← Miss Understood with Rachel Uchitel
Miss Understood with Rachel Uchitel
The Godfather of Domains: How Andrew Rosener Built an $800M Digital Real Estate Empire
01:33:09
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A
I think gold, bitcoin, and domain names are literally the three greatest investments that you can make for the next decade. Many of the biggest brands that you would have heard of, big domains, we're responsible for that. We are the ones that got x.com for Elon and many other of his company names. If that domain has any value whatsoever, somebody's willing to buy it for some price, whether it's 10 bucks or 10 grand. Everybody in every business in every walk of life is going to want or need their domain. Domain names really are in almost every facet, like digital real estate. Over the last 15 years, we've done $800 million in domain sales. Seven companies that were worth a billion dollars or more that had Zoom in their name, and they're going to come to me and they're going to want to buy it and they're going to millions of dollars for the domain.
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B
And did they?
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A
Oh, yeah. You want to own bitcoin, you want to own gold, and you want to own domain names. You want things that can't be increased in supply.
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B
Today on Misunderstood, we are talking about a form of real estate most people never think about. Not beachfront or city blocks, but the digital kind domain name. My guest, Andrew Roessner is known as the godfather of domain brokering. He's the founder and CEO of Media Options, the world's top domain brokerage, responsible for some of the biggest digital asset deals in history. Think zoom.com, prime.com, x.com and more. He's built a company worth hundreds of millions of dollars with just six people. What's fascinating about Andrew isn't just his success. It's the way he sees the Internet. To him, a great doname name is the ultimate storefront. It's where your brand, where trust begins and where value compounds. We talk about what makes a name truly great, the psychology behind why certain words and combinations stick, and why even in 2025, it's not too late to invest in this digital real estate. Because while some people are still chasing trends, Andrew is quietly owning the ground they're built on. From selling scallops to selling some of the most recognizable names on the web. His story is about seeing opportunity where others see noise and proving that sometimes the most misunderstood assets turn out to be the most valuable. I absolutely loved this conversation. I know you will too. So even if this seems like a complicated topic or something you normally wouldn't be interested in listening to, I promise you this is one to get excited about. And now let me introduce you to Andrew Rosner. So, Andrew, it's such a pleasure to have you here on Misunderstood. Thank you for joining me. Are. Where are you?
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A
So I am sitting in Lisbon, Portugal.
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B
Oh, that's amazing. But you're from America.
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A
I'm from Rhode Island.
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B
From Rhode Island. Okay. Well, how did you end up in Portugal?
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A
That is a long story. But let's see. I, I was in the fish business in Rhode Island. I actually graduated from college with a degree in database design. It was sort of a hybrid business, computer science thing. Realized that was absolutely not what I was going to do with my life. And then that was after starting a software business and all this. But I was like, okay, this is not what I'm doing with my life. Got a call from a guy that later became my boss and mentor, Peter Murky Charlie Tuna, as they call him. And he said, hey, you want to come sell seafood? And I thought definitely not. I basically told him to go pound sand and he said, well, I'll give you 1000 bucks to come and hang out with me for the day and see what this is all about. Took him up on the offer. And the office was in Newport, Rhode island, right in the harbor. It's a beautiful place. This was June and you know, so it was a great place to be for the summer. And so I said, okay, let's go try this out for a few months. And him and I hit it off. And long story short, it turned out I was exceptionally good at sales and I grew that business. I actually love to this day, I love that business. It's just not as lucrative as my current business. But I absolutely loved that business, every part of it and almost every part. And I did that.
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B
I'm just curious, what was your day to day of that?
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A
You know, one of the things I loved about it is that that business, there was nothing to do after hours, right? So it was like, you know, I showed up at 8:00 o' clock in the morning. 8, 8:30. And yeah, 8. We started relatively early and started 8 in the morning. You know, basically first mission of the day was figure out what the price was. It's commodity business. What's the price, what's the market prices that day for the various sizes, the various origins. We were primarily in the scallop business.
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B
And.
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A
And so it was basically like a fact gathering mission for the first hour or two of the day. And then. And many of our customers, that's what they were doing, right? And so we'd go out, do some fact gathering, price discovery and then basically create a Price sheet, fire that off to all our customers. And then the next few hours you're sort of servicing customers. And then the back half of the day was basically cold calling new customers.
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B
Oh, wow. And who are the customers? It's restaurants or what?
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A
No, no, no. We were selling larger quantities. So we were selling to like food distributors, import, export of like full cont. From, you know, China or to China. We were selling to Belgium, France, Germany a little bit, but mostly a lot of import from Japan, a lot of import from China, a lot of import from Argentina, Chile, Peru, Canada and then, you know, just next door to where we were. New Bedford is the largest producer of scallops in America. It's actually the second largest producing seafood port in America. I think number one is Anchorage, Alaska.
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B
That's where I'm from, by the way.
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A
Ah, interesting.
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B
Yeah.
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A
So Anchorage, I think it's number one in the world for, for in America for, you know, dollar wise production of seafood. And then number two is New Bedford, Massachusetts.
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B
Wow.
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A
And so we had some operations up there, but third party, right? So we sat in a beautiful little office on the harbor in Newport, Rhode Island. You know, people think about, you know, I love to kind of tongue in cheek, say I was a fishmonger. And I was, but you know, I wasn't touching fish. I talked.
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B
So you weren't involved in the packing of it and the icing it and all that stuff.
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A
All of our customers, most of our customers believed that we were because we had our own labels. But there was all being produced and packed by third parties. It was being stored by third parties, processed by third parties and then we would sell under our label. But we literally were like five or six people sitting in a little office in the, in Newport, Rhode island, you know, talking about frozen scallops on the phone all day.
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B
Amazing.
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A
Got into some other, you know, lobster and squid and some other things.
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B
But yeah, okay, so eventually you get out of that and now you're known as the godfather of domain brokering. So can you tell me how you got from one to the other? So.
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A
We have to actually back up. So in college, right, I was studying this sort of database, computer science. And this was right at the emergence of the sort of consumer Internet. So we're in the mid late 90s and I learned about the Internet and I learned that if you wanted to be on the Internet, it started with a domain name. And so the way I'm hyperactive and I have a million ideas a minute all the time. And it's a gift and a Curse. And so basically I thought, wow, I. All these ideas, I want to put them out on the Internet. And to do that, step one, get a domain name. And so I had no ambition or no idea of like, oh, I'm buying a domain name because it's valuable. I just thought this is a ways to a means. And so I just started buying them for all.
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B
And I'm sorry, just so that for people listening and for people that do not follow this at all, domain name means website address. Correct?
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A
Correct, correct. URL. There's, you know, people refer to them in different ways. URL, website address. But yeah, domain names, you know, it's like google.com or apple.com but totally different.
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B
Than what you're getting when you find your handle on Instagram or Twitter.
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A
Totally different. Right? With it. With a handle on a social media platform, you don't actually own it, right? You have a right to use it from the platform, but you don't own it. You can, you know, we've seen this with cancel culture, right? You can be shut down. You could just be like, oh, we don't like what you're saying on that platform. And you know, you're done.
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B
Oh, right, yeah.
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A
Whereas with the domain name, you own it. Right? This is, I mean, it's actually, it's much deeper than just being canceled, you know, when even if you have a very successful platform, as you do on YouTube or on other social media platforms, you don't own that data, the platform does. Right. You don't actually even own that relationship with the follower or with the customer or whatever it might be the platform does. Right. You have a relationship with, with, with that customer or with that follower at the pleasure of the platform and they can terminate that relationship at their will. And if they do so, you don't have the data and you no longer have the connection. You don't know how to connect back with your follower unless they have another way to get to you. And so I think that's actually a great way of highlighting the value of a domain name, one of the utilities and value points. So anyways, that's what we buy and sell. And at that time I was just collecting these things with the idea that, oh, it's another idea that I would love to explore or build or launch. And so I was buying things that were around sort of some of my interests and my hobbies and ideas.
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B
Like what?
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A
Well, like I lived in Newport in Providence, Rhode Island. So I had some domains related to Providence. And with Newport, I had, you know, what ultimately Led me into the domain brokerage business. I bought these domain names around Patanegra ham. Patanegra is Spanish for blackfoot. And there's a black footed pig which is native to the Iberian Peninsula, which is, you know, Spain and Portugal, where I live now. And that ham at that time in particular was the most expensive meat in the world. It was cherished and it could not be imported into the United States. And I had, you know, experienced it in Mallorca, Spain and some Balearic island off of Barcelona, more or less. And I, when I tasted, I was like, this is incredible. This is the best thing I've ever had. How do we not have this in the US and so I bought the domain names because I thought, oh, I want, I'm in the fish business. I know how to import, you know, products. I'm going to import this in the US to sell it. But I found out that it was actually banned by the fda. They treated it like they treat French cheese, which is to say that they don't think that it's fit for human consumption.
