it unless it was something material.
Are You a Car Guy? (Revisited) [12:27]
Shaan Puri: Were you uh like you know, the eight people in your office were were they like your coworkers or Uh I mean they’re business development, the people that wanted the commission on the deal, you know?
Shaan Puri: So like any any most Like it’s a big deal, right? They want to like do the deal and and the only way you get 30 million is to like say no to 22 million, right? And everything Well, like any reasonable, most reasonable people, which the reason you are where you are is you’re many would probably consider you not reasonable, right? I mean, you have you’re you’re you’re an extreme personality type and that’s why you you’re very successful. But any reasonable person would say, what are you an idiot? Like you paid very nothing for this. Take it. Were you but were you always that like uh always My my view on it is that in the English language is going to be important to the human race for a thousand years and in a thousand years from now, voice will probably still have value. Just like a lot of like hope. It’s a valuable word forever. I mean, until you murder everyone that speaks the English language. If you think about how valuable it is, I my my real view is is I think people are are crazy for spending hundreds of millions of dollars on ad campaigns to market a brand that’s a misspelling of a normal word. It’s like I got to convince you how to sell in with like two Ys and a Z, you know, and I’m like, why would you do that? Because in the modern era of spell checkers, when you try to type these crappy brands that are misspelled, the, you know, your iPhone unspells it for you or properly spells it. So try going to a website that’s a misspelling of a name. Most brands and most brand consultants, I just disagree with them all. They, you know, they charge you a lot of money to come up with a misspelling of a common word and then you spend half a billion dollars marketing the brand. A much better idea would be buy the word hope or angel or alarm or alert or voice. Even if you got to pay 100 million or 200 million or 500 million dollars, because if I see your your ad and you tell me that, you know, your brand is alert.com, I can remember it in one second. I can spell it in one second. You leap immediately to the top of the Google search engine. So I just I I always view domains as being undervalued and then market people spend hundreds of millions of dollars of going crappy marketing to send someone to a place they can’t spell that they can’t remember. I think the world will gradually come around to that point of view, but they’re not there yet. But that so that was my view. Like I didn’t want to sell it to tell you the truth. Like if you owned the word angel or the word alarm or the word hope or voice, like the truth is Google should have paid a billion dollars for the word voice. Tell tell the tell the short version of that story. The the story is kind of crazy. I’ve heard it once before, but I I would assume Sam and most people have not heard the story of selling voice.com. You bought all these early on in the web. You kind of recognized, oh, these are these are probably going to be valuable to own these names. There’s only one, you know, there’s only one owner of each of these names. You you own it and you hold it for a really long time, like over a decade. And uh, at some point, you decide, okay, maybe we should see if somebody wants to buy some of these. So tell the story of selling voice.com real quick. Well, yeah, we I bought all these domains because I thought, wouldn’t it be great to own a part of the English language? I mean, owning hope or owning voice. I mean, eventually there’ll be a Google voice or there’ll be, you know, some some Telco company that’ll want to launch some service and what a great domain on uh to launch on the on a word like voice.com. So we held them a long time and and uh, I think at some point we were looking for joint ventures, we were looking to commercialize them and we did commercialize a bunch. For example, I created a company called alarm.com. And alarm.com is now publicly traded on NASDAQ. It’s like a four or five billion dollar market cap company. And and you can guess what it does. It actually integrates your home alarm into the internet. You know, and I created another company called angel.com and we sold that for a bit more than $100 million and that was actually a speech interactive voice response like Siri or Alexa before Siri and Alexa came along. And uh, so I had voice and I was holding it and we were looking for some kind of good uh commercialization and someone out of the blue, they contacted us, one of the domain brokers, and they said, well, you know, do you want to sell it? We’ll give you $150,000. And uh, and I, you know, I was like, someone came to me and said they offered $150,000. I said, no. So I thought nothing of it because I just I couldn’t see the point. A week later, they come back and said, well, they doubled it to $300,000. I said, tell them no. So a couple days later, they go, well, the broker is really insistent uh and so they went to $600,000. I said, no. So they said, well, what should you say? I said, don’t tell anything. Tell them, you know, like we’re not interested. It’s got to be something serious. So they they went to 1.2 million. I said, tell them no. I said, well, they want to know what you want for it. I said, um, well, send them a note or something and just tell them I said, it’s like it’s it’s the word voice in the English language, right? So it’s going to have to be something you know, north of uh I don’t know, I don’t think I said seven or eight eight figures, but I just said a lot of money. Um, and so it went on and they doubled it again to two and a half million. And then uh and then uh 5 million and then around 10 million. Then I said they said I had like 18 people in my office. They’re like, or not eight but eight eight people they’re like looking at me like, aren’t you are you going to take the money? It’s like a lot of money now. I said, uh, no, send them back uh at this point, send them back an a note pointing out that this is like the word voice in the English language and it’s and it’s it’s worth a billion dollars to the right company. And uh they said, well, you going to give them a response? I said, uh, okay, tell them 30 million. Tell them I’ll take 30 million for it. Because I thought like if I didn’t give them some number, they would stop negotiating after uh, you know, five nos. So I said tell them 30 million. I don’t want to sell it for 30 million. I want to sell it for 100 million or more, but I guess I’ll say 30 million. So that so at that point they said, well, you know, they offered you I think they up their their offer to like um 12 million. I said, tell them uh no, but if you want, I’ll I’ll take a meeting with them. So when it got to 12 million, I said I’d get on the phone for half an hour. So then we got on the phone and the call started with someone saying, well, how about 22 million? And I said, um, let me explain. This is like my daughter. Like I’m willing to I’m willing to like marry her off, but only to a man that values her more than I value her. So I value this domain, you know, at 30 million. And so if you don’t want to give me the 30, you know, I’m going to regret after I sell it anyway. I’ll have sellers remorse, but I would I would do it just to make the market. But if you don’t want to value it at 30, I’ll just keep it. And they’re like, uh, okay, we’ll give you 30. I said, okay.
The “Bill of the Week” Segment (Continued) [11:46]
Sam Parr: So 30, you went you got a 30 from 100k.
Michael Saylor: So they did like double seven or eight times and I eventually they started 150k I think and we ended it and I said 30, we ended at 30. But but the point was I didn’t really need the money. It was a matter like if I had at the point maybe 600 million in cash in the bank and the company the MicroStrategy was is a multi-billion dollar company. So I was like a million’s not going to move the needle for me. 100,000’s not going to move the needle for me. 5 million, 10 million’s not going to move the needle one way or the other. So there’s no point in doing it unless it was something material.
Are You a Car Guy? (Revisited) [12:27]
Shaan Puri: Were you uh like you know, the eight people in your office were were they like your coworkers or Uh I mean they’re business development, the people that wanted the commission on the deal, you know?
Shaan Puri: So like any any most Like it’s a big deal, right? They want to like do the deal and and the only way you get 30 million is to like say no to 22 million, right? And everything Well, like any reasonable, most reasonable people, which the reason you are where you are is you’re many would probably consider you not reasonable, right? I mean, you have you’re you’re you’re an extreme personality type and that’s why you you’re very successful. But any reasonable person would say, what are you an idiot? Like you paid very nothing for this. Take it. Were you but were you always that like uh always My my view on it is that in the English language is going to be important to the human race for a thousand years and in a thousand years from now, voice will probably still have value. Just like a lot of like hope. It’s a valuable word forever. I mean, until you murder everyone that speaks the English language. If you think about how valuable it is, I my my real view is is I think people are are crazy for spending hundreds of millions of dollars on ad campaigns to market a brand that’s a misspelling of a normal word. It’s like I got to convince you how to sell in with like two Ys and a Z, you know, and I’m like, why would you do that? Because in the modern era of spell checkers, when you try to type these crappy brands that are misspelled, the, you know, your iPhone unspells it for you or properly spells it. So try going to a website that’s a misspelling of a name. Most brands and most brand consultants, I just disagree with them all. They, you know, they charge you a lot of money to come up with a misspelling of a common word and then you spend half a billion dollars marketing the brand. A much better idea would be buy the word hope or angel or alarm or alert or voice. Even if you got to pay 100 million or 200 million or 500 million dollars, because if I see your your ad and you tell me that, you know, your brand is alert.com, I can remember it in one second. I can spell it in one second. You leap immediately to the top of the Google search engine. So I just I I always view domains as being undervalued and then market people spend hundreds of millions of dollars of going crappy marketing to send someone to a place they can’t spell that they can’t remember. I think the world will gradually come around to that point of view, but they’re not there yet. But that so that was my view. Like I didn’t want to sell it to tell you the truth. Like if you owned the word angel or the word alarm or the word hope or voice, like the truth is Google should have paid a billion dollars for the word voice. Tell tell the tell the short version of that story. The the story is kind of crazy. I’ve heard it once before, but I I would assume Sam and most people have not heard the story of selling voice.com. You bought all these early on in the web. You kind of recognized, oh, these are these are probably going to be valuable to own these names. There’s only one, you know, there’s only one owner of each of these names. You you own it and you hold it for a really long time, like over a decade. And uh, at some point, you decide, okay, maybe we should see if somebody wants to buy some of these. So tell the story of selling voice.com real quick. Well, yeah, we I bought all these domains because I thought, wouldn’t it be great to own a part of the English language? I mean, owning hope or owning voice. I mean, eventually there’ll be a Google voice or there’ll be, you know, some some Telco company that’ll want to launch some service and what a great domain on uh to launch on the on a word like voice.com. So we held them a long time and and uh, I think at some point we were looking for joint ventures, we were looking to commercialize them and we did commercialize a bunch. For example, I created a company called alarm.com. And alarm.com is now publicly traded on NASDAQ. It’s like a four or five billion dollar market cap company. And and you can guess what it does. It actually integrates your home alarm into the internet. You know, and I created another company called angel.com and we sold that for a bit more than $100 million and that was actually a speech interactive voice response like Siri or Alexa before Siri and Alexa came along. And uh, so I had voice and I was holding it and we were looking for some kind of good uh commercialization and someone out of the blue, they contacted us, one of the domain brokers, and they said, well, you know, do you want to sell it? We’ll give you $150,000. And uh, and I, you know, I was like, someone came to me and said they offered $150,000. I said, no. So I thought nothing of it because I just I couldn’t see the point. A week later, they come back and said, well, they doubled it to $300,000. I said, tell them no. So a couple days later, they go, well, the broker is really insistent uh and so they went to $600,000. I said, no. So they said, well, what should you say? I said, don’t tell anything. Tell them, you know, like we’re not interested. It’s got to be something serious. So they they went to 1.2 million. I said, tell them no. I said, well, they want to know what you want for it. I said, um, well, send them a note or something and just tell them I said, it’s like it’s it’s the word voice in the English language, right? So it’s going to have to be something you know, north of uh I don’t know, I don’t think I said seven or eight eight figures, but I just said a lot of money. Um, and so it went on and they doubled it again to two and a half million. And then uh and then uh 5 million and then around 10 million. Then I said they said I had like 18 people in my office. They’re like, or not eight but eight eight people they’re like looking at me like, aren’t you are you going to take the money? It’s like a lot of money now. I said, uh, no, send them back uh at this point, send them back an a note pointing out that this is like the word voice in the English language and it’s and it’s it’s worth a billion dollars to the right company. And uh they said, well, you going to give them a response? I said, uh, okay, tell them 30 million. Tell them I’ll take 30 million for it. Because I thought like if I didn’t give them some number, they would stop negotiating after uh, you know, five nos. So I said tell them 30 million. I don’t want to sell it for 30 million. I want to sell it for 100 million or more, but I guess I’ll say 30 million. So that so at that point they said, well, you know, they offered you I think they up their their offer to like um 12 million. I said, tell them uh no, but if you want, I’ll I’ll take a meeting with them. So when it got to 12 million, I said I’d get on the phone for half an hour. So then we got on the phone and the call started with someone saying, well, how about 22 million? And I said, um, let me explain. This is like my daughter. Like I’m willing to I’m willing to like marry her off, but only to a man that values her more than I value her. So I value this domain, you know, at 30 million. And so if you don’t want to give me the 30, you know, I’m going to regret after I sell it anyway. I’ll have sellers remorse, but I would I would do it just to make the market. But if you don’t want to value it at 30, I’ll just keep it. And they’re like, uh, okay, we’ll give you 30. I said, okay.
The “Bill of the Week” Segment (Continued) [11:46]
Sam Parr: So 30, you went you got a 30 from 100k.
Michael Saylor: So they did like double seven or eight times and I eventually they started 150k I think and we ended it and I said 30, we ended at 30. But but the point was I didn’t really need the money. It was a matter like if I had at the point maybe 600 million in cash in the bank and the company the MicroStrategy was is a multi-billion dollar company. So I was like a million’s not going to move the needle for me. 100,000’s not going to move the needle for me. 5 million, 10 million’s not going to move the needle one way or the other. So there’s no point in doing it unless it was something material.
Are You a Car Guy? (Revisited) [12:27]
Shaan Puri: Were you uh like you know, the eight people in your office were were they like your coworkers or Uh I mean they’re business development, the people that wanted the commission on the deal, you know?
