Michael Saylor tells the story of buying premium English-language domain names in the early web era and holding them for decades. The centerpiece is the negotiation saga around selling voice.com — which went from a $150,000 opening offer to a final $30 million deal, the largest naked domain sale in history. Saylor explains his negotiating philosophy and why he treats these assets like irreplaceable property.
Speakers: Michael Saylor (guest, MicroStrategy founder), Shaan Puri (host), Sam Parr (host)
Michael Saylor’s Domain Portfolio [00:00:00]
Shaan: You own a ton of domain names, right?
Michael Saylor: Yeah, I bought a bunch.
Shaan: How many do you own now?
Michael Saylor: I won’t count them all — I mean, I own hundreds and hundreds. But the ones that are our top-level primary domain names, about 16. I like words in the English language that everybody understands. I own emma.com, frank.com — I own my own name. I own michael.com, and I also own my nickname, mike.com. My personal website is on michael.com — you just type michael.com, you see all the stuff about me.
Shaan: Go to hope.com — see where that takes you.
Michael Saylor: Yeah, well, Bitcoin is hope. So if you type hope.com, you get everything there is to know about Bitcoin. I actually repath hope.com to all of our resources and materials.
The Voice.com Sale [00:01:00]
Michael Saylor: I owned voice.com, and I sold it for $30 million a couple of years ago. That’s the largest naked domain sale in the history of domains.
Shaan: Tell the short version of that story. It’s kind of crazy — I’ve heard it once before, but 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 recognized, “These are probably going to be valuable — there’s only one owner of each of these names.” You hold it for a really long time, over a decade. At some point you decide, okay, maybe we should see if somebody wants to buy some of these. Tell the story of selling voice.com.
Michael Saylor: Yeah, 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” — eventually there’ll be a Google Voice, there’ll be some telco company that wants to launch a service, and what a great domain to launch on. A word like voice.com. So we held them a long time.
At some point we were looking for joint ventures, looking to commercialize them. And we did commercialize a bunch. For example, I created a company called alarm.com — alarm.com is now publicly traded on NASDAQ, it’s like a four or five billion dollar market cap company. You can guess what it does: it integrates your home alarm into the internet. I created another company called angel.com, and we sold that for a bit more than $100 million. That was actually a speech interactive voice response system — like Siri or Alexa before Siri and Alexa came along.
So I had voice.com, and I was holding it. We’re looking for some kind of good commercialization, and then someone out of the blue — one of the domain brokers contacted us and said, “Do you want to sell it? We’ll give you $150,000.” I was like, someone came to me with $250,000 and I said no, so I thought nothing of it.
The Negotiation Escalates [00:03:30]
Michael Saylor: A week later they come back and say they doubled it to $300,000. I said tell them no. A couple days later they go, “The broker’s really insistent” — they went to $600,000. I said no. They said, “Well, what should we say?” I said, “Don’t tell them anything. Tell them we’re not interested. It’s got to be something serious.”
So they went to $1.2 million. I said tell them no. They said, “Well, they want to know what you want for it.” I said, “Send them a note and just tell them — it’s the word ‘voice’ in the English language. It’s going to have to be something north of… I don’t know, I think I said something like a lot of money.”
So it went on. They doubled again to $2.5 million, then $5 million, then around $10 million. At that point they said — I had like eight people in my office — they’re looking at me like, “Aren’t you going to take the money? It’s a lot of money now.” I said, “No. Send them back a note pointing out that this is the word ‘voice’ in the English language, and it’s worth a billion dollars to the right company.”
They said, “Well, you’re going to give them a response?” I said, “Okay, tell them $30 million. Tell them I’ll take $30 million for it.” I thought, if I don’t give them some number, they’ll stop negotiating after five no’s. I said to myself, 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.
The Closing Call [00:06:00]
Michael Saylor: At that point they upped their offer to around $12 million. I said, “Tell them no, but if they want, 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.
We got on the phone and the call started with someone saying, “Well, how about $22 million?” And I said, “Let me explain something. This is like my daughter. I’m willing to marry her off, but only to a man who values her more than I value her.”