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B
Wow.
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A
And so that was sort of that. And I did a back burner. And then one day I'm driving to my office, I had to drive across the Newport Bridge. At that point I had moved from Newport to Providence. And so I'm driving across the Newport Bridge and I'm listening to NPR radio. And they said that George Bush was about to receive the first Pattenegra ham ever imported into the United States. They had changed the FDA position and they were now allowing this thing to be imported. And there was one importer in virginia and he, latienda.com give him a little shout out. He was a great guy. And he was an importer of specialty Spanish products. And so he had fought for years to get this approved. And he worked with one factory in Spain to get it. This factory FDA approved and licensed. And he was the first importer. And he basically had a monopoly and he was starting to distribute it in the US to all the top restaurants and chefs and whatnot. And so I got to my office and I said, I gotta look up this guy. And you know, I gotta speak with him and with Solo because I wanted to buy a ham. Like, literally this stuff. I was like, this the best thing I've ever had. I haven't had it since I was in Spain. How do I get a ham? So I called him up and we chatted and, you know, we was kind of talking shop because we were both in the food import business. And as we Were talking, you know, I realized he was at this real online e commerce focus, which, you know, e commerce wasn't like it was really just starting at that point. This was 2001. So. Or two. And so we got to talking and I realized, I said, by the way, I own these domain names all around Patanega. I think I had five or six of the best names around that ham. And he said, you could hear his proverbial jaw drop. And I knew I had my sales guy. I knew I had him. He was like, how much you want? And what I didn't know was I had no clue what this thing was worth. Is it worth a hundred bucks? Is it worth a hundred grand? I have no clue idea. But what I wanted was a ham. And so I said, well, I don't know, but I'll trade you for a ham. And he just goes, done. No, so. So let me actually back up for a second. I already asked him, can I buy a ham? And he laughed at me. He's like, look, my next. Like, I remember now, but it was like the next 11 containers are already pre sold. So like, yeah, you can get one, but it's next year. And it's like, I think it was. I don't want to talk out of class. It's been a long time. And I don't have to gr mem. But it was like 5,000 a pound or something. Or a kilo.
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B
Wow.
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A
You know, these are like five, seven kilo or five, seven pound legs. You know, you buy a whole leg of him.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Literally is on the foot. The foot is still attached.
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B
Right.
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A
And. And so these were very expensive.
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B
So they were valuable. Yeah. Okay.
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A
Oh, very valuable. At that time, he had a monopoly. And it was, it was. It was absurdly expensive.
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B
Right.
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A
And so anyway, so going back to the sort of negotiation, I didn't know what these things were worth, but I wanted a ham. So I said, well, I'll trade you for the ham. And it like, without hesitation, he just said, done. And I thought, oops, I undersold that. And so I was like, and five grand. And he goes, done. And I was like, okay, well, you know, deal. Let's do it.
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B
Do you regret not saying you want ham for life?
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A
Well, would have been nice. That would have been nice. I don't know that he would have agreed to that. That would have been a big commitment. But maybe, maybe he was pretty excited to get these names, but he was a phenomenal guy. I try to live my life with almost zero regrets. I have very few Regrets. But he was a very nice guy. And he not only sent me the ham, you know, it literally showed up my door. Like it looked like a coffin.
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B
Oh my God.
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A
Big wooden box, like huge. And. But he sent me like a case of really good Rio ha wine. And he sent me the carving set, you know, the holder for the, for the, for the leg of ham and the special carving knife.
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B
And point being, he saw the value in the domain and wanted to give you whatever he could to compensate, I think. Amazing. And did the ham live up to the hype coming from America?
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A
I'm telling you, for 30 days, my wife and I, all we did was eat ham and we ate ham and drank Rioja. That was basically our diet for 30 days. And I think we ate the whole thing in about a month, which is quite a feat.
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B
I love that story.
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A
Yeah, so that was really it. And it was really, that was the light bulb moment for me that was like, whoa, these things are valuable. And this is like a really esoteric little niche. Black footed pig ham, you know, Patanegra. It's like most of the world doesn't even know it exists. And this guy's willing to put some real value on the table for these domains, right? Everybody in every business in every walk of life is going to want or need their domain. So that was sort of the moment. And this coincided with. My wife is German. When we married, she had said, like, I'm willing to live in the US for four years. And so I had like this shot clock and that shot clock was running up and I need to come up with an idea of how I could make a living somewhere else. And I had a really good job. Like I was making a lot of money. I was, you know, in my 20s, making three, $400,000 a year, way more than any of my friends were making. And so, you know, it was a great job. And I knew that I was going to basically be walking away from it really in the next year. And so I kind of thought, wow, maybe I can turn this into a business. And so I started being even more aggressive in buying more domains and learning about the industry.
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B
And just side note, when you're saying you're buying these domains, where were you buying them from and how much were they?
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A
Yeah, so great question. So at that time I didn't even know that there was an industry here, right? Like, I was like, people buy domains for their business, they own one, maybe two. That's it. And a story, right? I didn't know there was like domain collectors and There was, you know, was.
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B
It like godaddy back then that just had.
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A
God. Godaddy was relatively new on the scene. Right at that time network solutions was kind of almost a monopoly. But yeah, GoDaddy was new on the scene. They were starting to grow, you know, quite rapidly. You know, they had their provocative commercials coming on online and, and the industry was kind of just starting to blossom, but I didn't even know it existed. Nevertheless, anybody else and, but I happened to, through actually through a representative at GoDaddy, I learned that there was this whole industry, there's auction houses and there's you know, forums, online forums that people are, you know, sharing ideas and, and you know, this thing is competitive and there's people drop catching and there's all these different facets of the business. And so I got really fascinated. I went deep down the rabbit hole, learned as much as I could and I started buying more and more names, mostly in auctions. So these auctions, just to sort of clarify, when you let a domain expire, if that domain has any value whatsoever, like, and for it to not go to auction it really has to be like garbage. If it has any value whatsoever, somebody's willing to buy it for some price, whether it's 10 bucks or 10 grand. And so every day there are thousands and thousands of domains. I probably should know the number, but there's thousands, maybe tens of thousands of domains every day they go to auction across various platforms. There's maybe five major ones like dropcatch.com, goDaddy auctions, namejet.com snap names, that's, you know, those are the major ones, right. And, and people compete to buy these things. And you know, back then they didn't go for a lot because there was only, let's say a couple hundred people in the world that were involved in this business today. There's probably, I don't know, 10,000, that's a rough estimate. And there's probably a few hundred, maybe it's 300, 400 that are like, you know, have really made an extremely successful career out of it. Okay, not, not including like executives of big companies in the space, but I mean like, you know, domain investors. And so I started out just as another domain investor and as I started accumulating domains and I invested all, basically all of my savings into these things, I realized like who's selling them to the people that are actually going to use them. And there really wasn't anybody doing a great job of playing matchmaker between the people that have all these domains. And the businesses that ultimately need them or should want them, whether they know it or not, right at that time, most of them didn't know they should have it or should want it. So again, I, you know, the skill set I had was I was a great salesman and above all else. And so I said, all right, I'm gonna basically become like a real estate broker. But for domain names, which we, you know, treat like digital real estate, the domain names really are in almost every facet. You can make the analogy between domain names and physical commercial real estate and the principles are the same, the metrics are more or less the same. There's, there's a, you know, there's a, there's a mirror analogy in the real estate business to the domain. So I started just picking up the phone and calling companies and you know, saying, hey, you want to buy this domain? And I remember one of the first ones I sold, you know, outbound was like, you know, maritime risk.com, you know, I sold to like a big maritime shipping company or maritime shipping insurance company, you know. And then I sold pizza.net was the first like six figure domain sale that I made. And pizza.net was kind of famous because it had, well, famous, you know, it had made a cameo in, in the movie the Net with Sandra Bullock way back in the day, 1994, I want to say. Sandra Bullock had that movie the Net. And you know, it was the first time in a movie somebody went online and ordered pizza and she ordered pizza on pizza.net and back then, Net was actually the more mainstream domain extension because.
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B
More than dot com.
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A
Much more, because it was like network. Right. So if you were online, it was about networking.