Shaan Puri: So like any any most Like it’s a big deal, right? They want to like do the deal and and the only way you get 30 million is to like say no to 22 million, right? And everything Well, like any reasonable, most reasonable people, which the reason you are where you are is you’re many would probably consider you not reasonable, right? I mean, you have you’re you’re you’re an extreme personality type and that’s why you you’re very successful. But any reasonable person would say, what are you an idiot? Like you paid very nothing for this. Take it. Were you but were you always that like uh always My my view on it is that in the English language is going to be important to the human race for a thousand years and in a thousand years from now, voice will probably still have value. Just like a lot of like hope. It’s a valuable word forever. I mean, until you murder everyone that speaks the English language. If you think about how valuable it is, I my my real view is is I think people are are crazy for spending hundreds of millions of dollars on ad campaigns to market a brand that’s a misspelling of a normal word. It’s like I got to convince you how to sell in with like two Ys and a Z, you know, and I’m like, why would you do that? Because in the modern era of spell checkers, when you try to type these crappy brands that are misspelled, the, you know, your iPhone unspells it for you or properly spells it. So try going to a website that’s a misspelling of a name. Most brands and most brand consultants, I just disagree with them all. They, you know, they charge you a lot of money to come up with a misspelling of a common word and then you spend half a billion dollars marketing the brand. A much better idea would be buy the word hope or angel or alarm or alert or voice. Even if you got to pay 100 million or 200 million or 500 million dollars, because if I see your your ad and you tell me that, you know, your brand is alert.com, I can remember it in one second. I can spell it in one second. You leap immediately to the top of the Google search engine. So I just I I always view domains as being undervalued and then market people spend hundreds of millions of dollars of going crappy marketing to send someone to a place they can’t spell that they can’t remember. I think the world will gradually come around to that point of view, but they’re not there yet. But that so that was my view. Like I didn’t want to sell it to tell you the truth. Like if you owned the word angel or the word alarm or the word hope or voice, like the truth is Google should have paid a billion dollars for the word voice. Tell tell the tell the short version of that story. The the story is kind of crazy. I’ve heard it once before, but I I would assume Sam and most people have not heard the story of selling voice.com. You bought all these early on in the web. You kind of recognized, oh, these are these are probably going to be valuable to own these names. There’s only one, you know, there’s only one owner of each of these names. You you own it and you hold it for a really long time, like over a decade. And uh, at some point, you decide, okay, maybe we should see if somebody wants to buy some of these. So tell the story of selling voice.com real quick. Well, yeah, we I bought all these domains because I thought, wouldn’t it be great to own a part of the English language? I mean, owning hope or owning voice. I mean, eventually there’ll be a Google voice or there’ll be, you know, some some Telco company that’ll want to launch some service and what a great domain on uh to launch on the on a word like voice.com. So we held them a long time and and uh, I think at some point we were looking for joint ventures, we were looking to commercialize them and we did commercialize a bunch. For example, I created a company called alarm.com. And alarm.com is now publicly traded on NASDAQ. It’s like a four or five billion dollar market cap company. And and you can guess what it does. It actually integrates your home alarm into the internet. You know, and I created another company called angel.com and we sold that for a bit more than $100 million and that was actually a speech interactive voice response like Siri or Alexa before Siri and Alexa came along. And uh, so I had voice and I was holding it and we were looking for some kind of good uh commercialization and someone out of the blue, they contacted us, one of the domain brokers, and they said, well, you know, do you want to sell it? We’ll give you $150,000. And uh, and I, you know, I was like, someone came to me and said they offered $150,000. I said, no. So I thought nothing of it because I just I couldn’t see the point. A week later, they come back and said, well, they doubled it to $300,000. I said, tell them no. So a couple days later, they go, well, the broker is really insistent uh and so they went to $600,000. I said, no. So they said, well, what should you say? I said, don’t tell anything. Tell them, you know, like we’re not interested. It’s got to be something serious. So they they went to 1.2 million. I said, tell them no. I said, well, they want to know what you want for it. I said, um, well, send them a note or something and just tell them I said, it’s like it’s it’s the word voice in the English language, right? So it’s going to have to be something you know, north of uh I don’t know, I don’t think I said seven or eight eight figures, but I just said a lot of money. Um, and so it went on and they doubled it again to two and a half million. And then uh and then uh 5 million and then around 10 million. Then I said they said I had like 18 people in my office. They’re like, or not eight but eight eight people they’re like looking at me like, aren’t you are you going to take the money? It’s like a lot of money now. I said, uh, no, send them back uh at this point, send them back an a note pointing out that this is like the word voice in the English language and it’s and it’s it’s worth a billion dollars to the right company. And uh they said, well, you going to give them a response? I said, uh, okay, tell them 30 million. Tell them I’ll take 30 million for it. Because I thought like if I didn’t give them some number, they would stop negotiating after uh, you know, five nos. So I said tell them 30 million. I don’t want to sell it for 30 million. I want to sell it for 100 million or more, but I guess I’ll say 30 million. So that so at that point they said, well, you know, they offered you I think they up their their offer to like um 12 million. I said, tell them uh no, but if you want, I’ll I’ll take a meeting with them. So when it got to 12 million, I said I’d get on the phone for half an hour. So then we got on the phone and the call started with someone saying, well, how about 22 million? And I said, um, let me explain. This is like my daughter. Like I’m willing to I’m willing to like marry her off, but only to a man that values her more than I value her. So I value this domain, you know, at 30 million. And so if you don’t want to give me the 30, you know, I’m going to regret after I sell it anyway. I’ll have sellers remorse, but I would I would do it just to make the market. But if you don’t want to value it at 30, I’ll just keep it. And they’re like, uh, okay, we’ll give you 30. I said, okay.
The “Bill of the Week” Segment (Continued) [11:46]
Sam Parr: So 30, you went you got a 30 from 100k.
Michael Saylor: So they did like double seven or eight times and I eventually they started 150k I think and we ended it and I said 30, we ended at 30. But but the point was I didn’t really need the money. It was a matter like if I had at the point maybe 600 million in cash in the bank and the company the MicroStrategy was is a multi-billion dollar company. So I was like a million’s not going to move the needle for me. 100,000’s not going to move the needle for me. 5 million, 10 million’s not going to move the needle one way or the other. So there’s no point in doing it unless it was something material.
Are You a Car Guy? (Revisited) [12:27]
Shaan Puri: Were you uh like you know, the eight people in your office were were they like your coworkers or Uh I mean they’re business development, the people that wanted the commission on the deal, you know?
Shaan Puri: So like any any most Like it’s a big deal, right? They want to like do the deal and and the only way you get 30 million is to like say no to 22 million, right? And everything Well, like any reasonable, most reasonable people, which the reason you are where you are is you’re many would probably consider you not reasonable, right? I mean, you have you’re you’re you’re an extreme personality type and that’s why you you’re very successful. But any reasonable person would say, what are you an idiot? Like you paid very nothing for this. Take it. Were you but were you always that like uh always My my view on it is that in the English language is going to be important to the human race for a thousand years and in a thousand years from now, voice will probably still have value. Just like a lot of like hope. It’s a valuable word forever. I mean, until you murder everyone that speaks the English language. If you think about how valuable it is, I my my real view is is I think people are are crazy for spending hundreds of millions of dollars on ad campaigns to market a brand that’s a misspelling of a normal word. It’s like I got to convince you how to sell in with like two Ys and a Z, you know, and I’m like, why would you do that? Because in the modern era of spell checkers, when you try to type these crappy brands that are misspelled, the, you know, your iPhone unspells it for you or properly spells it. So try going to a website that’s a misspelling of a name. Most brands and most brand consultants, I just disagree with them all. They, you know, they charge you a lot of money to come up with a misspelling of a common word and then you spend half a billion dollars marketing the brand. A much better idea would be buy the word hope or angel or alarm or alert or voice. Even if you got to pay 100 million or 200 million or 500 million dollars, because if I see your your ad and you tell me that, you know, your brand is alert.com, I can remember it in one second. I can spell it in one second. You leap immediately to the top of the Google search engine. So I just I I always view domains as being undervalued and then market people spend hundreds of millions of dollars of going crappy marketing to send someone to a place they can’t spell that they can’t remember. I think the world will gradually come around to that point of view, but they’re not there yet. But that so that was my view. Like I didn’t want to sell it to tell you the truth. Like if you owned the word angel or the word alarm or the word hope or voice, like the truth is Google should have paid a billion dollars for the word voice. Tell tell the tell the short version of that story. The the story is kind of crazy. I’ve heard it once before, but I I would assume Sam and most people have not heard the story of selling voice.com. You bought all these early on in the web. You kind of recognized, oh, these are these are probably going to be valuable to own these names. There’s only one, you know, there’s only one owner of each of these names. You you own it and you hold it for a really long time, like over a decade. And uh, at some point, you decide, okay, maybe we should see if somebody wants to buy some of these. So tell the story of selling voice.com real quick. Well, yeah, we I bought all these domains because I thought, wouldn’t it be great to own a part of the English language? I mean, owning hope or owning voice. I mean, eventually there’ll be a Google voice or there’ll be, you know, some some Telco company that’ll want to launch some service and what a great domain on uh to launch on the on a word like voice.com. So we held them a long time and and uh, I think at some point we were looking for joint ventures, we were looking to commercialize them and we did commercialize a bunch. For example, I created a company called alarm.com. And alarm.com is now publicly traded on NASDAQ. It’s like a four or five billion dollar market cap company. And and you can guess what it does. It actually integrates your home alarm into the internet. You know, and I created another company called angel.com and we sold that for a bit more than $100 million and that was actually a speech interactive voice response like Siri or Alexa before Siri and Alexa came along. And uh, so I had voice and I was holding it and we were looking for some kind of good uh commercialization and someone out of the blue, they contacted us, one of the domain brokers, and they said, well, you know, do you want to sell it? We’ll give you $150,000. And uh, and I, you know, I was like, someone came to me and said they offered $150,000. I said, no. So I thought nothing of it because I just I couldn’t see the point. A week later, they come back and said, well, they doubled it to $300,000. I said, tell them no. So a couple days later, they go, well, the broker is really insistent uh and so they went to $600,000. I said, no. So they said, well, what should you say? I said, don’t tell anything. Tell them, you know, like we’re not interested. It’s got to be something serious. So they they went to 1.2 million. I said, tell them no. I said, well, they want to know what you want for it. I said, um, well, send them a note or something and just tell them I said, it’s like it’s it’s the word voice in the English language, right? So it’s going to have to be something you know, north of uh I don’t know, I don’t think I said seven or eight eight figures, but I just said a lot of money. Um, and so it went on and they doubled it again to two and a half million. And then uh and then uh 5 million and then around 10 million. Then I said they said I had like 18 people in my office. They’re like, or not eight but eight eight people they’re like looking at me like, aren’t you are you going to take the money? It’s like a lot of money now. I said, uh, no, send them back uh at this point, send them back an a note pointing out that this is like the word voice in the English language and it’s and it’s it’s worth a billion dollars to the right company. And uh they said, well, you going to give them a response? I said, uh, okay, tell them 30 million. Tell them I’ll take 30 million for it. Because I thought like if I didn’t give them some number, they would stop negotiating after uh, you know, five nos. So I said tell them 30 million. I don’t want to sell it for 30 million. I want to sell it for 100 million or more, but I guess I’ll say 30 million. So that so at that point they said, well, you know, they offered you I think they up their their offer to like um 12 million. I said, tell them uh no, but if you want, I’ll I’ll take a meeting with them. So when it got to 12 million, I said I’d get on the phone for half an hour. So then we got on the phone and the call started with someone saying, well, how about 22 million? And I said, um, let me explain. This is like my daughter. Like I’m willing to I’m willing to like marry her off, but only to a man that values her more than I value her. So I value this domain, you know, at 30 million. And so if you don’t want to give me the 30, you know, I’m going to regret after I sell it anyway. I’ll have sellers remorse, but I would I would do it just to make the market. But if you don’t want to value it at 30, I’ll just keep it. And they’re like, uh, okay, we’ll give you 30. I said, okay.
The “Bill of the Week” Segment (Continued) [11:46]
Sam Parr: So 30, you went you got a 30 from 100k.
Michael Saylor: So they did like double seven or eight times and I eventually they started 150k I think and we ended it and I said 30, we ended at 30. But but the point was I didn’t really need the money. It was a matter like if I had at the point maybe 600 million in cash in the bank and the company the MicroStrategy was is a multi-billion dollar company. So I was like a million’s not going to move the needle for me. 100,000’s not going to move the needle for me. 5 million, 10 million’s not going to move the needle one way or the other. So there’s no point in doing it unless it was something material.
Are You a Car Guy? (Revisited) [12:27]
Shaan Puri: Were you uh like you know, the eight people in your office were were they like your coworkers or Uh I mean they’re business development, the people that wanted the commission on the deal, you know?
Shaan Puri: So like any any most Like it’s a big deal, right? They want to like do the deal and and the only way you get 30 million is to like say no to 22 million, right? And everything Well, like any reasonable, most reasonable people, which the reason you are where you are is you’re many would probably consider you not reasonable, right? I mean, you have you’re you’re you’re an extreme personality type and that’s why you you’re very successful. But any reasonable person would say, what are you an idiot? Like you paid very nothing for this. Take it. Were you but were you always that like uh always My my view on it is that in the English language is going to be important to the human race for a thousand years and in a thousand years from now, voice will probably still have value. Just like a lot of like hope. It’s a valuable word forever. I mean, until you murder everyone that speaks the English language. If you think about how valuable it is, I my my real view is is I think people are are crazy for spending hundreds of millions of dollars on ad campaigns to market a brand that’s a misspelling of a normal word. It’s like I got to convince you how to sell in with like two Ys and a Z, you know, and I’m like, why would you do that? Because in the modern era of spell checkers, when you try to type these crappy brands that are misspelled, the, you know, your iPhone unspells it for you or properly spells it. So try going to a website that’s a misspelling of a name. Most brands and most brand consultants, I just disagree with them all. They, you know, they charge you a lot of money to come up with a misspelling of a common word and then you spend half a billion dollars marketing the brand. A much better idea would be buy the word hope or angel or alarm or alert or voice. Even if you got to pay 100 million or 200 million or 500 million dollars, because if I see your your ad and you tell me that, you know, your brand is alert.com, I can remember it in one second. I can spell it in one second. You leap immediately to the top of the Google search engine. So I just I I always view domains as being undervalued and then market people spend hundreds of millions of dollars of going crappy marketing to send someone to a place they can’t spell that they can’t remember. I think the world will gradually come around to that point of view, but they’re not there yet. But that so that was my view. Like I didn’t want to sell it to tell you the truth. Like if you owned the word angel or the word alarm or the word hope or voice, like the truth is Google should have paid a billion dollars for the word voice. Tell tell the tell the short version of that story. The the story is kind of crazy. I’ve heard it once before, but I I would assume Sam and most people have not heard the story of selling voice.com. You bought all these early on in the web. You kind of recognized, oh, these are these are probably going to be valuable to own these names. There’s only one, you know, there’s only one owner of each of these names. You you own it and you hold it for a really long time, like over a decade. And uh, at some point, you decide, okay, maybe we should see if somebody wants to buy some of these. So tell the story of selling voice.com real quick. Well, yeah, we I bought all these domains because I thought, wouldn’t it be great to own a part of the English language? I mean, owning hope or owning voice. I mean, eventually there’ll be a Google voice or there’ll be, you know, some some Telco company that’ll want to launch some service and what a great domain on uh to launch on the on a word like voice.com. So we held them a long time and and uh, I think at some point we were looking for joint ventures, we were looking to commercialize them and we did commercialize a bunch. For example, I created a company called alarm.com. And alarm.com is now publicly traded on NASDAQ. It’s like a four or five billion dollar market cap company. And and you can guess what it does. It actually integrates your home alarm into the internet. You know, and I created another company called angel.com and we sold that for a bit more than $100 million and that was actually a speech interactive voice response like Siri or Alexa before Siri and Alexa came along. And uh, so I had voice and I was holding it and we were looking for some kind of good uh commercialization and someone out of the blue, they contacted us, one of the domain brokers, and they said, well, you know, do you want to sell it? We’ll give you $150,000. And uh, and I, you know, I was like, someone came to me and said they offered $150,000. I said, no. So I thought nothing of it because I just I couldn’t see the point. A week later, they come back and said, well, they doubled it to $300,000. I said, tell them no. So a couple days later, they go, well, the broker is really insistent uh and so they went to $600,000. I said, no. So they said, well, what should you say? I said, don’t tell anything. Tell them, you know, like we’re not interested. It’s got to be something serious. So they they went to 1.2 million. I said, tell them no. I said, well, they want to know what you want for it. I said, um, well, send them a note or something and just tell them I said, it’s like it’s it’s the word voice in the English language, right? So it’s going to have to be something you know, north of uh I don’t know, I don’t think I said seven or eight eight figures, but I just said a lot of money. Um, and so it went on and they doubled it again to two and a half million. And then uh and then uh 5 million and then around 10 million. Then I said they said I had like 18 people in my office. They’re like, or not eight but eight eight people they’re like looking at me like, aren’t you are you going to take the money? It’s like a lot of money now. I said, uh, no, send them back uh at this point, send them back an a note pointing out that this is like the word voice in the English language and it’s and it’s it’s worth a billion dollars to the right company. And uh they said, well, you going to give them a response? I said, uh, okay, tell them 30 million. Tell them I’ll take 30 million for it. Because I thought like if I didn’t give them some number, they would stop negotiating after uh, you know, five nos. So I said tell them 30 million. I don’t want to sell it for 30 million. I want to sell it for 100 million or more, but I guess I’ll say 30 million. So that so at that point they said, well, you know, they offered you I think they up their their offer to like um 12 million. I said, tell them uh no, but if you want, I’ll I’ll take a meeting with them. So when it got to 12 million, I said I’d get on the phone for half an hour. So then we got on the phone and the call started with someone saying, well, how about 22 million? And I said, um, let me explain. This is like my daughter. Like I’m willing to I’m willing to like marry her off, but only to a man that values her more than I value her. So I value this domain, you know, at 30 million. And so if you don’t want to give me the 30, you know, I’m going to regret after I sell it anyway. I’ll have sellers remorse, but I would I would do it just to make the market. But if you don’t want to value it at 30, I’ll just keep it. And they’re like, uh, okay, we’ll give you 30. I said, okay.
