Episode of My First Million with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri.
Transcript
Note: This transcript was auto-generated from YouTube captions. It may contain errors and lacks speaker identification. A full Gemini audio transcript will replace this.
Kind: captions Language: en you own a a ton of domain names right yeah i bought a bunch like how many do you own now or how many have you i won’t count 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 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 yes sam go to hope.com see where that takes you go to hope.com yeah well actually bitcoin is hope so if you type hope.com you get everything there is a know about bitcoin i actually repath hope to all of our resources and materials uh speaker i i owned voice.com and i sold it for 30 million dollars a couple years ago that’s the largest uh naked domain sale in the history of domain so tell them tell the short version of that story 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 sellingvoice.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 sellingvoice.com real quick well yeah we i 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 so there’ll be you know some some telco company that’ll want to launch some service and what a great domain on 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’re 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 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 saw that for a bit more than 100 million dollars and that was actually a speech interactive voice response like surrey or alexa before siri and alexa came along and uh so i had voice and i was holding it and we’re 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 said they have 250 000 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 say well they doubled it to 300 000 i said tell them no so a couple days later they go well the broker’s 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 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 gonna 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 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 gonna 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’re going to give him a response i said uh okay tell him 30 million tell him i’ll take 30 million for it because i thought like if i didn’t give them some number they would stop negotiating after you know five no’s so i said tom 30 man 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 upped their their offer to like um 12 million i said tell them uh no but if you 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 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 i feel like i can rule the world i know i could be what i want to i put my law in it like no days off on the road travel never looking back