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B
Okay, well that was what I was going to ask you. Was it more or less valuable than pizza.com?
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A
So in 94, net was probably more valuable than pizza.com, but very shortly thereafter in the later 90s, dot com overtook net. And it's never really changed.
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B
Okay, wait, I have a bunch of questions. This is so fun.
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A
Let's go.
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B
So first you realized the things that were going to be valuable or might be valuable, like you're talking about this maritime thing, you knew that somewhere along the line somebody would find that valuable. But then in looking at like let's say you wanted andrew.com for example, or rachel.com now if those were taken, how. Well, that's a whole nother question. But how did you first realize what was going to be valuable in the future?
- [24:32]
A
Great question. So I mean, what I will say personally as A domain investor with my domain investor hat on is that I try to buy things that are going to be valuable in the past, in the present, and in the future. I don't want to buy things that have, let's say, an expiration date. I want things that have shelf life.
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B
So could a brand name have an expiration date as opposed to, like, something that represents the brand?
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A
Yeah. So we have what we call brandables. We have generics, and we have descriptive. Right. And so you've got things like, I don't know, CarInsurance.com. right. CarInsurance.com is a descriptive domain. It describes an industry, but it's also the term that people actually search for when they go to Google. Right. And so for a very long time, especially in the early days, that was enormously valuable for SEO search engine optimization. And if you had CarInsurance.com it was like almost automatic that you'd be at the top of Google, and so that would drive more traffic for you, and that therefore made it very valuable. What drove the value domains has changed over time. We can get to that later. But I always tried to focus on things that I thought would always be valuable. There are other people that have been successful and many others that have not been successful trying to chase trends. So they're trying to buy that hottest new term that the teenagers are using, or they're trying to build the hottest new term that was used on the nightly news, or they're chasing trends. Whether that's AI or whether that was Metaverse or whether that was crypto or whether it was whatever came before that, they're always chasing some new trend. Whereas I was trying to buy evergreen type of stuff, Right? And one of the ways there's a lot of tools that we use, most of these tools were built for companies for SEO, and we use those tools to sort of see, okay, how many people are searching for this term. And the more people that are searching for that term, the more mindshare that term has, the more valuable the domain is. So the corresponding domain is.
- [26:41]
B
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- [28:33]
A
So it's a cost benefit analysis. Okay, so the cost is that if you, if you just make something up, I don't know. Bluepio.com. okay, bluepio.com could be a reasonable brand. Nobody's ever heard of it. It would be very easy to trademark and so you can dominate and control that whole namespace.
- [28:55]
B
Right.
- [28:56]
A
But you now need to go spend probably millions and millions of dollars to ingrain that brand into the mind of consumers. Mint is still $15 a month for premium wireless. And if you haven't made the switch yet, here are 15 reasons why you should. One, it's $15 a month. Two, seriously, it's $15 a month. Three, no big contracts. Four, I use it. Five, my mom uses it. Are you playing me off? That's what's happening, right? Okay, give it a try. @mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment of $45 for three month plan.
- [29:29]
B
$15 per month equivalent required. New customer offer first three months only. Then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See mint mobile.com right, because they're not. Unless they know you and they know the name to search. They're not finding that automatically like Google did.
- [29:41]
A
Or like godaddy did. Right. Godaddy had to hire Dana, you know, Danica Patrick and, you know, all these beautiful women to come on screen and just shoot these provocative commercials in order to ingrain the godadd into the minds of consumers and get that relationship to domain names because nobody had ever heard of the brand. Now, if they were domain name.com or domains.com, right, it would have been a much closer and easier association, but harder to get a trademark or almost impossible to trademark. And you can't, let's say, dominate. You can't flood the zone on that namespace. Right. You're going to have competition. That's domain dot something else. Or, you know, it's just not. It's a strong domain name, but it's not necessarily a strong brand.
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B
I get it, I get it. Okay. So you. Yeah. You actually created something that's now called the Rosener Equation. Can you describe to people what that is?
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A
Yeah, to be clear, I'm not the one that named it the Rosener Equation, but I did create the formula.
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B
Right.
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A
So after a few years of pounding my head against the wall trying to sell these domain names to companies that mostly didn't get it, they're like, why would I want to spend tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars to buy this domain? I'm perfectly fine with the domain I've got, which has two hyphens in it or some weird prefix. And so it was an uphill battle trying to convince them. And so at some point I said, okay, it's very clear that these are valuable. And so there has to be something that's driving that value. And if there's something that's driving that value and I can understand what that thing is, then I can measure it. And if I can measure it, then I can basically create a metric to say this domain is worth X at a minimum. What that does is it gives me the ability to anchor the value on some indisputable price. And then from there we can negotiate. And from there, maybe you don't have the budget, maybe it's not the right timing, maybe you're just not willing to pay that price, but at least we can't dispute that it's worth that. What I say all the time is that price and value are two very different things, and particularly in the domain name world. But in basically any, let's say.
- [32:07]
B
Any.
- [32:07]
A
Industry where price discovery is not clear, there's not a lot of liquidity, then price almost never equals value. Generally the price will fall below value. Today, it's quite often on the best domain names that the price exceeds value because there's many people trying to chase that same domain or because there's many companies that all want to shorten their brand to that domain and because more and more people understand how valuable it is. Covid was sort of a turning point for the whole industry because once everything went online, everybody sort of realized like, oh, wait, this is my store now. This is my office now. Oh wait, the place I communicate with my employees even is on my domain name through my email or through a, you know, zoom link that has my brand in it or, you know, whatever, right? And so more and more people realize that actually their company's brand was their domain name. In a digital world, your brand is your domain, right? So and if it's not dot com, then the brand is kind of encumbered, right? Because if you're, let's say.xyz or you're AI, well then that kind of has to become a part of your brand because otherwise people just assume Apple can only just be Apple because they have apple.com. amazon can only be Amazon because they're Amazon.com otherwise you'd have to say, we're Amazon XYZ or Amazon AI or whatever it might be. Anyways, Rosener equation. What I realized was that I try to work always from first principles. And I thought about, what is it doing? A domain is a way of getting a human being with some kind of intent to a destination on the Internet that can fulfill that intent, whether it's E commerce, whether it's news, whether it's media, whatever it might be. And so the better that domain name is at getting that person from their intention to their destination, the more valuable that domain name is. And we can measure that value based on how many people are trying to get to that destination. So if we look at cars coming back to car insurance, you know, I don't know, maybe there's four or five hundred thousand people a month that just type car insurance into Google, and that's in the US Alone. And every time somebody does that and then they click on a link, if it's a paid link in Google, then that advertiser is paying Google, like somewhere between, let's say 150 and maybe $500 per click, depending on the location, depending on the time of day, depending on a whole bunch of factors, it's a very expensive click. And so what if you were CarInsurance.com and you didn't have to pay Google because you could rank number one, right? This was the origin. This thing has evolved over time, but this is a good way of understanding how it works and where it came from. Right? So you think, okay, well that's just for easy numbers and for the sake of public math, so I don't look stupid, let's call it $100 per cl. And let's say 500,000 people per month search for car insurance. Okay, so 500,000 times $100 a click is $5 million, right? So no, $50 million. So it's, is that right?
- [35:37]
B
I don't know, I'm not a math person. Public math, it's very expensive, whatever it is, very expensive.
- [35:43]
A
Right. And so then you, it's like, okay, well that's, that's how much it costs per month for advertisers to get that traffic on their website. If you rank number one in Google organically without paying Google, you can expect to get somewhere between 20, 25% of the clicks. So let's just say, you know, take whatever that number was. Let's just say it's five million bucks divided by five, that's 20%. Now you're at a million bucks. Okay, that's $1 million for one month that you're saving. Multiply that by 12. Now you have $12 million in annual savings. And then it's really easy from there. It's like, okay, in your industry, you know, if you were doing an M and A deal, if you're buying another business, how many year multiple would you pay for that business? And in most businesses it's going to be anywhere from three to eight years. Okay. And I like to be conservative. So let's say three to five. Let's say three. Okay? So a three year multiple of that $12 million in savings is $36 million. So basically what you're doing is you're decreasing your cost, your cost of customer acquisition by $36 million over a three year period of time.
- [37:01]
B
Okay.
- [37:02]
A
You know, for all the geeks out there, they're going to come and they're going to beat me up on my public math. They're going to beat me up on some of the logic. I'm trying to give a very back of the napkin, simplified version, but that's.
- [37:12]
B
How you get to the value of what then you charge for this domain, correct?