The “Bill of the Week” Segment (Continued) [11:46]
Sam Parr: So 30, you went you got a 30 from 100k.
Michael Saylor: So they did like double seven or eight times and I eventually they started 150k I think and we ended it and I said 30, we ended at 30. But but the point was I didn’t really need the money. It was a matter like if I had at the point maybe 600 million in cash in the bank and the company the MicroStrategy was is a multi-billion dollar company. So I was like a million’s not going to move the needle for me. 100,000’s not going to move the needle for me. 5 million, 10 million’s not going to move the needle one way or the other. So there’s no point in doing it unless it was something material.
Are You a Car Guy? (Revisited) [12:27]
Shaan Puri: Were you uh like you know, the eight people in your office were were they like your coworkers or Uh I mean they’re business development, the people that wanted the commission on the deal, you know?
Shaan Puri: So like any any most Like it’s a big deal, right? They want to like do the deal and and the only way you get 30 million is to like say no to 22 million, right? And everything Well, like any reasonable, most reasonable people, which the reason you are where you are is you’re many would probably consider you not reasonable, right? I mean, you have you’re you’re you’re an extreme personality type and that’s why you you’re very successful. But any reasonable person would say, what are you an idiot? Like you paid very nothing for this. Take it. Were you but were you always that like uh always My my view on it is that in the English language is going to be important to the human race for a thousand years and in a thousand years from now, voice will probably still have value. Just like a lot of like hope. It’s a valuable word forever. I mean, until you murder everyone that speaks the English language. If you think about how valuable it is, I my my real view is is I think people are are crazy for spending hundreds of millions of dollars on ad campaigns to market a brand that’s a misspelling of a normal word. It’s like I got to convince you how to sell in with like two Ys and a Z, you know, and I’m like, why would you do that? Because in the modern era of spell checkers, when you try to type these crappy brands that are misspelled, the, you know, your iPhone unspells it for you or properly spells it. So try going to a website that’s a misspelling of a name. Most brands and most brand consultants, I just disagree with them all. They, you know, they charge you a lot of money to come up with a misspelling of a common word and then you spend half a billion dollars marketing the brand. A much better idea would be buy the word hope or angel or alarm or alert or voice. Even if you got to pay 100 million or 200 million or 500 million dollars, because if I see your your ad and you tell me that, you know, your brand is alert.com, I can remember it in one second. I can spell it in one second. You leap immediately to the top of the Google search engine. So I just I I always view domains as being undervalued and then market people spend hundreds of millions of dollars of going crappy marketing to send someone to a place they can’t spell that they can’t remember. I think the world will gradually come around to that point of view, but they’re not there yet. But that so that was my view. Like I didn’t want to sell it to tell you the truth. Like if you owned the word angel or the word alarm or the word hope or voice, like the truth is Google should have paid a billion dollars for the word voice. Tell tell the tell the short version of that story. The the story is kind of crazy. I’ve heard it once before, but I I would assume Sam and most people have not heard the story of selling voice.com. You bought all these early on in the web. You kind of recognized, oh, these are these are probably going to be valuable to own these names. There’s only one, you know, there’s only one owner of each of these names. You you own it and you hold it for a really long time, like over a decade. And uh, at some point, you decide, okay, maybe we should see if somebody wants to buy some of these. So tell the story of selling voice.com real quick. Well, yeah, we I bought all these domains because I thought, wouldn’t it be great to own a part of the English language? I mean, owning hope or owning voice. I mean, eventually there’ll be a Google voice or there’ll be, you know, some some Telco company that’ll want to launch some service and what a great domain on uh to launch on the on a word like voice.com. So we held them a long time and and uh, I think at some point we were looking for joint ventures, we were looking to commercialize them and we did commercialize a bunch. For example, I created a company called alarm.com. And alarm.com is now publicly traded on NASDAQ. It’s like a four or five billion dollar market cap company. And and you can guess what it does. It actually integrates your home alarm into the internet. You know, and I created another company called angel.com and we sold that for a bit more than $100 million and that was actually a speech interactive voice response like Siri or Alexa before Siri and Alexa came along. And uh, so I had voice and I was holding it and we were looking for some kind of good uh commercialization and someone out of the blue, they contacted us, one of the domain brokers, and they said, well, you know, do you want to sell it? We’ll give you $150,000. And uh, and I, you know, I was like, someone came to me and said they offered $150,000. I said, no. So I thought nothing of it because I just I couldn’t see the point. A week later, they come back and said, well, they doubled it to $300,000. I said, tell them no. So a couple days later, they go, well, the broker is really insistent uh and so they went to $600,000. I said, no. So they said, well, what should you say? I said, don’t tell anything. Tell them, you know, like we’re not interested. It’s got to be something serious. So they they went to 1.2 million. I said, tell them no. I said, well, they want to know what you want for it. I said, um, well, send them a note or something and just tell them I said, it’s like it’s it’s the word voice in the English language, right? So it’s going to have to be something you know, north of uh I don’t know, I don’t think I said seven or eight eight figures, but I just said a lot of money. Um, and so it went on and they doubled it again to two and a half million. And then uh and then uh 5 million and then around 10 million. Then I said they said I had like 18 people in my office. They’re like, or not eight but eight eight people they’re like looking at me like, aren’t you are you going to take the money? It’s like a lot of money now. I said, uh, no, send them back uh at this point, send them back an a note pointing out that this is like the word voice in the English language and it’s and it’s it’s worth a billion dollars to the right company. And uh they said, well, you going to give them a response? I said, uh, okay, tell them 30 million. Tell them I’ll take 30 million for it. Because I thought like if I didn’t give them some number, they would stop negotiating after uh, you know, five nos. So I said tell them 30 million. I don’t want to sell it for 30 million. I want to sell it for 100 million or more, but I guess I’ll say 30 million. So that so at that point they said, well, you know, they offered you I think they up their their offer to like um 12 million. I said, tell them uh no, but if you want, I’ll I’ll take a meeting with them. So when it got to 12 million, I said I’d get on the phone for half an hour. So then we got on the phone and the call started with someone saying, well, how about 22 million? And I said, um, let me explain. This is like my daughter. Like I’m willing to I’m willing to like marry her off, but only to a man that values her more than I value her. So I value this domain, you know, at 30 million. And so if you don’t want to give me the 30, you know, I’m going to regret after I sell it anyway. I’ll have sellers remorse, but I would I would do it just to make the market. But if you don’t want to value it at 30, I’ll just keep it. And they’re like, uh, okay, we’ll give you 30. I said, okay.
The “Bill of the Week” Segment (Continued) [11:46]
Sam Parr: So 30, you went you got a 30 from 100k.
Michael Saylor: So they did like double seven or eight times and I eventually they started 150k I think and we ended it and I said 30, we ended at 30. But but the point was I didn’t really need the money. It was a matter like if I had at the point maybe 600 million in cash in the bank and the company the MicroStrategy was is a multi-billion dollar company. So I was like a million’s not going to move the needle for me. 100,000’s not going to move the needle for me. 5 million, 10 million’s not going to move the needle one way or the other. So there’s no point in doing it unless it was something material.
Are You a Car Guy? (Revisited) [12:27]
Shaan Puri: Were you uh like you know, the eight people in your office were were they like your coworkers or Uh I mean they’re business development, the people that wanted the commission on the deal, you know?
Shaan Puri: So like any any most Like it’s a big deal, right? They want to like do the deal and and the only way you get 30 million is to like say no to 22 million, right? And everything Well, like any reasonable, most reasonable people, which the reason you are where you are is you’re many would probably consider you not reasonable, right? I mean, you have you’re you’re you’re an extreme personality type and that’s why you you’re very successful. But any reasonable person would say, what are you an idiot? Like you paid very nothing for this. Take it. Were you but were you always that like uh always My my view on it is that in the English language is going to be important to the human race for a thousand years and in a thousand years from now, voice will probably still have value. Just like a lot of like hope. It’s a valuable word forever. I mean, until you murder everyone that speaks the English language. If you think about how valuable it is, I my my real view is is I think people are are crazy for spending hundreds of millions of dollars on ad campaigns to market a brand that’s a misspelling of a normal word. It’s like I got to convince you how to sell in with like two Ys and a Z, you know, and I’m like, why would you do that? Because in the modern era of spell checkers, when you try to type these crappy brands that are misspelled, the, you know, your iPhone unspells it for you or properly spells it. So try going to a website that’s a misspelling of a name. Most brands and most brand consultants, I just disagree with them all. They, you know, they charge you a lot of money to come up with a misspelling of a common word and then you spend half a billion dollars marketing the brand. A much better idea would be buy the word hope or angel or alarm or alert or voice. Even if you got to pay 100 million or 200 million or 500 million dollars, because if I see your your ad and you tell me that, you know, your brand is alert.com, I can remember it in one second. I can spell it in one second. You leap immediately to the top of the Google search engine. So I just I I always view domains as being undervalued and then market people spend hundreds of millions of dollars of going crappy marketing to send someone to a place they can’t spell that they can’t remember. I think the world will gradually come around to that point of view, but they’re not there yet. But that so that was my view. Like I didn’t want to sell it to tell you the truth. Like if you owned the word angel or the word alarm or the word hope or voice, like the truth is Google should have paid a billion dollars for the word voice. Tell tell the tell the short version of that story. The the story is kind of crazy. I’ve heard it once before, but I I would assume Sam and most people have not heard the story of selling voice.com. You bought all these early on in the web. You kind of recognized, oh, these are these are probably going to be valuable to own these names. There’s only one, you know, there’s only one owner of each of these names. You you own it and you hold it for a really long time, like over a decade. And uh, at some point, you decide, okay, maybe we should see if somebody wants to buy some of these. So tell the story of selling voice.com real quick. Well, yeah, we I bought all these domains because I thought, wouldn’t it be great to own a part of the English language? I mean, owning hope or owning voice. I mean, eventually there’ll be a Google voice or there’ll be, you know, some some Telco company that’ll want to launch some service and what a great domain on uh to launch on the on a word like voice.com. So we held them a long time and and uh, I think at some point we were looking for joint ventures, we were looking to commercialize them and we did commercialize a bunch. For example, I created a company called alarm.com. And alarm.com is now publicly traded on NASDAQ. It’s like a four or five billion dollar market cap company. And and you can guess what it does. It actually integrates your home alarm into the internet. You know, and I created another company called angel.com and we sold that for a bit more than $100 million and that was actually a speech interactive voice response like Siri or Alexa before Siri and Alexa came along. And uh, so I had voice and I was holding it and we were looking for some kind of good uh commercialization and someone out of the blue, they contacted us, one of the domain brokers, and they said, well, you know, do you want to sell it? We’ll give you $150,000. And uh, and I, you know, I was like, someone came to me and said they offered $150,000. I said, no. So I thought nothing of it because I just I couldn’t see the point. A week later, they come back and said, well, they doubled it to $300,000. I said, tell them no. So a couple days later, they go, well, the broker is really insistent uh and so they went to $600,000. I said, no. So they said, well, what should you say? I said, don’t tell anything. Tell them, you know, like we’re not interested. It’s got to be something serious. So they they went to 1.2 million. I said, tell them no. I said, well, they want to know what you want for it. I said, um, well, send them a note or something and just tell them I said, it’s like it’s it’s the word voice in the English language, right? So it’s going to have to be something you know, north of uh I don’t know, I don’t think I said seven or eight eight figures, but I just said a lot of money. Um, and so it went on and they doubled it again to two and a half million. And then uh and then uh 5 million and then around 10 million. Then I said they said I had like 18 people in my office. They’re like, or not eight but eight eight people they’re like looking at me like, aren’t you are you going to take the money? It’s like a lot of money now. I said, uh, no, send them back uh at this point, send them back an a note pointing out that this is like the word voice in the English language and it’s and it’s it’s worth a billion dollars to the right company. And uh they said, well, you going to give them a response? I said, uh, okay, tell them 30 million. Tell them I’ll take 30 million for it. Because I thought like if I didn’t give them some number, they would stop negotiating after uh, you know, five nos. So I said tell them 30 million. I don’t want to sell it for 30 million. I want to sell it for 100 million or more, but I guess I’ll say 30 million. So that so at that point they said, well, you know, they offered you I think they up their their offer to like um 12 million. I said, tell them uh no, but if you want, I’ll I’ll take a meeting with them. So when it got to 12 million, I said I’d get on the phone for half an hour. So then we got on the phone and the call started with someone saying, well, how about 22 million? And I said, um, let me explain. This is like my daughter. Like I’m willing to I’m willing to like marry her off, but only to a man that values her more than I value her. So I value this domain, you know, at 30 million. And so if you don’t want to give me the 30, you know, I’m going to regret after I sell it anyway. I’ll have sellers remorse, but I would I would do it just to make the market. But if you don’t want to value it at 30, I’ll just keep it. And they’re like, uh, okay, we’ll give you 30. I said, okay.
The “Bill of the Week” Segment (Continued) [11:46]
Sam Parr: So 30, you went you got a 30 from 100k.
Michael Saylor: So they did like double seven or eight times and I eventually they started 150k I think and we ended it and I said 30, we ended at 30. But but the point was I didn’t really need the money. It was a matter like if I had at the point maybe 600 million in cash in the bank and the company the MicroStrategy was is a multi-billion dollar company. So I was like a million’s not going to move the needle for me. 100,000’s not going to move the needle for me. 5 million, 10 million’s not going to move the needle one way or the other. So there’s no point in doing it unless it was something material.
Are You a Car Guy? (Revisited) [12:27]
Shaan Puri: Were you uh like you know, the eight people in your office were were they like your coworkers or Uh I mean they’re business development, the people that wanted the commission on the deal, you know?