- [37:16]
A
Exactly, exactly. And so it's easy to then say like car insurance.com, it's worth $36 million. And coincidentally I think actually it sold for $36 million.
- [37:25]
B
Oh, wow.
- [37:26]
A
So that's kind of the way to think about it is that a domain name is a way of. It's a proxy for trust on the Internet. When somebody sees a great domain name, they inherently generally trust that brand. Okay, and so what are you doing when you have increased trust? You're increasing your conversion rate. So on the one hand, your domain name is going to help you increase customer acquisition through increased traffic, and then it's going to help you increase your conversion rate on that traffic by increasing trust, perceived trust. And then the rest is up to you. You guys still got to have good product, you still got to have good, you know, media design, all the other things that come with a good business. But what we, as a, you know, representing domain names, what we can do for you is help you get more organic traffic and increase the conversion on that traffic, and that decreases your cost of customer acquisition, which is one of the most important metrics that every business measures. How do you get more people to listen to your podcast? There's some formula that you think about or, you know, consciously or subconscious or unconsciously that, you know, has a dollar value, and that dollar value can be mirrored in the value of the domain name that can help you do that.
- [38:51]
B
Okay, so here's my next question with that, because there's. Throughout decades, let's say that I've been looking. First of all, let's talk about your own names. Right. If I go to rachelukatel.com actually someone else owns it, which I think is crazy. Yeah. And I was told that, like, that's considered squatting or something. Can you explain that rule to me? And they said that that's illegal and I could actually get it. That true.
- [39:15]
A
So it's, it's, it's very nuanced. Okay. I will preface this with I am not a lawyer. I don't play one on the Internet. So this is not legal advice. And if you, you know, you should seek legal advice if you need it. Okay. But generally speaking, there are two ways to approach this. There is a law which addresses cyber squatting. It was introduced, I believe in 1997is 696. 97, 98. Somewhere. That.
- [39:42]
B
Is that just for. For names or for businesses too?
- [39:45]
A
That's for. So it's specifically for trademarks. If you have a trademark which does not necessarily need to be registered, there are common law marks. Just even if you don't have your name registered as a trademark, which you probably don't. Most people don't.
- [40:03]
B
Right.
- [40:04]
A
You are still using it commercially. And so you have common law rights and to your name because you use it as a business name. And so because you are operating a business under that name, you have common law rights to that name. And so yes, you have rights that you could pursue. And if that person cannot demonstrate that they have rights to own that name, meaning they're not named Rachel Utitel, then you have, let's say, enforceable rights. Now there are nuances to that. For example, if that person is a fan, there is, you know, the pub there is, there is sort of public domain when it comes to names. You can buy the name of a celebrity, you can even buy the name of some brands. Like there's a, I think a classic case with like the Ford Mustang, right? If you, somebody was a major fan of Ford Mustangs and they started an online forum where people came together to talk about their Ford Mustang and share pictures and whatever and they weren't monetizing it. There was no monetization, they weren't selling ads, people weren't paying a subscription. And so it was just basically called a fan site. And if people are using it for that, that reason, then that is a legitimate use.
- [41:18]
B
Okay?
- [41:19]
A
They're not using it commercially, they're using it actually in the shadow of you and your brand. So if that person wants to fan site that would be considered legitimate use as long as they didn't, you know, monetize it. If they were monetizing off of your brand, then you know, you got a great case. And again, I say there's two ways to approach this. One is the like call it, you know, civil law. Okay. Which is, you know, I'm gonna go file this cyber squatting lawsuit against you which bears I think a minimum $100,000 fine. And you get the domain if you win. Right. But then there's also this really simplified approach that came later because brands didn't want to wait, that you know, a lawsuit can take a long time and it costs a ton of money on both sides. And so brands, advertisers wanted a simplified way to get these domains that people were squatting on. And then at that time there was a lot of people squatting and abusing this, this, this, abusing these domains and abusing these brands. So what came out of that was a kind of like, what do you call it? I want to say arbitrage. But no, what's like instead of a court, instead of going to court you can.
- [42:36]
B
Arbitration arbitration. Yeah.
- [42:42]
A
I will tell you, I'm not as sharp As I might usually be because I'm doing a detox this month. I'm doing a sober October. And as a part of that, I stopped drinking coffee. And I'm generally like an 8 to 10 coffee a day kind of guy. So, you know, my brain is like at a 5 or a 6 where it's normally racing at like a 12.
- [43:01]
B
Oh, you look great.
- [43:04]
A
Thank you. I have to say, I feel great. The first five days was pretty rough, but I feel great. I actually feel really good.
- [43:13]
B
Yeah, you have a good glow.
- [43:14]
A
Thank you. So they came up with this thing called the UDRP Uniform Dispute Resolution Protocol. I think that's what it stands. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's what it stands for. Udrp. And what that is is basically an arbitration process where a bunch of intellectual property attorneys are these arbiters, and they, you know, I think it's like, it costs somewhere between depends on if you want one. You can select if you want one or three panel of judges, and then you can file a case. And the whole process takes anywhere from two to four months, let's say. So it's relatively fast. And you basically file a case, you say you have to prove three things. You have to say, look, this domain name is confusingly similar or exactly my brand, which I have a trademark for or I have otherwise civil, you know, rights for. They are using it in a way to, you know, abuse my brand. And at the time that they bought it, they bought it knowing that I existed and with the intent of either abusing my brand or trying to sell it to me.
- [44:38]
B
Okay?
- [44:39]
A
So if you can prove those three elements, then you win and you get the domain name. And it cost you, you know, a few grand. Maybe it costs you, let's say, twenty five hundred dollars, and you might cost three to five grand for a lawyer.
- [44:50]
B
Right. So it falls within the trademark issues, too. And I mean, I feel like we've heard something outside of court. Outside of court. Right. But I mean, it's interesting because I think we've heard a couple of these things where I'm forgetting the name of her makeup line, but the girl who's married to Justin Bieber, I'm also forgetting her name.
- [45:07]
A
Oh, Hailey Bieber.
- [45:09]
B
Yes. Has, like a makeup line. And there was a whole issue with that and the trademark and the domain name. But anyways, I digress.
- [45:16]
A
It's funny that you bring, you bring, you bring the Biebers up. I, I, I, you know, I'm, I'm Drew. My, my name is Andrew Rosner, but I Go by Drew mostly. And I own Drew.com and Justin Bieber. For whatever reason, I think his middle name is Drew. He launched this whole brand, this clothing brand and this whole lifestyle brand called Drew. And so anyways, we've been approached a few times by various lawyers who I think represent him trying to buy the domain. It's like, I feel bad, like, but you know, like, dude, domain names.
- [45:53]
B
Wait, what are you doing with. What are you doing with dot com?
- [45:58]
A
I use it for email. You know, it's my personal email. And you know, I've got a very basic bio site that is very old that needs to be updated. Actually, I. It's actually some. One of the sort of projects that's on the side burner here that we're working on. I gotta do an updated version of it. But I love it. I love owning it.
- [46:15]
B
But so this is what I'm saying. That's why I said andrew.com. okay, well, that makes sense. But so. But now there's a major value because Justin Bieber wants it. That. That obviously creates value too, right? I mean, if somebody. So it's by demand.
- [46:29]
A
There's only one and you can't have there, you know, there's no way to.
- [46:33]
B
Have another one, you know, so is there a number that it becomes doable?
- [46:37]
A
I mean, so generally speaking, I would tell you that everything has a price. I mean that if there's one thing that I have learned in this business is that that is not a cliche. Yeah, everything has a price I deal.
- [46:53]
B
With, except for drew.com and so, but.
- [46:56]
A
You know, drew.com is tricky. Like I've been offered $2 million for it. And I told them flat out, no, no way. Well, I mean, like, look, I. It's my personal email. It's tied to so many different things. And you know, again, like, domains are my thing. You know, like domains are. All my success has been built on domain names. And so, like, for me to sell Drew.com is kind of like, I don't know, it's almost like a sellout. And so I. It would take a serious number.
- [47:27]
B
Like what a great story that would be.
- [47:29]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you want to pay me a serious number, Justin, you know, hit me up. You know where to find me.
- [47:35]
B
Exactly. Or maybe you could help broker a different one like drew clothing.com or what.
- [47:41]
A
I think you've got like Drew House, which is so weird.
- [47:43]
B
Okay. Yes. No one even never heard of it.
- [47:46]
A
Yeah, exactly.
- [47:48]
B
Okay, so when. When the average person though, is going to start their little business Small business, big business, whatever it is, they go on GoDaddy or one of these sites and they're looking for what's available, and they will see these things and it's like a dollar or whatever, and it might be similar to what they want, so they go with it. There are times when they really want something that's not available and it says, call this number and we can broker it for you. Whatever. That's happened to me before. And for example, when we were looking at. I think our website is Misunderstood Podcast, we really wanted Misunderstood spelled with M I S S understood dot com. But one was when I looked last. I don't think anyone was actually using it. Or maybe it was a clothing line, I can't really remember. It was something sort of irrelevant, not to be rude, but it wasn't. I think we may have called them or called someone to figure it out. And we didn't get anywhere. And I wanted to start the website, so I just went with Misunderstood Podcast, whatever. So the question is, is this where someone like you comes in that you do big and small, or are you only working with Elon Musk and his friends doing big domains?
- [48:55]
A
So on the domain acquisition side, our business is more or less 50 50. So let's say half of the. Half the business is, you know, representing companies to help them get their domain names. You know, we are the ones that got x.com for Elon and many other of his company names. You know, we've gotten Zoom.com, which, you know, we're recording this on Zoom.com, we sold to Zoom, you know, many of the biggest brands that you would have heard of. Big domains, we're responsible for that. We do quite a large percentage of the market share of aftermarket domain sales, particularly on the high end. But on the domain acquisition side, we actually do a ton of domain acquisitions for small brands. We really don't care. On the acquisition side, we'll help, you know, companies like, we literally, we just did a deal for five grand. And it's funny because it's actually for enormous company, but, you know, the domain was five grand, and so it's not a particularly valuable domain, but it was for them for that moment. So we basically will help big, small, and everywhere in between. On the domain acquisition side, on the main sales side, we really only work on the world's best domain names. So we're talking, you know, I used to say $100,000 and up. Today it's more like $250,000 and up. And so most of our sales are probably 500,000 and up. Our average sale is probably close to a million dollars, give or take 20%. So, you know, we've got sales on the outbound sales side, you know, anywhere from, let's say, 250 grand to $15 million. So we're quite picky on the domains on the outbound selling side, but on the acquisition side, we don't care. Good, bad, doesn't matter what the domain is. You know, we have a minimum fee, 2500 bucks. You know, it's pretty reasonable and we'll help anybody.
- [50:56]
B
Okay, so wait, explain this to me with, for example, Zoom. Did they come to you? They already had their brand name and you happen to own it or you knew how to find it, or you were like, let's come up with a random name like that?
- [51:07]
A
Yeah, in the case of Zoom.com, i happened to own it and they came to me.
- [51:11]
B
How did you own that? Like, were they in business?
- [51:15]
A
We own a lot of very valuable domains.
- [51:17]
B
But hold on. Was Zoom in business when you. When you bought it?
- [51:20]
A
No.
- [51:21]
B
So you just figured this random word is going to be valuable?
- [51:25]
A
All words are valuable. Maybe not today, but at some point.
- [51:30]
B
Okay, but that's got to be one of your best stories of, like, I picked a random word and it happened to be what everyone come. That word comes out of. Everyone.
- [51:37]
A
I mean, Zoom. I mean, Zoom is, you know, have the Mazda commercial. Zoom. Zoom. Yeah. You know, there's Zoom photography.
- [51:44]
B
Zoom. Okay, maybe.
- [51:45]
A
Yeah. Zoom is actually a very, you know, it's actually a very popular branding term. And so actually I bought that domain. I paid quite a bit of money for it because I thought this is an incredibly valuable domain because there's like, I don't remember, but I think at that time there was like seven companies that were worth a billion dollars or more that had Zoom in their name or their name was Zoom. Right. And so it was like, at some point, one of these companies needs to upgrade their brand and they're going to come to me and they're going to want to buy it and they're going to pay me millions of dollars for the domain.
- [52:19]
B
And did they?
- [52:20]
A
Oh, yeah.
- [52:22]
B
Okay, good for you. I love that. And the same thing with, with x.
- [52:26]
A
Zoom.Com paid for this house. Thank you, Zoom. Love that.
- [52:31]
B
And talk about work. Can you talk about working with Elon or do you have, like, an idea?
- [52:35]
A
No, I really don't like, just, you know, out of respect, I don't, I don't like to go.
- [52:39]
B
Not about working with him. But, I mean, picking the name X, is that something you guys helped pick?
- [52:44]
A
What? I can't say. I mean, Elon. Elon was the original. Well, actually, there was this lawyer that originally owned it in, like, the early 90s, and then Elon bought it from him and was building, basically a competitor, PayPal. So it was that Peter Thiel was building PayPal, Elon was building X. They were both trying to do the same thing. Then they joined forces. They had an epic battle over who, you know, which name they were going to choose. Was it going to be called X or was it going to be called PayPal? They went with PayPal, but then PayPal owned X dot com, then they sold the company to eBay, and then eBay spun it off, and it went public on its own. And then the. You know, I don't want to go into the details of how the deal happened, but, you know, ultimately, then, you know, I got a knock saying, hey, do you have somebody that might want to buy X? I kind of thought Elon might want it, and he did, and he bought it. But that was actually, I want to say, like, 2017.
- [53:45]
B
Okay.
- [53:46]
A
It was actually way before Elon launched X or way before he bought Twitter. You know, he had this thing and wasn't. I mean, I don't know what he might have been using it for email. I have no idea what he was using it for. But from the time he bought it, it was basically dormant for years until he turned it into what everybody knows, ex.com now.
- [54:06]
B
Yeah. All right, so you've done a ton of these deals. Was there. Was there one story, or is there one story from a major deal that really sticks with you that you are allowed to tell us about?
- [54:21]
A
God, I have so many stories. I have so many stories. You know, in my line of work, you kind of. You know where all the bodies are buried on the Internet, Right?
- [54:28]
B
I know.
- [54:35]
A
I have to give it some thought. Let me give you some thought.
- [54:39]
B
Okay. So I know some of these things.
- [54:42]
A
I have so many stories, but, like, I do have a lot of NDAs, so it's a little tricky to, like, you know, figure it out.
- [54:47]
B
But think about it as we. As we finish this up, and if it's something. Okay, I want to talk about scaling your. Your PR team tells me that you built an $800 million business with just six people. Is that true?
- [55:00]
A
We've done $800 million in domain sales over the last. Whatever it is, 15 years. So we sell these days. Let's say the last two, three years, we do roughly $100 million in domain sales a year.
- [55:15]
B
Wow.
- [55:16]
A
I was a one man t. Well, my wife actually started it with me. So it was me and my wife. My wife, my graduating picture, my grandmother slapping my hand, saying, my wife and I. My wife and I in the early days. And then we realized, you know, we got to separate church and state. And then it was basically just me. And then I hired my first employee, and it was just the two of us for, I don't know, three or four years. And then I hired my first, you know, other broker, Chris Zeicher. So Chris joined me. I want to say maybe it's now might be close to 10 years, seven, eight years, something like that. And so that was just three of us today were, I guess, six.
- [56:05]
B
So what's the secret to that scaling with such a low head?
- [56:08]
A
And all my competitors are like, you know, 60 people, or, you know, they're not even close. Like, we do, you know, we're like head and shoulders selling more domains than anybody else in the world. And all of our competitors are like, much bigger in terms of the team size, in terms of administrative staff. I don't know what my secret is other than I know I probably work harder and I'm more passionate than most people I've ever met in any business. And I think most of the people that work with me also reflect that attitude. And we're really efficient. Like, I would say we're really bad at customer service. Like, I. And it's literally one of the first things I tell people when they want to. When we're, you know, having an initial conversation whether they should hire us. I don't really do customer service. Like, the reason you're hiring me is either to help you get a domain or help you sell a domain. If I'm not going to be your friend, I don't want to be your friend. I'm not here to, like, chat.
- [57:12]
B
You don't need the daily check ins.
- [57:14]
A
I don't want a daily check. If you need a daily check in, I got another phone number to give you. You like, I'm not going to hold your hand. That's not what I do. I am like a special ops. You know, we are. I. I say we're like Seal Team 6 for domains. Like, you hire us, you give us a mission, we go do that mission. And you will not hear from us until the mission is complete or we need more feedback. Right? That's it. And so that's the way we operate. And it's super efficient. You know, People get really caught up in marketing. I don't do marketing. I've never marketed. I don't do advertising. I don't do marketing.
- [57:49]
B
How do people find you?