Shaan Puri: So like any any most Like it’s a big deal, right? They want to like do the deal and and the only way you get 30 million is to like say no to 22 million, right? And everything Well, like any reasonable, most reasonable people, which the reason you are where you are is you’re many would probably consider you not reasonable, right? I mean, you have you’re you’re you’re an extreme personality type and that’s why you you’re very successful. But any reasonable person would say, what are you an idiot? Like you paid very nothing for this. Take it. Were you but were you always that like uh always My my view on it is that in the English language is going to be important to the human race for a thousand years and in a thousand years from now, voice will probably still have value. Just like a lot of like hope. It’s a valuable word forever. I mean, until you murder everyone that speaks the English language. If you think about how valuable it is, I my my real view is is I think people are are crazy for spending hundreds of millions of dollars on ad campaigns to market a brand that’s a misspelling of a normal word. It’s like I got to convince you how to sell in with like two Ys and a Z, you know, and I’m like, why would you do that? Because in the modern era of spell checkers, when you try to type these crappy brands that are misspelled, the, you know, your iPhone unspells it for you or properly spells it. So try going to a website that’s a misspelling of a name. Most brands and most brand consultants, I just disagree with them all. They, you know, they charge you a lot of money to come up with a misspelling of a common word and then you spend half a billion dollars marketing the brand. A much better idea would be buy the word hope or angel or alarm or alert or voice. Even if you got to pay 100 million or 200 million or 500 million dollars, because if I see your your ad and you tell me that, you know, your brand is alert.com, I can remember it in one second. I can spell it in one second. You leap immediately to the top of the Google search engine. So I just I I always view domains as being undervalued and then market people spend hundreds of millions of dollars of going crappy marketing to send someone to a place they can’t spell that they can’t remember. I think the world will gradually come around to that point of view, but they’re not there yet. But that so that was my view. Like I didn’t want to sell it to tell you the truth. Like if you owned the word angel or the word alarm or the word hope or voice, like the truth is Google should have paid a billion dollars for the word voice. Tell tell the tell the short version of that story. The the story is kind of crazy. I’ve heard it once before, but I I would assume Sam and most people have not heard the story of selling voice.com. You bought all these early on in the web. You kind of recognized, oh, these are these are probably going to be valuable to own these names. There’s only one, you know, there’s only one owner of each of these names. You you own it and you hold it for a really long time, like over a decade. And uh, at some point, you decide, okay, maybe we should see if somebody wants to buy some of these. So tell the story of selling voice.com real quick. Well, yeah, we I bought all these domains because I thought, wouldn’t it be great to own a part of the English language? I mean, owning hope or owning voice. I mean, eventually there’ll be a Google voice or there’ll be, you know, some some Telco company that’ll want to launch some service and what a great domain on uh to launch on the on a word like voice.com. So we held them a long time and and uh, I think at some point we were looking for joint ventures, we were looking to commercialize them and we did commercialize a bunch. For example, I created a company called alarm.com. And alarm.com is now publicly traded on NASDAQ. It’s like a four or five billion dollar market cap company. And and you can guess what it does. It actually integrates your home alarm into the internet. You know, and I created another company called angel.com and we sold that for a bit more than $100 million and that was actually a speech interactive voice response like Siri or Alexa before Siri and Alexa came along. And uh, so I had voice and I was holding it and we were looking for some kind of good uh commercialization and someone out of the blue, they contacted us, one of the domain brokers, and they said, well, you know, do you want to sell it? We’ll give you $150,000. And uh, and I, you know, I was like, someone came to me and said they offered $150,000. I said, no. So I thought nothing of it because I just I couldn’t see the point. A week later, they come back and said, well, they doubled it to $300,000. I said, tell them no. So a couple days later, they go, well, the broker is really insistent uh and so they went to $600,000. I said, no. So they said, well, what should you say? I said, don’t tell anything. Tell them, you know, like we’re not interested. It’s got to be something serious. So they they went to 1.2 million. I said, tell them no. I said, well, they want to know what you want for it. I said, um, well, send them a note or something and just tell them I said, it’s like it’s it’s the word voice in the English language, right? So it’s going to have to be something you know, north of uh I don’t know, I don’t think I said seven or eight eight figures, but I just said a lot of money. Um, and so it went on and they doubled it again to two and a half million. And then uh and then uh 5 million and then around 10 million. Then I said they said I had like 18 people in my office. They’re like, or not eight but eight eight people they’re like looking at me like, aren’t you are you going to take the money? It’s like a lot of money now. I said, uh, no, send them back uh at this point, send them back an a note pointing out that this is like the word voice in the English language and it’s and it’s it’s worth a billion dollars to the right company. And uh they said, well, you going to give them a response? I said, uh, okay, tell them 30 million. Tell them I’ll take 30 million for it. Because I thought like if I didn’t give them some number, they would stop negotiating after uh, you know, five nos. So I said tell them 30 million. I don’t want to sell it for 30 million. I want to sell it for 100 million or more, but I guess I’ll say 30 million. So that so at that point they said, well, you know, they offered you I think they up their their offer to like um 12 million. I said, tell them uh no, but if you want, I’ll I’ll take a meeting with them. So when it got to 12 million, I said I’d get on the phone for half an hour. So then we got on the phone and the call started with someone saying, well, how about 22 million? And I said, um, let me explain. This is like my daughter. Like I’m willing to I’m willing to like marry her off, but only to a man that values her more than I value her. So I value this domain, you know, at 30 million. And so if you don’t want to give me the 30, you know, I’m going to regret after I sell it anyway. I’ll have sellers remorse, but I would I would do it just to make the market. But if you don’t want to value it at 30, I’ll just keep it. And they’re like, uh, okay, we’ll give you 30. I said, okay.
The “Bill of the Week” Segment (Continued) [11:46]
Sam Parr: So 30, you went you got a 30 from 100k.
Michael Saylor: So they did like double seven or eight times and I eventually they started 150k I think and we ended it and I said 30, we ended at 30. But but the point was I didn’t really need the money. It was a matter like if I had at the point maybe 600 million in cash in the bank and the company the MicroStrategy was is a multi-billion dollar company. So I was like a million’s not going to move the needle for me. 100,000’s not going to move the needle for me. 5 million, 10 million’s not going to move the needle one way or the other. So there’s no point in doing it unless it was something material.
Are You a Car Guy? (Revisited) [12:27]
Shaan Puri: Were you uh like you know, the eight people in your office were were they like your coworkers or Uh I mean they’re business development, the people that wanted the commission on the deal, you know?
Shaan Puri: So like any any most Like it’s a big deal, right? They want to like do the deal and and the only way you get 30 million is to like say no to 22 million, right? And everything Well, like any reasonable, most reasonable people, which the reason you are where you are is you’re many would probably consider you not reasonable, right? I mean, you have you’re you’re you’re an extreme personality type and that’s why you you’re very successful. But any reasonable person would say, what are you an idiot? Like you paid very nothing for this. Take it. Were you but were you always that like uh always My my view on it is that in the English language is going to be important to the human race for a thousand years and in a thousand years from now, voice will probably still have value. Just like a lot of like hope. It’s a valuable word forever. I mean, until you murder everyone that speaks the English language. If you think about how valuable it is, I my my real view is is I think people are are crazy for spending hundreds of millions of dollars on ad campaigns to market a brand that’s a misspelling of a normal word. It’s like I got to convince you how to sell in with like two Ys and a Z, you know, and I’m like, why would you do that? Because in the modern era of spell checkers, when you try to type these crappy brands that are misspelled, the, you know, your iPhone unspells it for you or properly spells it. So try going to a website that’s a misspelling of a name. Most brands and most brand consultants, I just disagree with them all. They, you know, they charge you a lot of money to come up with a misspelling of a common word and then you spend half a billion dollars marketing the brand. A much better idea would be buy the word hope or angel or alarm or alert or voice. Even if you got to pay 100 million or 200 million or 500 million dollars, because if I see your your ad and you tell me that, you know, your brand is alert.com, I can remember it in one second. I can spell it in one second. You leap immediately to the top of the Google search engine. So I just I I always view domains as being undervalued and then market people spend hundreds of millions of dollars of going crappy marketing to send someone to a place they can’t spell that they can’t remember. I think the world will gradually come around to that point of view, but they’re not there yet. But that so that was my view. Like I didn’t want to sell it to tell you the truth. Like if you owned the word angel or the word alarm or the word hope or voice, like the truth is Google should have paid a billion dollars for the word voice. Tell tell the tell the short version of that story. The the story is kind of crazy. I’ve heard it once before, but I I would assume Sam and most people have not heard the story of selling voice.com. You bought all these early on in the web. You kind of recognized, oh, these are these are probably going to be valuable to own these names. There’s only one, you know, there’s only one owner of each of these names. You you own it and you hold it for a really long time, like over a decade. And uh, at some point, you decide, okay, maybe we should see if somebody wants to buy some of these. So tell the story of selling voice.com real quick. Well, yeah, we I bought all these domains because I thought, wouldn’t it be great to own a part of the English language? I mean, owning hope or owning voice. I mean, eventually there’ll be a Google voice or there’ll be, you know, some some Telco company that’ll want to launch some service and what a great domain on uh to launch on the on a word like voice.com. So we held them a long time and and uh, I think at some point we were looking for joint ventures, we were looking to commercialize them and we did commercialize a bunch. For example, I created a company called alarm.com. And alarm.com is now publicly traded on NASDAQ. It’s like a four or five billion dollar market cap company. And and you can guess what it does. It actually integrates your home alarm into the internet. You know, and I created another company called angel.com and we sold that for a bit more than $100 million and that was actually a speech interactive voice response like Siri or Alexa before Siri and Alexa came along. And uh, so I had voice and I was holding it and we were looking for some kind of good uh commercialization and someone out of the blue, they contacted us, one of the domain brokers, and they said, well, you know, do you want to sell it? We’ll give you $150,000. And uh, and I, you know, I was like, someone came to me and said they offered $150,000. I said, no. So I thought nothing of it because I just I couldn’t see the point. A week later, they come back and said, well, they doubled it to $300,000. I said, tell them no. So a couple days later, they go, well, the broker is really insistent uh and so they went to $600,000. I said, no. So they said, well, what should you say? I said, don’t tell anything. Tell them, you know, like we’re not interested. It’s got to be something serious. So they they went to 1.2 million. I said, tell them no. I said, well, they want to know what you want for it. I said, um, well, send them a note or something and just tell them I said, it’s like it’s it’s the word voice in the English language, right? So it’s going to have to be something you know, north of uh I don’t know, I don’t think I said seven or eight eight figures, but I just said a lot of money. Um, and so it went on and they doubled it again to two and a half million. And then uh and then uh 5 million and then around 10 million. Then I said they said I had like 18 people in my office. They’re like, or not eight but eight eight people they’re like looking at me like, aren’t you are you going to take the money? It’s like a lot of money now. I said, uh, no, send them back uh at this point, send them back an a note pointing out that this is like the word voice in the English language and it’s and it’s it’s worth a billion dollars to the right company. And uh they said, well, you going to give them a response? I said, uh, okay, tell them 30 million. Tell them I’ll take 30 million for it. Because I thought like if I didn’t give them some number, they would stop negotiating after uh, you know, five nos. So I said tell them 30 million. I don’t want to sell it for 30 million. I want to sell it for 100 million or more, but I guess I’ll say 30 million. So that so at that point they said, well, you know, they offered you I think they up their their offer to like um 12 million. I said, tell them uh no, but if you want, I’ll I’ll take a meeting with them. So when it got to 12 million, I said I’d get on the phone for half an hour. So then we got on the phone and the call started with someone saying, well, how about 22 million? And I said, um, let me explain. This is like my daughter. Like I’m willing to I’m willing to like marry her off, but only to a man that values her more than I value her. So I value this domain, you know, at 30 million. And so if you don’t want to give me the 30, you know, I’m going to regret after I sell it anyway. I’ll have sellers remorse, but I would I would do it just to make the market. But if you don’t want to value it at 30, I’ll just keep it. And they’re like, uh, okay, we’ll give you 30. I said, okay.
The “Bill of the Week” Segment (Continued) [11:46]
Sam Parr: So 30, you went you got a 30 from 100k.
Michael Saylor: So they did like double seven or eight times and I eventually they started 150k I think and we ended it and I said 30, we ended at 30. But but the point was I didn’t really need the money. It was a matter like if I had at the point maybe 600 million in cash in the bank and the company the MicroStrategy was is a multi-billion dollar company. So I was like a million’s not going to move the needle for me. 100,000’s not going to move the needle for me. 5 million, 10 million’s not going to move the needle one way or the other. So there’s no point in doing it unless it was something material.
Are You a Car Guy? (Revisited) [12:27]
Shaan Puri: Were you uh like you know, the eight people in your office were were they like your coworkers or Uh I mean they’re business development, the people that wanted the commission on the deal, you know?
Shaan Puri: So like any any most Like it’s a big deal, right? They want to like do the deal and and the only way you get 30 million is to like say no to 22 million, right? And everything Well, like any reasonable, most reasonable people, which the reason you are where you are is you’re many would probably consider you not reasonable, right? I mean, you have you’re you’re you’re an extreme personality type and that’s why you you’re very successful. But any reasonable person would say, what are you an idiot? Like you paid very nothing for this. Take it. Were you but were you always that like uh always My my view on it is that in the English language is going to be important to the human race for a thousand years and in a thousand years from now, voice will probably still have value. Just like a lot of like hope. It’s a valuable word forever. I mean, until you murder everyone that speaks the English language. If you think about how valuable it is, I my my real view is is I think people are are crazy for spending hundreds of millions of dollars on ad campaigns to market a brand that’s a misspelling of a normal word. It’s like I got to convince you how to sell in with like two Ys and a Z, you know, and I’m like, why would you do that? Because in the modern era of spell checkers, when you try to type these crappy brands that are misspelled, the, you know, your iPhone unspells it for you or properly spells it. So try going to a website that’s a misspelling of a name. Most brands and most brand consultants, I just disagree with them all. They, you know, they charge you a lot of money to come up with a misspelling of a common word and then you spend half a billion dollars marketing the brand. A much better idea would be buy the word hope or angel or alarm or alert or voice. Even if you got to pay 100 million or 200 million or 500 million dollars, because if I see your your ad and you tell me that, you know, your brand is alert.com, I can remember it in one second. I can spell it in one second. You leap immediately to the top of the Google search engine. So I just I I always view domains as being undervalued and then market people spend hundreds of millions of dollars of going crappy marketing to send someone to a place they can’t spell that they can’t remember. I think the world will gradually come around to that point of view, but they’re not there yet. But that so that was my view. Like I didn’t want to sell it to tell you the truth. Like if you owned the word angel or the word alarm or the word hope or voice, like the truth is Google should have paid a billion dollars for the word voice. Tell tell the tell the short version of that story. The the story is kind of crazy. I’ve heard it once before, but I I would assume Sam and most people have not heard the story of selling voice.com. You bought all these early on in the web. You kind of recognized, oh, these are these are probably going to be valuable to own these names. There’s only one, you know, there’s only one owner of each of these names. You you own it and you hold it for a really long time, like over a decade. And uh, at some point, you decide, okay, maybe we should see if somebody wants to buy some of these. So tell the story of selling voice.com real quick. Well, yeah, we I bought all these domains because I thought, wouldn’t it be great to own a part of the English language? I mean, owning hope or owning voice. I mean, eventually there’ll be a Google voice or there’ll be, you know, some some Telco company that’ll want to launch some service and what a great domain on uh to launch on the on a word like voice.com. So we held them a long time and and uh, I think at some point we were looking for joint ventures, we were looking to commercialize them and we did commercialize a bunch. For example, I created a company called alarm.com. And alarm.com is now publicly traded on NASDAQ. It’s like a four or five billion dollar market cap company. And and you can guess what it does. It actually integrates your home alarm into the internet. You know, and I created another company called angel.com and we sold that for a bit more than $100 million and that was actually a speech interactive voice response like Siri or Alexa before Siri and Alexa came along. And uh, so I had voice and I was holding it and we were looking for some kind of good uh commercialization and someone out of the blue, they contacted us, one of the domain brokers, and they said, well, you know, do you want to sell it? We’ll give you $150,000. And uh, and I, you know, I was like, someone came to me and said they offered $150,000. I said, no. So I thought nothing of it because I just I couldn’t see the point. A week later, they come back and said, well, they doubled it to $300,000. I said, tell them no. So a couple days later, they go, well, the broker is really insistent uh and so they went to $600,000. I said, no. So they said, well, what should you say? I said, don’t tell anything. Tell them, you know, like we’re not interested. It’s got to be something serious. So they they went to 1.2 million. I said, tell them no. I said, well, they want to know what you want for it. I said, um, well, send them a note or something and just tell them I said, it’s like it’s it’s the word voice in the English language, right? So it’s going to have to be something you know, north of uh I don’t know, I don’t think I said seven or eight eight figures, but I just said a lot of money. Um, and so it went on and they doubled it again to two and a half million. And then uh and then uh 5 million and then around 10 million. Then I said they said I had like 18 people in my office. They’re like, or not eight but eight eight people they’re like looking at me like, aren’t you are you going to take the money? It’s like a lot of money now. I said, uh, no, send them back uh at this point, send them back an a note pointing out that this is like the word voice in the English language and it’s and it’s it’s worth a billion dollars to the right company. And uh they said, well, you going to give them a response? I said, uh, okay, tell them 30 million. Tell them I’ll take 30 million for it. Because I thought like if I didn’t give them some number, they would stop negotiating after uh, you know, five nos. So I said tell them 30 million. I don’t want to sell it for 30 million. I want to sell it for 100 million or more, but I guess I’ll say 30 million. So that so at that point they said, well, you know, they offered you I think they up their their offer to like um 12 million. I said, tell them uh no, but if you want, I’ll I’ll take a meeting with them. So when it got to 12 million, I said I’d get on the phone for half an hour. So then we got on the phone and the call started with someone saying, well, how about 22 million? And I said, um, let me explain. This is like my daughter. Like I’m willing to I’m willing to like marry her off, but only to a man that values her more than I value her. So I value this domain, you know, at 30 million. And so if you don’t want to give me the 30, you know, I’m going to regret after I sell it anyway. I’ll have sellers remorse, but I would I would do it just to make the market. But if you don’t want to value it at 30, I’ll just keep it. And they’re like, uh, okay, we’ll give you 30. I said, okay.