- [57:51]
A
Because we're really good at what we do. And then our customers tell their friends who are also successful entrepreneurs or executives. You know, man, I'm having trouble with this domain thing. And, you know, somebody squatting on my domain, and they're like, oh, I've got a guy. And so, you know.
- [58:09]
B
But do they also come to you and say, I need help with creating a name. Can you help me sometimes?
- [58:14]
A
Yep. Yep. Back in the day, it used to be very common.
- [58:17]
B
Today.
- [58:19]
A
Less so. But, yeah, I mean, I would say, you know, few times a month, we got somebody that comes in. You know, it's not my favorite just because, you know, it turns into a fishing expedition. Somebody says, come in. You know, I've got a budget of X. You know, I'm looking for a domain. What can you do for me? And it's like, all right, well, let's, you know, here's some ideas, and we'll go through these iterations of. Here are the branding ideas, and we're good at it, and we, you know, we have a really good overview of the market. And if you go to a branding company, I always laugh because people still do this. I think these are literally the worst company in the world is a branding company. Like, you go to a branding company, you pay them 100 grand, 250 grand, sometimes 500 grand to come up with a brand. And they say, okay, Rachel, here's the brand for you. It's going to be, you know, the podcast is going to be called whatever, right? Here's your brand. You know, they give you a little piece of paper, describes the brand. It gives you sort of a, you know, an outline of what's the, you know, all the details around the brand, you know, a mood board of the brand, and the rest is up to you. And it's not that, you know, they might have cleared it to say that you could get a trademark for this brand in your field. That's it. They don't know if the domain is available. They don't care if the domain is available. And they don't realize it, really. Branding today in a digital world has to start with a domain. It's not available. Don't even bother telling me that. That's my brand. And so we are brand. We're domain first, right? So we don't want to talk about a brand unless the domain can be Acquired, maybe it's in use, but it's in use by somebody that's underutilizing it. And we think you can afford or it's in your budget to, you know, help them get onto a new domain or rebrand their business also or, you know, or just to acquire the domain name that matches that brand. So we're domain first and then we work backwards from there into what, you know, what options there are for your brand. So we go through these iterations of various, you know, ideas. We generally will provide like a list of, let's say, 20 different domain names. And we'll say, I don't even care if any of these are like the right fit for you. What I want to know is what are the ones you hate and what are the ones that sort of are in the direction you like, if any. And you know, that way I can sort of gauge because it's very difficult for people to tell me what they want, but if I give them a list of just a bunch of options and say, you know, kind of score these, like, I hate this. I hate this. This is okay, kind of love this. This isn't a perfect fit, but this is the direction I'm going. Hate this. Then I know from experience, you know, which direction to take that exercise and then create a new list that are more like the ones that they highlighted. And then we'll go through that and we'll go through two, three, four iterations of that, sometimes many more. And it can be a very time consuming process. And we don't charge. The only thing we charge for is the domain acquisition. And so it can be a fishing expedition because it's like, okay, we've narrowed down some of these domains. Now we have to go out and get pricing on, let's say maybe five domains or 10 domains. That in itself can be time consuming. We narrow it down, you know, now we've got a list of, let's say five that have, you know, that are priced within the budget you've given me. You pick one, we negotiate it, we close a deal, we get paid a percentage based on the actual final deal. If we aren't successful, we get paid nothing. So it's not my favorite, but we do those exercises a couple times a month.
- [62:06]
B
Got it. Okay, where do you see the digital asset world in 5 or 10 years? Where are we headed? And is bitcoin and crypto like, is everything going to be dot bit or something?
- [62:19]
A
Great questions related. Basically, let's say domain names, digital assets up and to the right, meaning if you're looking at a chart and you're looking at data, price or value, it's going, you know, it's a, it's an exponential curve up and to the right. And the reason for that, obviously people say, oh, you're, you know, you're selling your own book. Well, you know, I've been doing this for roughly 30 years, 27 years, and it's only gone up into the right since day one. And I think that's only going to continue because, look, you still have, I think, something like 60% of the world that's not online. And so every year, something like 5 to 10% more of the world goes online. That's more competition. And the people that start at the bottom gradually work their way up to the top. And the people that get to the top, they need great brands, they need great domains. And so I always tell people, like, it's fine to start with a.xyz or a.co or a AI or whatever. I call it training wheels. You need to, you know, you need to crawl before you run. And so start with that. See if your business gets legs. And then if it does, you should put on your big boy pants and upgrade to the dot com, and that's where we can help you. And so it's just more and more of that, and more businesses are digital, less businesses are brick and mortar. Since COVID as I mentioned, you know, more and more people don't even go to an office. Your office is your domain. It's where you meet, right? The place you meet your investor, the place you meet your customer, your vendor. Everything is digital. And so as that trend continues, and it will continue, that is a certainty. It's just supply and demand, right? We're not. There's only so many semantically meaningful words, semantically meaningful brands with a dot com on the end of it, right? And so that supply is constricted, the spillover goes into all these other extensions or people put a prefix or a suffix. You know, you, you couldn't get Misunderstood. So you said Misunderstood podcast, right? But maybe some someday you want to upgrade to misunderstood. And that's, that's the life cycle of a brand. And so it's just more and more competition for the top. And so, you know, it's, it's, you know, the fat end of the curve is messy. It's all the alternative extensions which gets into that, you know, dot bit, right? So in 2026, ICANN, and I don't want to get too technical because people get bored, but ICANN is the governing body of the Internet. It's one of the most important organizations in the world that nobody's ever heard of. And they control basically the Internet, but they control that whole naming space. Okay. And so in 2012, they opened that up and allowed brands to apply for their dot brand. Some brands got their dot brand, like, you know, dot Google. Right. Google actually just wrote an article last week about, you know, how brands should own their dot brand. So dot Amazon, Amazon, for example, has been in a legal battle with, like, the countries that actually control and surround the Amazon Basin rainforest, whether that Amazon, the business can own Amazon, or whether Amazon should be protected for the use of this geographical region, an important global resource. And so it's been a giant legal battle. And I think maybe recently Amazon maybe won that and they had to make a bunch of concessions and, you know, they're going to make huge donations.
- [66:12]
B
What do you mean? It would be like, Amazon, Amazon. Is that what you're saying?
- [66:16]
A
Yeah, which again, you know, doesn't make a lot of sense. Like, I don't think anybody's ever going to say, you know, ooh, isn't that great if I'm Amazon, Amazon, like, that's redundant and silly.
- [66:27]
B
But maybe it's like shipping Amazon or something. It's like.
- [66:30]
A
Exactly.
- [66:31]
B
Yeah, exactly.
- [66:32]
A
Secondary tertiary brands and services, maybe internal use. There's a whole bunch of different reasons why it is actually useful. It also becomes kind of interesting for email, but, you know, email, Amazon.
- [66:50]
B
Right.
- [66:50]
A
That's kind of cool, right?
- [66:51]
B
Oh, yeah, that is good. I like that. So you're saying it's not too late, though, to be an investor, that people can still get involved and buy things, but not by necessarily going on like what I said before, like a godaddy, but on going to these auctions. Right, yeah.
- [67:07]
A
So let me just quickly finish that thought because I want to finish. No, I, I just want to answer the question you originally asked, which is about, you know, bit, for example, just as an example. So ICANN has now opened up the window. In 2026, there will be a new round for people to apply. So anybody that wants to can pay a $200,000 application fee. And yeah, so it's 200 or 220 or something. Like last time it was 180 and now it's 200 something. So you pay this application fee. You. It's, you know, it's quite a process. You got to hire, you know, domain attorney, probably, or, you know, there are various services that do this. They call them registry services. And you Hire one of these people. You, you file your application, whether it's your dot brand or some other dot whatever. Generic. Right. In the case of dot bit, for example, I think dot bit and dot btc dot bitcoin dot crypto dot, you know, whatever, all of these things, I think these are going to be some of the most competitive, let's say domain extensions in this next round. And when more than one party wants the same extension, it goes to an auction. And these things can go for a lot of money. In the last round, for example, multiple parties wanted web, arguably web is maybe the second best. Let's say generic domain extension after dot com. Right. It's just, you know, it's simple. It doesn't have any implication. It's just a web destination. And so that ended up going for. I don't remember the exact number. Again, I probably should. If I was drinking my coffee, I probably would remember. I don't know. I think it was like 100, it was, it was over $100 million. So 120, $140 million that this thing went for. Right. But you know, Verisign won it. And Verisign is public company. They're the ones that control the contract for.com.net.tv if you want.
- [69:23]
B
They're paying that to then who the government or whoever you said is owner.
- [69:26]
A
Well, in this, this time around, it looks like that money will go to icann.
- [69:31]
B
Icann, okay.
- [69:32]
A
Which is, you know, a non governmental organization, you know, that sort of governs the Internet and looks out for, you know, consumers and commercial enterprises that utilize that Internet. In the last round, however, there was all these third party auctions and there was some very clever. The guy that created the auction mechanism actually won a Nobel Prize a few years ago. But they created this very clever auction mechanism whereby basically the winning bidder paid whatever the second highest bidder, whatever the second highest bid was. The winning bidder paid that price, not the bid they made, but the price of the second highest bidder. And then the money, some portion of it went to icann, but the vast majority, lion's share, got distributed on a pro rata basis to all of the other people that participated in the auction. Oh, so if you were a loser in the auction, you were still a winner. And so, you know, the really smart money, which unfortunately I was not a part of, I was super against this. I was like, I was thinking about it like a domain investor and I was like, dot horse, I don't need it. Why somebody need horse without insurance? Like I Don't need it. So I was thinking about kind of like a domain investor, which was the 100% wrong attitude. From a registry business perspective, this was the greatest cash machine opportunity. I don't even, I mean basically you're getting a monopoly on a namespace and you charge indefinitely and collect passive income on the return, the renewals. Right. It's a quite incredible opportunity and that's why 200 grand is a lot of money. But you know, for a well heeled investor or business, it's, it's really a tremendous opportunity. So let's say, I don't know, I bet you there will be 50 companies competing to get dot bit or dot BTC or dot Bitcoin. There'll be 200 companies trying to get dot crypto and you know, probably crypto.com will try to get dot crypto.
- [71:43]
B
No, and just so I'm understanding they're paying the $200,000 fee just to apply to get into this, but then they have.
- [71:49]
A
That's just table stakes.
- [71:51]
B
Got it. Okay, got it.
- [71:52]
A
That's just, that's just, you know, that's just.
- [71:54]
B
They've got to come to the table with some money to really get this. Okay.
- [71:57]
A
Now you know, if you're, I don't know, I'm just looking for, looking around, you know. Okay, I got some vitamins on my desk. Nordic. Okay, so let's say you want to get DOT Nordic and you're the only one that wants Nordic. It's probably not going to be a lot of competition for Nordic.
- [72:13]
B
But like my fiance's in the security world, like he has four companies, maybe they want DOT security, whatever.
- [72:19]
A
Yeah, I think there's already a DOT security. But if, if there isn't then definitely there will be companies that want DOT security.
- [72:24]
B
But, but now, so if there is just using this example, somebody that owns it is that when somebody like you as a broker comes in and then starts getting involved in that after they go through the whole process or. No, brokers aren't doing that anymore.
- [72:38]
A
So again, so what I work on is the stuff to the left of the dot.
- [72:42]
B
I got it. I got it.
- [72:43]
A
Right. Did you see this is really controlling the part that's to the right of the dot.
- [72:48]
B
Okay.
- [72:49]
A
Dot com is to the right of the dot. Apple is to the left of the dot.
- [72:52]
B
Got it. Totally different.
- [72:54]
A
Yeah. So you're going to have these auctions. These are very controlled, you know, things. There's no brokers and there are middlemen that, let's say guide the customers. But there's not really a broker.
- [73:08]
B
So once it's owned, it's really owned.
- [73:11]
A
Yeah, yeah. Once you've got it, you got it. And as long as you follow, you know, stay within the terms of, you know, there are guidelines provided to you by ICANN that you have to abide by. You know, you have to be licensed and bonded and all this stuff and you have to manage the registry. And you know, there's, there's a lot to this. You have, you know, privacy laws in Europe and you have to abide by those. And you have privacy laws in Europe, in the US that are different abide by those. And you have takedown notices for illegal content and takedown notices for people infringing on copyright and you have to control all this. And so, you know, there is an administrative element to this that is controlled and it's, you know, it's regulated, but you own that entire namespace and everybody that wants, you know, a friend of mine owns xyz that has turned out to be an incredibly successful namespace because for whatever reason, a lot of these web three crypto businesses have adopted XYZ as their own for whatever reason. And so there's just been this explosion. Well, even Google, the parent company of Google Alphabet, they were the first major company to use XYZ and they got ABC xyz, which they thought was sort of a tongue in cheek fun way of, of being the primary web address for Alphabet, the parent company. And so since then, XYZ got more and more popular and now you've got a very healthy speculative domain investor community that chases after xyz. You've got businesses using them. And so that's become a very healthy, very large namespace. I don't know the numbers, but let's say there's a million XYZ domains registered and let's just say that on average they cost 8 bucks, 10 bucks. You know, that namespace pulls in 10 million. And I bet it's actually quite a bit more than that because many of these cost much more to renew every year.
- [75:23]
B
Right?
- [75:25]
A
10 million plus in basically passive income. Now if you want to market XYZ or you want to market your domain extension to the broader universe to try to get more people to register it. You've got marketing costs, you've got some employees, but most of the people I know, they run these registries with a pretty limited staff and you know, they're using a third party back end and software and you know, there's some legal costs. And so it's, it's It's a pretty good business. It's a cash machine, but you got to have something people want. I bought one. I had Dot Juegos. I used to live in Panama for a long time. And when I left the fish seafood business, actually, we. We moved to Panama for 10 years and not then seven or eight years ago, I moved to Portugal.
- [76:13]
B
But by the way, on a side note with that, I just want to tell you, I just got back from Panama. I went and did stem cells in Panama at a place.
- [76:19]
A
Amazing. Yeah.
- [76:20]
B
Called Origins. I fell in love with Panama, first of all. I didn't even know where Panama was on a map. Okay. It was so amazing.
- [76:29]
A
And the belly button of the Americas.
- [76:31]
B
I am not a foodie. I could eat Lucky Charms and be totally fine. They had the best food I've ever had. I love the people. It was just such an amazing place to go. So. Sorry. Sidebar.
- [76:43]
A
Go on. Yeah, it was even better back when I. When I moved there and I moved there in 2008, and it was just amazing. It was an amazing, amazing place to live. I, I still. My daughter was born in Panama. She's got Panamanian passport. I. It's a. It's a. It's a place very near and dear to my heart. But I like Portugal even more. But, yes, Panama is amazing and great restaurants. Panama is not anything like what people imagine it to be.
- [77:09]
B
No, not at all.
- [77:10]
A
You've got the Caribbean and the Pacific. You've got some of the best surfing in the world. You've got, you know, it's. It's really a cool place.
- [77:17]
B
Yeah.
- [77:17]
A
Best fishing, full stop. I. I love fishing. I've never seen anything like it. You go out. I would go out tuna fishing in Panama and we'd catch like 30 tuna in two hours.
- [77:29]
B
Oh, no way.
- [77:30]
A
Yeah. It's crazy.
- [77:31]
B
So, anyway, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you.
- [77:34]
A
That's right. But I did lose my train of thought.
- [77:37]
B
Now. I did, too. You were talking about something good. We were talking about. Well, originally, I guess I had asked if it's too late for investors and people to get involved. And that's where you were kind of wrapping up with that.
- [77:47]
A
Yeah. So I think that in 2026, there will be this opportunity for people to get these new domain extensions. I think that's a great opportunity for the right people, right businesses, I think brands. I would encourage them to own it. I don't even know. I don't know if we know today exactly why you want to own it. We know some of the reasons But I think in the future domain names are going to become even more fundamental, particularly as we start having this AI agent world where these AI agents are sort of navigating the Internet for us in various ways. I think domains are going to become extremely fundamental. I think every AI agent will have its own domain name. I think every machine that's connected to the Internet, this whole concept of Internet of things, every one of those has an IP address and will have a domain name so that you can interact with it. And so I think the expansion of the utility of domain names is only getting started. You brought up crypto. I think that, look, you can take your domain name and turn it into a crypto wallet today. So using, you know, again, I don't want to geek out, but like using some of the utilities on the back end of a domain name called the DNS, the domain name servers, these are specific things that A record, the text records the C names. There's various things that help you point a domain name to do the thing you want it to do, to set up email, to point to your AWS server, to whatever you're going to be able to basically using that, that turn the domain name into your crypto wallet. So I can have drew.com and it's like, oh, hey Rachel, you know, you're gonna send me a hundred bucks a bitcoin. Well, you can send it to drew.com.
- [79:33]
B
Got it.