The “Bill of the Week” Segment (Continued) [11:46]
Sam Parr: So 30, you went you got a 30 from 100k.
Michael Saylor: So they did like double seven or eight times and I eventually they started 150k I think and we ended it and I said 30, we ended at 30. But but the point was I didn’t really need the money. It was a matter like if I had at the point maybe 600 million in cash in the bank and the company the MicroStrategy was is a multi-billion dollar company. So I was like a million’s not going to move the needle for me. 100,000’s not going to move the needle for me. 5 million, 10 million’s not going to move the needle one way or the other. So there’s no point in doing it unless it was something material.
Are You a Car Guy? (Revisited) [12:27]
Shaan Puri: Were you uh like you know, the eight people in your office were were they like your coworkers or Uh I mean they’re business development, the people that wanted the commission on the deal, you know?
Shaan Puri: So like any any most Like it’s a big deal, right? They want to like do the deal and and the only way you get 30 million is to like say no to 22 million, right? And everything Well, like any reasonable, most reasonable people, which the reason you are where you are is you’re many would probably consider you not reasonable, right? I mean, you have you’re you’re you’re an extreme personality type and that’s why you you’re very successful. But any reasonable person would say, what are you an idiot? Like you paid very nothing for this. Take it. Were you but were you always that like uh always My my view on it is that in the English language is going to be important to the human race for a thousand years and in a thousand years from now, voice will probably still have value. Just like a lot of like hope. It’s a valuable word forever. I mean, until you murder everyone that speaks the English language. If you think about how valuable it is, I my my real view is is I think people are are crazy for spending hundreds of millions of dollars on ad campaigns to market a brand that’s a misspelling of a normal word. It’s like I got to convince you how to sell in with like two Ys and a Z, you know, and I’m like, why would you do that? Because in the modern era of spell checkers, when you try to type these crappy brands that are misspelled, the, you know, your iPhone unspells it for you or properly spells it. So try going to a website that’s a misspelling of a name. Most brands and most brand consultants, I just disagree with them all. They, you know, they charge you a lot of money to come up with a misspelling of a common word and then you spend half a billion dollars marketing the brand. A much better idea would be buy the word hope or angel or alarm or alert or voice. Even if you got to pay 100 million or 200 million or 500 million dollars, because if I see your your ad and you tell me that, you know, your brand is alert.com, I can remember it in one second. I can spell it in one second. You leap immediately to the top of the Google search engine. So I just I I always view domains as being undervalued and then market people spend hundreds of millions of dollars of going crappy marketing to send someone to a place they can’t spell that they can’t remember. I think the world will gradually come around to that point of view, but they’re not there yet. But that so that was my view. Like I didn’t want to sell it to tell you the truth. Like if you owned the word angel or the word alarm or the word hope or voice, like the truth is Google should have paid a billion dollars for the word voice. Tell tell the tell the short version of that story. The the story is kind of crazy. I’ve heard it once before, but I I would assume Sam and most people have not heard the story of selling voice.com. You bought all these early on in the web. You kind of recognized, oh, these are these are probably going to be valuable to own these names. There’s only one, you know, there’s only one owner of each of these names. You you own it and you hold it for a really long time, like over a decade. And uh, at some point, you decide, okay, maybe we should see if somebody wants to buy some of these. So tell the story of selling voice.com real quick. Well, yeah, we I bought all these domains because I thought, wouldn’t it be great to own a part of the English language? I mean, owning hope or owning voice. I mean, eventually there’ll be a Google voice or there’ll be, you know, some some Telco company that’ll want to launch some service and what a great domain on uh to launch on the on a word like voice.com. So we held them a long time and and uh, I think at some point we were looking for joint ventures, we were looking to commercialize them and we did commercialize a bunch. For example, I created a company called alarm.com. And alarm.com is now publicly traded on NASDAQ. It’s like a four or five billion dollar market cap company. And and you can guess what it does. It actually integrates your home alarm into the internet. You know, and I created another company called angel.com and we sold that for a bit more than $100 million and that was actually a speech interactive voice response like Siri or Alexa before Siri and Alexa came along. And uh, so I had voice and I was holding it and we were looking for some kind of good uh commercialization and someone out of the blue, they contacted us, one of the domain brokers, and they said, well, you know, do you want to sell it? We’ll give you $150,000. And uh, and I, you know, I was like, someone came to me and said they offered $150,000. I said, no. So I thought nothing of it because I just I couldn’t see the point. A week later, they come back and said, well, they doubled it to $300,000. I said, tell them no. So a couple days later, they go, well, the broker is really insistent uh and so they went to $600,000. I said, no. So they said, well, what should you say? I said, don’t tell anything. Tell them, you know, like we’re not interested. It’s got to be something serious. So they they went to 1.2 million. I said, tell them no. I said, well, they want to know what you want for it. I said, um, well, send them a note or something and just tell them I said, it’s like it’s it’s the word voice in the English language, right? So it’s going to have to be something you know, north of uh I don’t know, I don’t think I said seven or eight eight figures, but I just said a lot of money. Um, and so it went on and they doubled it again to two and a half million. And then uh and then uh 5 million and then around 10 million. Then I said they said I had like 18 people in my office. They’re like, or not eight but eight eight people they’re like looking at me like, aren’t you are you going to take the money? It’s like a lot of money now. I said, uh, no, send them back uh at this point, send them back an a note pointing out that this is like the word voice in the English language and it’s and it’s it’s worth a billion dollars to the right company. And uh they said, well, you going to give them a response? I said, uh, okay, tell them 30 million. Tell them I’ll take 30 million for it. Because I thought like if I didn’t give them some number, they would stop negotiating after uh, you know, five nos. So I said tell them 30 million. I don’t want to sell it for 30 million. I want to sell it for 100 million or more, but I guess I’ll say 30 million. So that so at that point they said, well, you know, they offered you I think they up their their offer to like um 12 million. I said, tell them uh no, but if you want, I’ll I’ll take a meeting with them. So when it got to 12 million, I said I’d get on the phone for half an hour. So then we got on the phone and the call started with someone saying, well, how about 22 million? And I said, um, let me explain. This is like my daughter. Like I’m willing to I’m willing to like marry her off, but only to a man that values her more than I value her. So I value this domain, you know, at 30 million. And so if you don’t want to give me the 30, you know, I’m going to regret after I sell it anyway. I’ll have sellers remorse, but I would I would do it just to make the market. But if you don’t want to value it at 30, I’ll just keep it. And they’re like, uh, okay, we’ll give you 30. I said, okay.
The “Bill of the Week” Segment (Continued) [11:46]
Sam Parr: So 30, you went you got a 30 from 100k.
Michael Saylor: So they did like double seven or eight times and I eventually they started 150k I think and we ended it and I said 30, we ended at 30. But but the point was I didn’t really need the money. It was a matter like if I had at the point maybe 600 million in cash in the bank and the company the MicroStrategy was is a multi-billion dollar company. So I was like a million’s not going to move the needle for me. 100,000’s not going to move the needle for me. 5 million, 10 million’s not going to move the needle one way or the other. So there’s no point in doing it unless it was something material.
Are You a Car Guy? (Revisited) [12:27]
Shaan Puri: Were you uh like you know, the eight people in your office were were they like your coworkers or Uh I mean they’re business development, the people that wanted the commission on the deal, you know?
Shaan Puri: So like any any most Like it’s a big deal, right? They want to like do the deal and and the only way you get 30 million is to like say no to 22 million, right? And everything Well, like any reasonable, most reasonable people, which the reason you are where you are is you’re many would probably consider you not reasonable, right? I mean, you have you’re you’re you’re an extreme personality type and that’s why you you’re very successful. But any reasonable person would say, what are you an idiot? Like you paid very nothing for this. Take it. Were you but were you always that like uh always My my view on it is that in the English language is going to be important to the human race for a thousand years and in a thousand years from now, voice will probably still have value. Just like a lot of like hope. It’s a valuable word forever. I mean, until you murder everyone that speaks the English language. If you think about how valuable it is, I my my real view is is I think people are are crazy for spending hundreds of millions of dollars on ad campaigns to market a brand that’s a misspelling of a normal word. It’s like I got to convince you how to sell in with like two Ys and a Z, you know, and I’m like, why would you do that? Because in the modern era of spell checkers, when you try to type these crappy brands that are misspelled, the, you know, your iPhone unspells it for you or properly spells it. So try going to a website that’s a misspelling of a name. Most brands and most brand consultants, I just disagree with them all. They, you know, they charge you a lot of money to come up with a misspelling of a common word and then you spend half a billion dollars marketing the brand. A much better idea would be buy the word hope or angel or alarm or alert or voice. Even if you got to pay 100 million or 200 million or 500 million dollars, because if I see your your ad and you tell me that, you know, your brand is alert.com, I can remember it in one second. I can spell it in one second. You leap immediately to the top of the Google search engine. So I just I I always view domains as being undervalued and then market people spend hundreds of millions of dollars of going crappy marketing to send someone to a place they can’t spell that they can’t remember. I think the world will gradually come around to that point of view, but they’re not there yet. But that so that was my view. Like I didn’t want to sell it to tell you the truth. Like if you owned the word angel or the word alarm or the word hope or voice, like the truth is Google should have paid a billion dollars for the word voice. Tell tell the tell the short version of that story. The the story is kind of crazy. I’ve heard it once before, but I I would assume Sam and most people have not heard the story of selling voice.com. You bought all these early on in the web. You kind of recognized, oh, these are these are probably going to be valuable to own these names. There’s only one, you know, there’s only one owner of each of these names. You you own it and you hold it for a really long time, like over a decade. And uh, at some point, you decide, okay, maybe we should see if somebody wants to buy some of these. So tell the story of selling voice.com real quick. Well, yeah, we I bought all these domains because I thought, wouldn’t it be great to own a part of the English language? I mean, owning hope or owning voice. I mean, eventually there’ll be a Google voice or there’ll be, you know, some some Telco company that’ll want to launch some service and what a great domain on uh to launch on the on a word like voice.com. So we held them a long time and and uh, I think at some point we were looking for joint ventures, we were looking to commercialize them and we did commercialize a bunch. For example, I created a company called alarm.com. And alarm.com is now publicly traded on NASDAQ. It’s like a four or five billion dollar market cap company. And and you can guess what it does. It actually integrates your home alarm into the internet. You know, and I created another company called angel.com and we sold that for a bit more than $100 million and that was actually a speech interactive voice response like Siri or Alexa before Siri and Alexa came along. And uh, so I had voice and I was holding it and we were looking for some kind of good uh commercialization and someone out of the blue, they contacted us, one of the domain brokers, and they said, well, you know, do you want to sell it? We’ll give you $150,000. And uh, and I, you know, I was like, someone came to me and said they offered $150,000. I said, no. So I thought nothing of it because I just I couldn’t see the point. A week later, they come back and said, well, they doubled it to $300,000. I said, tell them no. So a couple days later, they go, well, the broker is really insistent uh and so they went to $600,000. I said, no. So they said, well, what should you say? I said, don’t tell anything. Tell them, you know, like we’re not interested. It’s got to be something serious. So they they went to 1.2 million. I said, tell them no. I said, well, they want to know what you want for it. I said, um, well, send them a note or something and just tell them I said, it’s like it’s it’s the word voice in the English language, right? So it’s going to have to be something you know, north of uh I don’t know, I don’t think I said seven or eight eight figures, but I just said a lot of money. Um, and so it went on and they doubled it again to two and a half million. And then uh and then uh 5 million and then around 10 million. Then I said they said I had like 18 people in my office. They’re like, or not eight but eight eight people they’re like looking at me like, aren’t you are you going to take the money? It’s like a lot of money now. I said, uh, no, send them back uh at this point, send them back an a note pointing out that this is like the word voice in the English language and it’s and it’s it’s worth a billion dollars to the right company. And uh they said, well, you going to give them a response? I said, uh, okay, tell them 30 million. Tell them I’ll take 30 million for it. Because I thought like if I didn’t give them some number, they would stop negotiating after uh, you know, five nos. So I said tell them 30 million. I don’t want to sell it for 30 million. I want to sell it for 100 million or more, but I guess I’ll say 30 million. So that so at that point they said, well, you know, they offered you I think they up their their offer to like um 12 million. I said, tell them uh no, but if you want, I’ll I’ll take a meeting with them. So when it got to 12 million, I said I’d get on the phone for half an hour. So then we got on the phone and the call started with someone saying, well, how about 22 million? And I said, um, let me explain. This is like my daughter. Like I’m willing to I’m willing to like marry her off, but only to a man that values her more than I value her. So I value this domain, you know, at 30 million. And so if you don’t want to give me the 30, you know, I’m going to regret after I sell it anyway. I’ll have sellers remorse, but I would I would do it just to make the market. But if you don’t want to value it at 30, I’ll just keep it. And they’re like, uh, okay, we’ll give you 30. I said, okay.
The “Bill of the Week” Segment (Continued) [11:46]
Sam Parr: So 30, you went you got a 30 from 100k.
Michael Saylor: So they did like double seven or eight times and I eventually they started 150k I think and we ended it and I said 30, we ended at 30. But but the point was I didn’t really need the money. It was a matter like if I had at the point maybe 600 million in cash in the bank and the company the MicroStrategy was is a multi-billion dollar company. So I was like a million’s not going to move the needle for me. 100,000’s not going to move the needle for me. 5 million, 10 million’s not going to move the needle one way or the other. So there’s no point in doing it unless it was something material.
Are You a Car Guy? (Revisited) [12:27]
Shaan Puri: Were you uh like you know, the eight people in your office were were they like your coworkers or Uh I mean they’re business development, the people that wanted the commission on the deal, you know?
Shaan Puri: So like any any most Like it’s a big deal, right? They want to like do the deal and and the only way you get 30 million is to like say no to 22 million, right? And everything Well, like any reasonable, most reasonable people, which the reason you are where you are is you’re many would probably consider you not reasonable, right? I mean, you have you’re you’re you’re an extreme personality type and that’s why you you’re very successful. But any reasonable person would say, what are you an idiot? Like you paid very nothing for this. Take it. Were you but were you always that like uh always My my view on it is that in the English language is going to be important to the human race for a thousand years and in a thousand years from now, voice will probably still have value. Just like a lot of like hope. It’s a valuable word forever. I mean, until you murder everyone that speaks the English language. If you think about how valuable it is, I my my real view is is I think people are are crazy for spending hundreds of millions of dollars on ad campaigns to market a brand that’s a misspelling of a normal word. It’s like I got to convince you how to sell in with like two Ys and a Z, you know, and I’m like, why would you do that? Because in the modern era of spell checkers, when you try to type these crappy brands that are misspelled, the, you know, your iPhone unspells it for you or properly spells it. So try going to a website that’s a misspelling of a name. Most brands and most brand consultants, I just disagree with them all. They, you know, they charge you a lot of money to come up with a misspelling of a common word and then you spend half a billion dollars marketing the brand. A much better idea would be buy the word hope or angel or alarm or alert or voice. Even if you got to pay 100 million or 200 million or 500 million dollars, because if I see your your ad and you tell me that, you know, your brand is alert.com, I can remember it in one second. I can spell it in one second. You leap immediately to the top of the Google search engine. So I just I I always view domains as being undervalued and then market people spend hundreds of millions of dollars of going crappy marketing to send someone to a place they can’t spell that they can’t remember. I think the world will gradually come around to that point of view, but they’re not there yet. But that so that was my view. Like I didn’t want to sell it to tell you the truth. Like if you owned the word angel or the word alarm or the word hope or voice, like the truth is Google should have paid a billion dollars for the word voice. Tell tell the tell the short version of that story. The the story is kind of crazy. I’ve heard it once before, but I I would assume Sam and most people have not heard the story of selling voice.com. You bought all these early on in the web. You kind of recognized, oh, these are these are probably going to be valuable to own these names. There’s only one, you know, there’s only one owner of each of these names. You you own it and you hold it for a really long time, like over a decade. And uh, at some point, you decide, okay, maybe we should see if somebody wants to buy some of these. So tell the story of selling voice.com real quick. Well, yeah, we I bought all these domains because I thought, wouldn’t it be great to own a part of the English language? I mean, owning hope or owning voice. I mean, eventually there’ll be a Google voice or there’ll be, you know, some some Telco company that’ll want to launch some service and what a great domain on uh to launch on the on a word like voice.com. So we held them a long time and and uh, I think at some point we were looking for joint ventures, we were looking to commercialize them and we did commercialize a bunch. For example, I created a company called alarm.com. And alarm.com is now publicly traded on NASDAQ. It’s like a four or five billion dollar market cap company. And and you can guess what it does. It actually integrates your home alarm into the internet. You know, and I created another company called angel.com and we sold that for a bit more than $100 million and that was actually a speech interactive voice response like Siri or Alexa before Siri and Alexa came along. And uh, so I had voice and I was holding it and we were looking for some kind of good uh commercialization and someone out of the blue, they contacted us, one of the domain brokers, and they said, well, you know, do you want to sell it? We’ll give you $150,000. And uh, and I, you know, I was like, someone came to me and said they offered $150,000. I said, no. So I thought nothing of it because I just I couldn’t see the point. A week later, they come back and said, well, they doubled it to $300,000. I said, tell them no. So a couple days later, they go, well, the broker is really insistent uh and so they went to $600,000. I said, no. So they said, well, what should you say? I said, don’t tell anything. Tell them, you know, like we’re not interested. It’s got to be something serious. So they they went to 1.2 million. I said, tell them no. I said, well, they want to know what you want for it. I said, um, well, send them a note or something and just tell them I said, it’s like it’s it’s the word voice in the English language, right? So it’s going to have to be something you know, north of uh I don’t know, I don’t think I said seven or eight eight figures, but I just said a lot of money. Um, and so it went on and they doubled it again to two and a half million. And then uh and then uh 5 million and then around 10 million. Then I said they said I had like 18 people in my office. They’re like, or not eight but eight eight people they’re like looking at me like, aren’t you are you going to take the money? It’s like a lot of money now. I said, uh, no, send them back uh at this point, send them back an a note pointing out that this is like the word voice in the English language and it’s and it’s it’s worth a billion dollars to the right company. And uh they said, well, you going to give them a response? I said, uh, okay, tell them 30 million. Tell them I’ll take 30 million for it. Because I thought like if I didn’t give them some number, they would stop negotiating after uh, you know, five nos. So I said tell them 30 million. I don’t want to sell it for 30 million. I want to sell it for 100 million or more, but I guess I’ll say 30 million. So that so at that point they said, well, you know, they offered you I think they up their their offer to like um 12 million. I said, tell them uh no, but if you want, I’ll I’ll take a meeting with them. So when it got to 12 million, I said I’d get on the phone for half an hour. So then we got on the phone and the call started with someone saying, well, how about 22 million? And I said, um, let me explain. This is like my daughter. Like I’m willing to I’m willing to like marry her off, but only to a man that values her more than I value her. So I value this domain, you know, at 30 million. And so if you don’t want to give me the 30, you know, I’m going to regret after I sell it anyway. I’ll have sellers remorse, but I would I would do it just to make the market. But if you don’t want to value it at 30, I’ll just keep it. And they’re like, uh, okay, we’ll give you 30. I said, okay.
The “Bill of the Week” Segment (Continued) [11:46]
Sam Parr: So 30, you went you got a 30 from 100k.
Michael Saylor: So they did like double seven or eight times and I eventually they started 150k I think and we ended it and I said 30, we ended at 30. But but the point was I didn’t really need the money. It was a matter like if I had at the point maybe 600 million in cash in the bank and the company the MicroStrategy was is a multi-billion dollar company. So I was like a million’s not going to move the needle for me. 100,000’s not going to move the needle for me. 5 million, 10 million’s not going to move the needle one way or the other. So there’s no point in doing it unless it was something material.
Are You a Car Guy? (Revisited) [12:27]
Shaan Puri: Were you uh like you know, the eight people in your office were were they like your coworkers or Uh I mean they’re business development, the people that wanted the commission on the deal, you know?
Shaan Puri: So like any any most Like it’s a big deal, right? They want to like do the deal and and the only way you get 30 million is to like say no to 22 million, right? And everything Well, like any reasonable, most reasonable people, which the reason you are where you are is you’re many would probably consider you not reasonable, right? I mean, you have you’re you’re you’re an extreme personality type and that’s why you you’re very successful. But any reasonable person would say, what are you an idiot? Like you paid very nothing for this. Take it. Were you but were you always that like uh always My my view on it is that in the English language is going to be important to the human race for a thousand years and in a thousand years from now, voice will probably still have value. Just like a lot of like hope. It’s a valuable word forever. I mean, until you murder everyone that speaks the English language. If you think about how valuable it is, I my my real view is is I think people are are crazy for spending hundreds of millions of dollars on ad campaigns to market a brand that’s a misspelling of a normal word. It’s like I got to convince you how to sell in with like two Ys and a Z, you know, and I’m like, why would you do that? Because in the modern era of spell checkers, when you try to type these crappy brands that are misspelled, the, you know, your iPhone unspells it for you or properly spells it. So try going to a website that’s a misspelling of a name. Most brands and most brand consultants, I just disagree with them all. They, you know, they charge you a lot of money to come up with a misspelling of a common word and then you spend half a billion dollars marketing the brand. A much better idea would be buy the word hope or angel or alarm or alert or voice. Even if you got to pay 100 million or 200 million or 500 million dollars, because if I see your your ad and you tell me that, you know, your brand is alert.com, I can remember it in one second. I can spell it in one second. You leap immediately to the top of the Google search engine. So I just I I always view domains as being undervalued and then market people spend hundreds of millions of dollars of going crappy marketing to send someone to a place they can’t spell that they can’t remember. I think the world will gradually come around to that point of view, but they’re not there yet. But that so that was my view. Like I didn’t want to sell it to tell you the truth. Like if you owned the word angel or the word alarm or the word hope or voice, like the truth is Google should have paid a billion dollars for the word voice. Tell tell the tell the short version of that story. The the story is kind of crazy. I’ve heard it once before, but I I would assume Sam and most people have not heard the story of selling voice.com. You bought all these early on in the web. You kind of recognized, oh, these are these are probably going to be valuable to own these names. There’s only one, you know, there’s only one owner of each of these names. You you own it and you hold it for a really long time, like over a decade. And uh, at some point, you decide, okay, maybe we should see if somebody wants to buy some of these. So tell the story of selling voice.com real quick. Well, yeah, we I bought all these domains because I thought, wouldn’t it be great to own a part of the English language? I mean, owning hope or owning voice. I mean, eventually there’ll be a Google voice or there’ll be, you know, some some Telco company that’ll want to launch some service and what a great domain on uh to launch on the on a word like voice.com. So we held them a long time and and uh, I think at some point we were looking for joint ventures, we were looking to commercialize them and we did commercialize a bunch. For example, I created a company called alarm.com. And alarm.com is now publicly traded on NASDAQ. It’s like a four or five billion dollar market cap company. And and you can guess what it does. It actually integrates your home alarm into the internet. You know, and I created another company called angel.com and we sold that for a bit more than $100 million and that was actually a speech interactive voice response like Siri or Alexa before Siri and Alexa came along. And uh, so I had voice and I was holding it and we were looking for some kind of good uh commercialization and someone out of the blue, they contacted us, one of the domain brokers, and they said, well, you know, do you want to sell it? We’ll give you $150,000. And uh, and I, you know, I was like, someone came to me and said they offered $150,000. I said, no. So I thought nothing of it because I just I couldn’t see the point. A week later, they come back and said, well, they doubled it to $300,000. I said, tell them no. So a couple days later, they go, well, the broker is really insistent uh and so they went to $600,000. I said, no. So they said, well, what should you say? I said, don’t tell anything. Tell them, you know, like we’re not interested. It’s got to be something serious. So they they went to 1.2 million. I said, tell them no. I said, well, they want to know what you want for it. I said, um, well, send them a note or something and just tell them I said, it’s like it’s it’s the word voice in the English language, right? So it’s going to have to be something you know, north of uh I don’t know, I don’t think I said seven or eight eight figures, but I just said a lot of money. Um, and so it went on and they doubled it again to two and a half million. And then uh and then uh 5 million and then around 10 million. Then I said they said I had like 18 people in my office. They’re like, or not eight but eight eight people they’re like looking at me like, aren’t you are you going to take the money? It’s like a lot of money now. I said, uh, no, send them back uh at this point, send them back an a note pointing out that this is like the word voice in the English language and it’s and it’s it’s worth a billion dollars to the right company. And uh they said, well, you going to give them a response? I said, uh, okay, tell them 30 million. Tell them I’ll take 30 million for it. Because I thought like if I didn’t give them some number, they would stop negotiating after uh, you know, five nos. So I said tell them 30 million. I don’t want to sell it for 30 million. I want to sell it for 100 million or more, but I guess I’ll say 30 million. So that so at that point they said, well, you know, they offered you I think they up their their offer to like um 12 million. I said, tell them uh no, but if you want, I’ll I’ll take a meeting with them. So when it got to 12 million, I said I’d get on the phone for half an hour. So then we got on the phone and the call started with someone saying, well, how about 22 million? And I said, um, let me explain. This is like my daughter. Like I’m willing to I’m willing to like marry her off, but only to a man that values her more than I value her. So I value this domain, you know, at 30 million. And so if you don’t want to give me the 30, you know, I’m going to regret after I sell it anyway. I’ll have sellers remorse, but I would I would do it just to make the market. But if you don’t want to value it at 30, I’ll just keep it. And they’re like, uh, okay, we’ll give you 30. I said, okay.
The “Bill of the Week” Segment (Continued) [11:46]
Sam Parr: So 30, you went you got a 30 from 100k.
Michael Saylor: So they did like double seven or eight times and I eventually they started 150k I think and we ended it and I said 30, we ended at 30. But but the point was I didn’t really need the money. It was a matter like if I had at the point maybe 600 million in cash in the bank and the company the MicroStrategy was is a multi-billion dollar company. So I was like a million’s not going to move the needle for me. 100,000’s not going to move the needle for me. 5 million, 10 million’s not going to move the needle one way or the other. So there’s no point in doing it unless it was something material.
Are You a Car Guy? (Revisited) [12:27]
Shaan Puri: Were you uh like you know, the eight people in your office were were they like your coworkers or Uh I mean they’re business development, the people that wanted the commission on the deal, you know?
Shaan Puri: So like any any most Like it’s a big deal, right? They want to like do the deal and and the only way you get 30 million is to like say no to 22 million, right? And everything Well, like any reasonable, most reasonable people, which the reason you are where you are is you’re many would probably consider you not reasonable, right? I mean, you have you’re you’re you’re an extreme personality type and that’s why you you’re very successful. But any reasonable person would say, what are you an idiot? Like you paid very nothing for this. Take it. Were you but were you always that like uh always My my view on it is that in the English language is going to be important to the human race for a thousand years and in a thousand years from now, voice will probably still have value. Just like a lot of like hope. It’s a valuable word forever. I mean, until you murder everyone that speaks the English language. If you think about how valuable it is, I my my real view is is I think people are are crazy for spending hundreds of millions of dollars on ad campaigns to market a brand that’s a misspelling of a normal word. It’s like I got to convince you how to sell in with like two Ys and a Z, you know, and I’m like, why would you do that? Because in the modern era of spell checkers, when you try to type these crappy brands that are misspelled, the, you know, your iPhone unspells it for you or properly spells it. So try going to a website that’s a misspelling of a name. Most brands and most brand consultants, I just disagree with them all. They, you know, they charge you a lot of money to come up with a misspelling of a common word and then you spend half a billion dollars marketing the brand. A much better idea would be buy the word hope or angel or alarm or alert or voice. Even if you got to pay 100 million or 200 million or 500 million dollars, because if I see your your ad and you tell me that, you know, your brand is alert.com, I can remember it in one second. I can spell it in one second. You leap immediately to the top of the Google search engine. So I just I I always view domains as being undervalued and then market people spend hundreds of millions of dollars of going crappy marketing to send someone to a place they can’t spell that they can’t remember. I think the world will gradually come around to that point of view, but they’re not there yet. But that so that was my view. Like I didn’t want to sell it to tell you the truth. Like if you owned the word angel or the word alarm or the word hope or voice, like the truth is Google should have paid a billion dollars for the word voice. Tell tell the tell the short version of that story. The the story is kind of crazy. I’ve heard it once before, but I I would assume Sam and most people have not heard the story of selling voice.com. You bought all these early on in the web. You kind of recognized, oh, these are these are probably going to be valuable to own these names. There’s only one, you know, there’s only one owner of each of these names. You you own it and you hold it for a really long time, like over a decade. And uh, at some point, you decide, okay, maybe we should see if somebody wants to buy some of these. So tell the story of selling voice.com real quick. Well, yeah, we I bought all these domains because I thought, wouldn’t it be great to own a part of the English language? I mean, owning hope or owning voice. I mean, eventually there’ll be a Google voice or there’ll be, you know, some some Telco company that’ll want to launch some service and what a great domain on uh to launch on the on a word like voice.com. So we held them a long time and and uh, I think at some point we were looking for joint ventures, we were looking to commercialize them and we did commercialize a bunch. For example, I created a company called alarm.com. And alarm.com is now publicly traded on NASDAQ. It’s like a four or five billion dollar market cap company. And and you can guess what it does. It actually integrates your home alarm into the internet. You know, and I created another company called angel.com and we sold that for a bit more than $100 million and that was actually a speech interactive voice response like Siri or Alexa before Siri and Alexa came along. And uh, so I had voice and I was holding it and we were looking for some kind of good uh commercialization and someone out of the blue, they contacted us, one of the domain brokers, and they said, well, you know, do you want to sell it? We’ll give you $150,000. And uh, and I, you know, I was like, someone came to me and said they offered $150,000. I said, no. So I thought nothing of it because I just I couldn’t see the point. A week later, they come back and said, well, they doubled it to $300,000. I said, tell them no. So a couple days later, they go, well, the broker is really insistent uh and so they went to $600,000. I said, no. So they said, well, what should you say? I said, don’t tell anything. Tell them, you know, like we’re not interested. It’s got to be something serious. So they they went to 1.2 million. I said, tell them no. I said, well, they want to know what you want for it. I said, um, well, send them a note or something and just tell them I said, it’s like it’s it’s the word voice in the English language, right? So it’s going to have to be something you know, north of uh I don’t know, I don’t think I said seven or eight eight figures, but I just said a lot of money. Um, and so it went on and they doubled it again to two and a half million. And then uh and then uh 5 million and then around 10 million. Then I said they said I had like 18 people in my office. They’re like, or not eight but eight eight people they’re like looking at me like, aren’t you are you going to take the money? It’s like a lot of money now. I said, uh, no, send them back uh at this point, send them back an a note pointing out that this is like the word voice in the English language and it’s and it’s it’s worth a billion dollars to the right company. And uh they said, well, you going to give them a response? I said, uh, okay, tell them 30 million. Tell them I’ll take 30 million for it. Because I thought like if I didn’t give them some number, they would stop negotiating after uh, you know, five nos. So I said tell them 30 million. I don’t want to sell it for 30 million. I want to sell it for 100 million or more, but I guess I’ll say 30 million. So that so at that point they said, well, you know, they offered you I think they up their their offer to like um 12 million. I said, tell them uh no, but if you want, I’ll I’ll take a meeting with them. So when it got to 12 million, I said I’d get on the phone for half an hour. So then we got on the phone and the call started with someone saying, well, how about 22 million? And I said, um, let me explain. This is like my daughter. Like I’m willing to I’m willing to like marry her off, but only to a man that values her more than I value her. So I value this domain, you know, at 30 million. And so if you don’t want to give me the 30, you know, I’m going to regret after I sell it anyway. I’ll have sellers remorse, but I would I would do it just to make the market. But if you don’t want to value it at 30, I’ll just keep it. And they’re like, uh, okay, we’ll give you 30. I said, okay.
The “Bill of the Week” Segment (Continued) [11:46]
Sam Parr: So 30, you went you got a 30 from 100k.
Michael Saylor: So they did like double seven or eight times and I eventually they started 150k I think and we ended it and I said 30, we ended at 30. But but the point was I didn’t really need the money. It was a matter like if I had at the point maybe 600 million in cash in the bank and the company the MicroStrategy was is a multi-billion dollar company. So I was like a million’s not going to move the needle for me. 100,000’s not going to move the needle for me. 5 million, 10 million’s not going to move the needle one way or the other. So there’s no point in doing it unless it was something material.
Are You a Car Guy? (Revisited) [12:27]
Shaan Puri: Were you uh like you know, the eight people in your office were were they like your coworkers or Uh I mean they’re business development, the people that wanted the commission on the deal, you know?
Shaan Puri: So like any any most Like it’s a big deal, right? They want to like do the deal and and the only way you get 30 million is to like say no to 22 million, right? And everything Well, like any reasonable, most reasonable people, which the reason you are where you are is you’re many would probably consider you not reasonable, right? I mean, you have you’re you’re you’re an extreme personality type and that’s why you you’re very successful. But any reasonable person would say, what are you an idiot? Like you paid very nothing for this. Take it. Were you but were you always that like uh always My my view on it is that in the English language is going to be important to the human race for a thousand years and in a thousand years from now, voice will probably still have value. Just like a lot of like hope. It’s a valuable word forever. I mean, until you murder everyone that speaks the English language. If you think about how valuable it is, I my my real view is is I think people are are crazy for spending hundreds of millions of dollars on ad campaigns to market a brand that’s a misspelling of a normal word. It’s like I got to convince you how to sell in with like two Ys and a Z, you know, and I’m like, why would you do that? Because in the modern era of spell checkers, when you try to type these crappy brands that are misspelled, the, you know, your iPhone unspells it for you or properly spells it. So try going to a website that’s a misspelling of a name. Most brands and most brand consultants, I just disagree with them all. They, you know, they charge you a lot of money to come up with a misspelling of a common word and then you spend half a billion dollars marketing the brand. A much better idea would be buy the word hope or angel or alarm or alert or voice. Even if you got to pay 100 million or 200 million or 500 million dollars, because if I see your your ad and you tell me that, you know, your brand is alert.com, I can remember it in one second. I can spell it in one second. You leap immediately to the top of the Google search engine. So I just I I always view domains as being undervalued and then market people spend hundreds of millions of dollars of going crappy marketing to send someone to a place they can’t spell that they can’t remember. I think the world will gradually come around to that point of view, but they’re not there yet. But that so that was my view. Like I didn’t want to sell it to tell you the truth. Like if you owned the word angel or the word alarm or the word hope or voice, like the truth is Google should have paid a billion dollars for the word voice. Tell tell the tell the short version of that story. The the story is kind of crazy. I’ve heard it once before, but I I would assume Sam and most people have not heard the story of selling voice.com. You bought all these early on in the web. You kind of recognized, oh, these are these are probably going to be valuable to own these names. There’s only one, you know, there’s only one owner of each of these names. You you own it and you hold it for a really long time, like over a decade. And uh, at some point, you decide, okay, maybe we should see if somebody wants to buy some of these. So tell the story of selling voice.com real quick. Well, yeah, we I bought all these domains because I thought, wouldn’t it be great to own a part of the English language? I mean, owning hope or owning voice. I mean, eventually there’ll be a Google voice or there’ll be, you know, some some Telco company that’ll want to launch some service and what a great domain on uh to launch on the on a word like voice.com. So we held them a long time and and uh, I think at some point we were looking for joint ventures, we were looking to commercialize them and we did commercialize a bunch. For example, I created a company called alarm.com. And alarm.com is now publicly traded on NASDAQ. It’s like a four or five billion dollar market cap company. And and you can guess what it does. It actually integrates your home alarm into the internet. You know, and I created another company called angel.com and we sold that for a bit more than $100 million and that was actually a speech interactive voice response like Siri or Alexa before Siri and Alexa came along. And uh, so I had voice and I was holding it and we were looking for some kind of good uh commercialization and someone out of the blue, they contacted us, one of the domain brokers, and they said, well, you know, do you want to sell it? We’ll give you $150,000. And uh, and I, you know, I was like, someone came to me and said they offered $150,000. I said, no. So I thought nothing of it because I just I couldn’t see the point. A week later, they come back and said, well, they doubled it to $300,000. I said, tell them no. So a couple days later, they go, well, the broker is really insistent uh and so they went to $600,000. I said, no. So they said, well, what should you say? I said, don’t tell anything. Tell them, you know, like we’re not interested. It’s got to be something serious. So they they went to 1.2 million. I said, tell them no. I said, well, they want to know what you want for it. I said, um, well, send them a note or something and just tell them I said, it’s like it’s it’s the word voice in the English language, right? So it’s going to have to be something you know, north of uh I don’t know, I don’t think I said seven or eight eight figures, but I just said a lot of money. Um, and so it went on and they doubled it again to two and a half million. And then uh and then uh 5 million and then around 10 million. Then I said they said I had like 18 people in my office. They’re like, or not eight but eight eight people they’re like looking at me like, aren’t you are you going to take the money? It’s like a lot of money now. I said, uh, no, send them back uh at this point, send them back an a note pointing out that this is like the word voice in the English language and it’s and it’s it’s worth a billion dollars to the right company. And uh they said, well, you going to give them a response? I said, uh, okay, tell them 30 million. Tell them I’ll take 30 million for it. Because I thought like if I didn’t give them some number, they would stop negotiating after uh, you know, five nos. So I said tell them 30 million. I don’t want to sell it for 30 million. I want to sell it for 100 million or more, but I guess I’ll say 30 million. So that so at that point they said, well, you know, they offered you I think they up their their offer to like um 12 million. I said, tell them uh no, but if you want, I’ll I’ll take a meeting with them. So when it got to 12 million, I said I’d get on the phone for half an hour. So then we got on the phone and the call started with someone saying, well, how about 22 million? And I said, um, let me explain. This is like my daughter. Like I’m willing to I’m willing to like marry her off, but only to a man that values her more than I value her. So I value this domain, you know, at 30 million. And so if you don’t want to give me the 30, you know, I’m going to regret after I sell it anyway. I’ll have sellers remorse, but I would I would do it just to make the market. But if you don’t want to value it at 30, I’ll just keep it. And they’re like, uh, okay, we’ll give you 30. I said, okay.
The “Bill of the Week” Segment (Continued) [11:46]
Sam Parr: So 30, you went you got a 30 from 100k.
Michael Saylor: So they did like double seven or eight times and I eventually they started 150k I think and we ended it and I said 30, we ended at 30. But but the point was I didn’t really need the money. It was a matter like if I had at the point maybe 600 million in cash in the bank and the company the MicroStrategy was is a multi-billion dollar company. So I was like a million’s not going to move the needle for me. 100,000’s not going to move the needle for me. 5 million, 10 million’s not going to move the needle one way or the other. So there’s no point in doing it unless it was something material.
Are You a Car Guy? (Revisited) [12:27]
Shaan Puri: Were you uh like you know, the eight people in your office were were they like your coworkers or Uh I mean they’re business development, the people that wanted the commission on the deal, you know?
Shaan Puri: So like any any most Like it’s a big deal, right? They want to like do the deal and and the only way you get 30 million is to like say no to 22 million, right? And everything Well, like any reasonable, most reasonable people, which the reason you are where you are is you’re many would probably consider you not reasonable, right? I mean, you have you’re you’re you’re an extreme personality type and that’s why you you’re very successful. But any reasonable person would say, what are you an idiot? Like you paid very nothing for this. Take it. Were you but were you always that like uh always My my view on it is that in the English language is going to be important to the human race for a thousand years and in a thousand years from now, voice will probably still have value. Just like a lot of like hope. It’s a valuable word forever. I mean, until you murder everyone that speaks the English language. If you think about how valuable it is, I my my real view is is I think people are are crazy for spending hundreds of millions of dollars on ad campaigns to market a brand that’s a misspelling of a normal word. It’s like I got to convince you how to sell in with like two Ys and a Z, you know, and I’m like, why would you do that? Because in the modern era of spell checkers, when you try to type these crappy brands that are misspelled, the, you know, your iPhone unspells it for you or properly spells it. So try going to a website that’s a misspelling of a name. Most brands and most brand consultants, I just disagree with them all. They, you know, they charge you a lot of money to come up with a misspelling of a common word and then you spend half a billion dollars marketing the brand. A much better idea would be buy the word hope or angel or alarm or alert or voice. Even if you got to pay 100 million or 200 million or 500 million dollars, because if I see your your ad and you tell me that, you know, your brand is alert.com, I can remember it in one second. I can spell it in one second. You leap immediately to the top of the Google search engine. So I just I I always view domains as being undervalued and then market people spend hundreds of millions of dollars of going crappy marketing to send someone to a place they can’t spell that they can’t remember. I think the world will gradually come around to that point of view, but they’re not there yet. But that so that was my view. Like I didn’t want to sell it to tell you the truth. Like if you owned the word angel or the word alarm or the word hope or voice, like the truth is Google should have paid a billion dollars for the word voice. Tell tell the tell the short version of that story. The the story is kind of crazy. I’ve heard it once before, but I I would assume Sam and most people have not heard the story of selling voice.com. You bought all these early on in the web. You kind of recognized, oh, these are these are probably going to be valuable to own these names. There’s only one, you know, there’s only one owner of each of these names. You you own it and you hold it for a really long time, like over a decade. And uh, at some point, you decide, okay, maybe we should see if somebody wants to buy some of these. So tell the story of selling voice.com real quick. Well, yeah, we I bought all these domains because I thought, wouldn’t it be great to own a part of the English language? I mean, owning hope or owning voice. I mean, eventually there’ll be a Google voice or there’ll be, you know, some some Telco company that’ll want to launch some service and what a great domain on uh to launch on the on a word like voice.com. So we held them a long time and and uh, I think at some point we were looking for joint ventures, we were looking to commercialize them and we did commercialize a bunch. For example, I created a company called alarm.com. And alarm.com is now publicly traded on NASDAQ. It’s like a four or five billion dollar market cap company. And and you can guess what it does. It actually integrates your home alarm into the internet. You know, and I created another company called angel.com and we sold that for a bit more than $100 million and that was actually a speech interactive voice response like Siri or Alexa before Siri and Alexa came along. And uh, so I had voice and I was holding it and we were looking for some kind of good uh commercialization and someone out of the blue, they contacted us, one of the domain brokers, and they said, well, you know, do you want to sell it? We’ll give you $150,000. And uh, and I, you know, I was like, someone came to me and said they offered $150,000. I said, no. So I thought nothing of it because I just I couldn’t see the point. A week later, they come back and said, well, they doubled it to $300,000. I said, tell them no. So a couple days later, they go, well, the broker is really insistent uh and so they went to $600,000. I said, no. So they said, well, what should you say? I said, don’t tell anything. Tell them, you know, like we’re not interested. It’s got to be something serious. So they they went to 1.2 million. I said, tell them no. I said, well, they want to know what you want for it. I said, um, well, send them a note or something and just tell them I said, it’s like it’s it’s the word voice in the English language, right? So it’s going to have to be something you know, north of uh I don’t know, I don’t think I said seven or eight eight figures, but I just said a lot of money. Um, and so it went on and they doubled it again to two and a half million. And then uh and then uh 5 million and then around 10 million. Then I said they said I had like 18 people in my office. They’re like, or not eight but eight eight people they’re like looking at me like, aren’t you are you going to take the money? It’s like a lot of money now. I said, uh, no, send them back uh at this point, send them back an a note pointing out that this is like the word voice in the English language and it’s and it’s it’s worth a billion dollars to the right company. And uh they said, well, you going to give them a response? I said, uh, okay, tell them 30 million. Tell them I’ll take 30 million for it. Because I thought like if I didn’t give them some number, they would stop negotiating after uh, you know, five nos. So I said tell them 30 million. I don’t want to sell it for 30 million. I want to sell it for 100 million or more, but I guess I’ll say 30 million. So that so at that point they said, well, you know, they offered you I think they up their their offer to like um 12 million. I said, tell them uh no, but if you want, I’ll I’ll take a meeting with them. So when it got to 12 million, I said I’d get on the phone for half an hour. So then we got on the phone and the call started with someone saying, well, how about 22 million? And I said, um, let me explain. This is like my daughter. Like I’m willing to I’m willing to like marry her off, but only to a man that values her more than I value her. So I value this domain, you know, at 30 million. And so if you don’t want to give me the 30, you know, I’m going to regret after I sell it anyway. I’ll have sellers remorse, but I would I would do it just to make the market. But if you don’t want to value it at 30, I’ll just keep it. And they’re like, uh, okay, we’ll give you 30. I said, okay.
The “Bill of the Week” Segment (Continued) [11:46]
Sam Parr: So 30, you went you got a 30 from 100k.
Michael Saylor: So they did like double seven or eight times and I eventually they started 150k I think and we ended it and I said 30, we ended at 30. But but the point was I didn’t really need the money. It was a matter like if I had at the point maybe 600 million in cash in the bank and the company the MicroStrategy was is a multi-billion dollar company. So I was like a million’s not going to move the needle for me. 100,000’s not going to move the needle for me. 5 million, 10 million’s not going to move the needle one way or the other. So there’s no point in doing it unless it was something material.
Are You a Car Guy? (Revisited) [12:27]
Shaan Puri: Were you uh like you know, the eight people in your office were were they like your coworkers or Uh I mean they’re business development, the people that wanted the commission on the deal, you know?
Shaan Puri: So like any any most Like it’s a big deal, right? They want to like do the deal and and the only way you get 30 million is to like say no to 22 million, right? And everything Well, like any reasonable, most reasonable people, which the reason you are where you are is you’re many would probably consider you not reasonable, right? I mean, you have you’re you’re you’re an extreme personality type and that’s why you you’re very successful. But any reasonable person would say, what are you an idiot? Like you paid very nothing for this. Take it. Were you but were you always that like uh always My my view on it is that in the English language is going to be important to the human race for a thousand years and in a thousand years from now, voice will probably still have value. Just like a lot of like hope. It’s a valuable word forever. I mean, until you murder everyone that speaks the English language. If you think about how valuable it is, I my my real view is is I think people are are crazy for spending hundreds of millions of dollars on ad campaigns to market a brand that’s a misspelling of a normal word. It’s like I got to convince you how to sell in with like two Ys and a Z, you know, and I’m like, why would you do that? Because in the modern era of spell checkers, when you try to type these crappy brands that are misspelled, the, you know, your iPhone unspells it for you or properly spells it. So try going to a website that’s a misspelling of a name. Most brands and most brand consultants, I just disagree with them all. They, you know, they charge you a lot of money to come up with a misspelling of a common word and then you spend half a billion dollars marketing the brand. A much better idea would be buy the word hope or angel or alarm or alert or voice. Even if you got to pay 100 million or 200 million or 500 million dollars, because if I see your your ad and you tell me that, you know, your brand is alert.com, I can remember it in one second. I can spell it in one second. You leap immediately to the top of the Google search engine. So I just I I always view domains as being undervalued and then market people spend hundreds of millions of dollars of going crappy marketing to send someone to a place they can’t spell that they can’t remember. I think the world will gradually come around to that point of view, but they’re not there yet. But that so that was my view. Like I didn’t want to sell it to tell you the truth. Like if you owned the word angel or the word alarm or the word hope or voice, like the truth is Google should have paid a billion dollars for the word voice. Tell tell the tell the short version of that story. The the story is kind of crazy. I’ve heard it once before, but I I would assume Sam and most people have not heard the story of selling voice.com. You bought all these early on in the web. You kind of recognized, oh, these are these are probably going to be valuable to own these names. There’s only one, you know, there’s only one owner of each of these names. You you own it and you hold it for a really long time, like over a decade. And uh, at some point, you decide, okay, maybe we should see if somebody wants to buy some of these. So tell the story of selling voice.com real quick. Well, yeah, we I bought all these domains because I thought, wouldn’t it be great to own a part of the English language? I mean, owning hope or owning voice. I mean, eventually there’ll be a Google voice or there’ll be, you know, some some Telco company that’ll want to launch some service and what a great domain on uh to launch on the on a word like voice.com. So we held them a long time and and uh, I think at some point we were looking for joint ventures, we were looking to commercialize them and we did commercialize a bunch. For example, I created a company called alarm.com. And alarm.com is now publicly traded on NASDAQ. It’s like a four or five billion dollar market cap company. And and you can guess what it does. It actually integrates your home alarm into the internet. You know, and I created another company called angel.com and we sold that for a bit more than $100 million and that was actually a speech interactive voice response like Siri or Alexa before Siri and Alexa came along. And uh, so I had voice and I was holding it and we were looking for some kind of good uh commercialization and someone out of the blue, they contacted us, one of the domain brokers, and they said, well, you know, do you want to sell it? We’ll give you $150,000. And uh, and I, you know, I was like, someone came to me and said they offered $150,000. I said, no. So I thought nothing of it because I just I couldn’t see the point. A week later, they come back and said, well, they doubled it to $300,000. I said, tell them no. So a couple days later, they go, well, the broker is really insistent uh and so they went to $600,000. I said, no. So they said, well, what should you say? I said, don’t tell anything. Tell them, you know, like we’re not interested. It’s got to be something serious. So they they went to 1.2 million. I said, tell them no. I said, well, they want to know what you want for it. I said, um, well, send them a note or something and just tell them I said, it’s like it’s it’s the word voice in the English language, right? So it’s going to have to be something you know, north of uh I don’t know, I don’t think I said seven or eight eight figures, but I just said a lot of money. Um, and so it went on and they doubled it again to two and a half million. And then uh and then uh 5 million and then around 10 million. Then I said they said I had like 18 people in my office. They’re like, or not eight but eight eight people they’re like looking at me like, aren’t you are you going to take the money? It’s like a lot of money now. I said, uh, no, send them back uh at this point, send them back an a note pointing out that this is like the word voice in the English language and it’s and it’s it’s worth a billion dollars to the right company. And uh they said, well, you going to give them a response? I said, uh, okay, tell them 30 million. Tell them I’ll take 30 million for it. Because I thought like if I didn’t give them some number, they would stop negotiating after uh, you know, five nos. So I said tell them 30 million. I don’t want to sell it for 30 million. I want to sell it for 100 million or more, but I guess I’ll say 30 million. So that so at that point they said, well, you know, they offered you I think they up their their offer to like um 12 million. I said, tell them uh no, but if you want, I’ll I’ll take a meeting with them. So when it got to 12 million, I said I’d get on the phone for half an hour. So then we got on the phone and the call started with someone saying, well, how about 22 million? And I said, um, let me explain. This is like my daughter. Like I’m willing to I’m willing to like marry her off, but only to a man that values her more than I value her. So I value this domain, you know, at 30 million. And so if you don’t want to give me the 30, you know, I’m going to regret after I sell it anyway. I’ll have sellers remorse, but I would I would do it just to make the market. But if you don’t want to value it at 30, I’ll just keep it. And they’re like, uh, okay, we’ll give you 30. I said, okay.
The “Bill of the Week” Segment (Continued) [11:46]
Sam Parr: So 30, you went you got a 30 from 100k.
Michael Saylor: So they did like double seven or eight times and I eventually they started 150k I think and we ended it and I said 30, we ended at 30. But but the point was I didn’t really need the money. It was a matter like if I had at the point maybe 600 million in cash in the bank and the company the MicroStrategy was is a multi-billion dollar company. So I was like a million’s not going to move the needle for me. 100,000’s not going to move the needle for me. 5 million, 10 million’s not going to move the needle one way or the other. So there’s no point in doing it unless it was something material.
Are You a Car Guy? (Revisited) [12:27]
Shaan Puri: Were you uh like you know, the eight people in your office were were they like your coworkers or Uh I mean they’re business development, the people that wanted the commission on the deal, you know?
Shaan Puri: So like any any most Like it’s a big deal, right? They want to like do the deal and and the only way you get 30 million is to like say no to 22 million, right? And everything Well, like any reasonable, most reasonable people, which the reason you are where you are is you’re many would probably consider you not reasonable, right? I mean, you have you’re you’re you’re an extreme personality type and that’s why you you’re very successful. But any reasonable person would say, what are you an idiot? Like you paid very nothing for this. Take it. Were you but were you always that like uh always My my view on it is that in the English language is going to be important to the human race for a thousand years and in a thousand years from now, voice will probably still have value. Just like a lot of like hope. It’s a valuable word forever. I mean, until you murder everyone that speaks the English language. If you think about how valuable it is, I my my real view is is I think people are are crazy for spending hundreds of millions of dollars on ad campaigns to market a brand that’s a misspelling of a normal word. It’s like I got to convince you how to sell in with like two Ys and a Z, you know, and I’m like, why would you do that? Because in the modern era of spell checkers, when you try to type these crappy brands that are misspelled, the, you know, your iPhone unspells it for you or properly spells it. So try going to a website that’s a misspelling of a name. Most brands and most brand consultants, I just disagree with them all. They, you know, they charge you a lot of money to come up with a misspelling of a common word and then you spend half a billion dollars marketing the brand. A much better idea would be buy the word hope or angel or alarm or alert or voice. Even if you got to pay 100 million or 200 million or 500 million dollars, because if I see your your ad and you tell me that, you know, your brand is alert.com, I can remember it in one second. I can spell it in one second. You leap immediately to the top of the Google search engine. So I just I I always view domains as being undervalued and then market people spend hundreds of millions of dollars of going crappy marketing to send someone to a place they can’t spell that they can’t remember. I think the world will gradually come around to that point of view, but they’re not there yet. But that so that was my view. Like I didn’t want to sell it to tell you the truth. Like if you owned the word angel or the word alarm or the word hope or voice, like the truth is Google should have paid a billion dollars for the word voice. Tell tell the tell the short version of that story. The the story is kind of crazy. I’ve heard it once before, but I I would assume Sam and most people have not heard the story of selling voice.com. You bought all these early on in the web. You kind of recognized, oh, these are these are probably going to be valuable to own these names. There’s only one, you know, there’s only one owner of each of these names. You you own it and you hold it for a really long time, like over a decade. And uh, at some point, you decide, okay, maybe we should see if somebody wants to buy some of these. So tell the story of selling voice.com real quick. Well, yeah, we I bought all these domains because I thought, wouldn’t it be great to own a part of the English language? I mean, owning hope or owning voice. I mean, eventually there’ll be a Google voice or there’ll be, you know, some some Telco company that’ll want to launch some service and what a great domain on uh to launch on the on a word like voice.com. So we held them a long time and and uh, I think at some point we were looking for joint ventures, we were looking to commercialize them and we did commercialize a bunch. For example, I created a company called alarm.com. And alarm.com is now publicly traded on NASDAQ. It’s like a four or five billion dollar market cap company. And and you can guess what it does. It actually integrates your home alarm into the internet. You know, and I created another company called angel.com and we sold that for a bit more than $100 million and that was actually a speech interactive voice response like Siri or Alexa before Siri and Alexa came along. And uh, so I had voice and I was holding it and we were looking for some kind of good uh commercialization and someone out of the blue, they contacted us, one of the domain brokers, and they said, well, you know, do you want to sell it? We’ll give you $150,000. And uh, and I, you know, I was like, someone came to me and said they offered $150,000. I said, no. So I thought nothing of it because I just I couldn’t see the point. A week later, they come back and said, well, they doubled it to $300,000. I said, tell them no. So a couple days later, they go, well, the broker is really insistent uh and so they went to $600,000. I said, no. So they said, well, what should you say? I said, don’t tell anything. Tell them, you know, like we’re not interested. It’s got to be something serious. So they they went to 1.2 million. I said, tell them no. I said, well, they want to know what you want for it. I said, um, well, send them a note or something and just tell them I said, it’s like it’s it’s the word voice in the English language, right? So it’s going to have to be something you know, north of uh I don’t know, I don’t think I said seven or eight eight figures, but I just said a lot of money. Um, and so it went on and they doubled it again to two and a half million. And then uh and then uh 5 million and then around 10 million. Then I said they said I had like 18 people in my office. They’re like, or not eight but eight eight people they’re like looking at me like, aren’t you are you going to take the money? It’s like a lot of money now. I said, uh, no, send them back uh at this point, send them back an a note pointing out that this is like the word voice in the English language and it’s and it’s it’s worth a billion dollars to the right company. And uh they said, well, you going to give them a response? I said, uh, okay, tell them 30 million. Tell them I’ll take 30 million for it. Because I thought like if I didn’t give them some number, they would stop negotiating after uh, you know, five nos. So I said tell them 30 million. I don’t want to sell it for 30 million. I want to sell it for 100 million or more, but I guess I’ll say 30 million. So that so at that point they said, well, you know, they offered you I think they up their their offer to like um 12 million. I said, tell them uh no, but if you want, I’ll I’ll take a meeting with them. So when it got to 12 million, I said I’d get on the phone for half an hour. So then we got on the phone and the call started with someone saying, well, how about 22 million? And I said, um, let me explain. This is like my daughter. Like I’m willing to I’m willing to like marry her off, but only to a man that values her more than I value her. So I value this domain, you know, at 30 million. And so if you don’t want to give me the 30, you know, I’m going to regret after I sell it anyway. I’ll have sellers remorse, but I would I would do it just to make the market. But if you don’t want to value it at 30, I’ll just keep it. And they’re like, uh, okay, we’ll give you 30. I said, okay.
The “Bill of the Week” Segment (Continued) [11:46]
Sam Parr: So 30, you went you got a 30 from 100k.
Michael Saylor: So they did like double seven or eight times and I eventually they started 150k I think and we ended it and I said 30, we ended at 30. But but the point was I didn’t really need the money. It was a matter like if I had at the point maybe 600 million in cash in the bank and the company the MicroStrategy was is a multi-billion dollar company. So I was like a million’s not going to move the needle for me. 100,000’s not going to move the needle for me. 5 million, 10 million’s not going to move the needle one way or the other. So there’s no point in doing it unless it was something material.
Are You a Car Guy? (Revisited) [12:27]
Shaan Puri: Were you uh like you know, the eight people in your office were were they like your coworkers or Uh I mean they’re business development, the people that wanted the commission on the deal, you know?
Shaan Puri: So like any any most Like it’s a big deal, right? They want to like do the deal and and the only way you get 30 million is to like say no to 22 million, right? And everything Well, like any reasonable, most reasonable people, which the reason you are where you are is you’re many would probably consider you not reasonable, right? I mean, you have you’re you’re you’re an extreme personality type and that’s why you you’re very successful. But any reasonable person would say, what are you an idiot? Like you paid very nothing for this. Take it. Were you but were you always that like uh always My my view on it is that in the English language is going to be important to the human race for a thousand years and in a thousand years from now, voice will probably still have value. Just like a lot of like hope. It’s a valuable word forever. I mean, until you murder everyone that speaks the English language. If you think about how valuable it is, I my my real view is is I think people are are crazy for spending hundreds of millions of dollars on ad campaigns to market a brand that’s a misspelling of a normal word. It’s like I got to convince you how to sell in with like two Ys and a Z, you know, and I’m like, why would you do that? Because in the modern era of spell checkers, when you try to type these crappy brands that are misspelled, the, you know, your iPhone unspells it for you or properly spells it. So try going to a website that’s a misspelling of a name. Most brands and most brand consultants, I just disagree with them all. They, you know, they charge you a lot of money to come up with a misspelling of a common word and then you spend half a billion dollars marketing the brand. A much better idea would be buy the word hope or angel or alarm or alert or voice. Even if you got to pay 100 million or 200 million or 500 million dollars, because if I see your your ad and you tell me that, you know, your brand is alert.com, I can remember it in one second. I can spell it in one second. You leap immediately to the top of the Google search engine. So I just I I always view domains as being undervalued and then market people spend hundreds of millions of dollars of going crappy marketing to send someone to a place they can’t spell that they can’t remember. I think the world will gradually come around to that point of view, but they’re not there yet. But that so that was my view. Like I didn’t want to sell it to tell you the truth. Like if you owned the word angel or the word alarm or the word hope or voice, like the truth is Google should have paid a billion dollars for the word voice. Tell tell the tell the short version of that story. The the story is kind of crazy. I’ve heard it once before, but I I would assume Sam and most people have not heard the story of selling voice.com. You bought all these early on in the web. You kind of recognized, oh, these are these are probably going to be valuable to own these names. There’s only one, you know, there’s only one owner of each of these names. You you own it and you hold it for a really long time, like over a decade. And uh, at some point, you decide, okay, maybe we should see if somebody wants to buy some of these. So tell the story of selling voice.com real quick. Well, yeah, we I bought all these domains because I thought, wouldn’t it be great to own a part of the English language? I mean, owning hope or owning voice. I mean, eventually there’ll be a Google voice or there’ll be, you know, some some Telco company that’ll want to launch some service and what a great domain on uh to launch on the on a word like voice.com. So we held them a long time and and uh, I think at some point we were looking for joint ventures, we were looking to commercialize them and we did commercialize a bunch. For example, I created a company called alarm.com. And alarm.com is now publicly traded on NASDAQ. It’s like a four or five billion dollar market cap company. And and you can guess what it does. It actually integrates your home alarm into the internet. You know, and I created another company called angel.com and we sold that for a bit more than $100 million and that was actually a speech interactive voice response like Siri or Alexa before Siri and Alexa came along. And uh, so I had voice and I was holding it and we were looking for some kind of good uh commercialization and someone out of the blue, they contacted us, one of the domain brokers, and they said, well, you know, do you want to sell it? We’ll give you $150,000. And uh, and I, you know, I was like, someone came to me and said they offered $150,000. I said, no. So I thought nothing of it because I just I couldn’t see the point. A week later, they come back and said, well, they doubled it to $300,000. I said, tell them no. So a couple days later, they go, well, the broker is really insistent uh and so they went to $600,000. I said, no. So they said, well, what should you say? I said, don’t tell anything. Tell them, you know, like we’re not interested. It’s got to be something serious. So they they went to 1.2 million. I said, tell them no. I said, well, they want to know what you want for it. I said, um, well, send them a note or something and just tell them I said, it’s like it’s it’s the word voice in the English language, right? So it’s going to have to be something you know, north of uh I don’t know, I don’t think I said seven or eight eight figures, but I just said a lot of money. Um, and so it went on