- [79:33]
A
I don't need to give you this long string of letters and numbers that are case sensitive. You know, that's a disaster. That's like a really good way for people to lose their money. That stuff is not built for the mainstream yet. Right. But when we are you. When people are, you know, regularly utilizing domain names for their crypto wallet, I think that becomes a really good way for people to more safely transfer crypto, whether it's bitcoin or otherwise, between each other. I think that there are, again, I don't want to get too technical and geek out, but like, I think there's going to be these geospatial ways like drones that we can actually control drones using the DNS features. There's a lot of really crazy out there things that people are working on right now using a domain name. And so domain names are going to become more valuable because they're going to have more utility and there's going to be more people, more machines, more AI agents that need them and want them. And so, yeah, I don't think it's too late at all. I mean, if I thought it was too late, I wouldn't still be buying domains, and I'm still buying a lot of domains.
- [80:42]
B
Got it. All right, last question. What advice would you give someone listening who wants to build wealth in this new landscape?
- [80:48]
A
It, this could be a whole podcast in and of itself. So, you know, I think domain names are kind of like the way our parents thought of real estate or land being like the fundamental thing to put your money into. Right. I, I, I had somebody once tell me, you know, you got to put your money in the sun, meaning if you earn money, you save it. Don't keep it in a bank by land so that it's, you know, under the sun. And I think that was true. I think it's going to be less true going forward. I think that we're going to see a lot of pressure on real estate because insurance, property insurance is absolutely going to increase because there's more natural disasters, there's more insurance claims, there's more fires, there's more. Right. And just cost rising. And so as property insurance increases, that puts downward pressure on the value of real estate. As property taxes increase, that's going to put downward pressure on the value of real estate. I think property taxes are going to go up significantly because as businesses become more digital and can move, you know, Elon moved from California to Texas. Why there's no income tax. Well, that puts pressure on California because all the big businesses are leaving California and moving somewhere else because there's lower taxes. So how does California or any other jurisdiction, any other municipality, create a sustainable, predictable tax base which they need to sustain their municipality? Well, the only thing they can guarantee is that that land's not going anywhere. And so the place they have to capture that value is in property taxes. And so I think property taxes are going to significantly increase over the coming decades. I think that property insurance is going to significantly increase over the coming decade. And I think that we've already sort of hit a peak on how much of people's disposable income they can allocate to paying a mortgage and paying rent. And so I think that a lot of that value from commercial real estate and to, you know, to some extent, residential real estate is going to shift into the digital real estate world. We're already seeing that, and we even did a study to sort of prove that out. And that in my opinion, it's, it's a fact. And so I think that that trend will continue. And so I think that in the same way that people think about investing into real estate, they should Maybe start thinking about investing into domain names and other digital assets. You want things that are scarce when the money printer is going brrr and they're going to just keep increasing the money supply. You want things that can't be increased in supply so that there's more money chasing something that can't be increased. And so you want to own Bitcoin, you want to own gold, and you want to own domain names. In my mind, that's literally the magic triangle of the next decade and beyond. I don't like to think more the next five or ten years though, because I think, who knows, maybe we're on Mars. But over the next decade, the way I think about it personally, again, I'm also not a financial advisor and don't pretend to be one on the Internet. But the way that I think about building wealth today and for the next decade is you want to own scarce digital assets or scarce physical. Physical assets that cannot be turned into a liability. If property taxes and property insurance increase exponentially, your house that you think is this amazing asset can very quickly become a liability. Be right. And so I think gold, Bitcoin, and domain names are literally the three greatest investments that you can make for the next decade because they can't create more.
- [84:44]
B
Love it. And just quickly, for people, again, listening, if they're looking at domain names are the most valuable right now, still, the.
- [84:52]
A
Dot coms unequivocally and always will be, always will be. Trillions and trillions of dollars have been spent ingraining.com into the minds of consumers worldwide. And so, you know, you look at, look at the Fortune 1000. There's not one company in the Fortune 1000 that is not dot com.
- [85:11]
B
Right?
- [85:12]
A
There's a reason for that.
- [85:14]
B
Okay, so it's not like we're moving back to dot net or no.
- [85:18]
A
And everybody that's not in the Fortune 1000 aspires to be right.
- [85:22]
B
And so, so, but that's what I'm saying. Like misunderstood wasn't available Misunderstood podcast. But it might have been misunderstood.net was or something and I didn't want it. So I guess my question is, do you, do you just try to extend your word? Is that more valuable in the.com or getting pizza.net?
- [85:42]
A
I don't know that I would describe it in terms of value, but I would say that in my opinion, which is a quite well informed opinion, I think that adding a prefix or adding a suffix is better than choosing an alternative extension. It's easier to rebrand later. It's easier to Drop the prefix, drop the suffix. That looks like an upgrade. I think it's always better to use dot com. It's also one of the things that people we didn't talk about, but it's incredibly important and incredibly valuable is email. If your email can't be delivered, then what good is it? And most businesses rely on email not just to communicate, but also, like, for advertising, for security. And so anything except.com.net is good.org is great. But anything else, you're going to run into issues with email deliverability. And the reason is that spammers now use all these alternative domain extensions to send spam because it's easier and cheaper to get them. Right. You can register, you know, every couple months, there's a promotion from somebody. Get a dot XYZ for a dollar, get a dot info for a dollar, get, you know, get a dot horse for a dollar. And so a spammer goes out, they get a thousand, you know, domains, send out spam, they cycle through these domains, and then that whole namespace becomes less deliverable with these email providers because they're just trying to control spam.com is really the only one.org, net because it's so old, but net's always been like the redheaded stepchild of domains. It doesn't have its own identity anymore. It always feels like second place. Whereas org is like oh.org, it's like warm and fuzzy. And I trust it.com is like, okay, commercial entity. And the better it is, the more I trust it.
- [87:50]
B
Got it. Okay. Love hearing all that. Okay, finally. Zari, I know I've asked you so many questions. We've been going on forever. After all these big deals, what motivates you? What's next for you? What's, like, on your bucket list?
- [88:04]
A
Yeah, I ask myself this every day. Every day. I. I don't need to do this anymore. And so I asked myself, why? Why do I. And the truth is, I. I'm like, I'm an apex predator. I just, I love to make deals. I love making deals. And I do this because, you know, first off, I think I have the coolest domain. I think I have the coolest business in the world, like, or the business. The coolest job in the world. Like, if you think about my job every day, I'm dealing with some of the most important, some of the coolest, some most interesting, you know, entrepreneurs, scientists, investors in the world. I get to speak to people. Every person you could possibly think of. That's like, like a name Brand, in business, in science, in investing. Like, I probably have spoken to them right. At some point for some reason. And so I get to interact every day with really interesting people, and I can't imagine another business that would allow me to do that. And it's one of the things that I really love. I love chatting. I. You know, I don't want to keep going with questions. I could do this for five hours. I love chatting. I love talking to people. So that is a really awesome part of my business. I don't love demanding clients. That's the part I don't love anymore. But I really do love making deals. It's literally, like the biggest adrenaline rush for me. It's where I get my dopamine hit. I love making deals. I love winning. I love competing. And so that's really what drives me. That's really what it is. You know, at this point, I'm not particularly. You know, I've won, like, 10 of those awards behind me. You know, there's nobody else to even come close to. It's not even a competition thing anymore. It's just. I just. I do truly love what I do most days. And. And that's. I'm not being cliche. I'm not trying to be, but I. I. You know, I think if you think about what it is I do, and if you love sales, you love making deals, you love interacting with interesting people. Like, I don't think that there is another job or another business that offers that at this level.
- [90:12]
B
Amazing. Anything else do you want to conquer, though, that is out in the future like that?
- [90:18]
A
Like I said, you could talk about ideas. I have a lot of ideas. 1. So, you know, I go, from one day, I want to be a mushroom farmer. You know, I. One of the things that I really. I love jewelry. I love gemstones. I've got a whole bunch of gemstones back here. I love gemstones. I love jewelry. My wife is very lucky. I buy her tons and tons of very nice jewelry because I'm obsessive about it. I'm obsessive about things that I get into. So I would love to launch a jewelry company someday. I think that's probably the thing that I'm most keen to probably do next. Or let's say, do in parallel. I would love to do a jewelry brand. Yeah. Yeah.
- [91:03]
B
Amazing. All right, well, I wish you the best of luck with that. You are a very interesting dude. I loved speaking to you. If people want more information or want to look you up and see what you do, potentially want to hire you. Where can they find you?
- [91:18]
A
Media options dot com. That is our domain brokerage business. Domain sherpa dot com is our domain name podcast that we do once a week. It's fun, it's sometimes offensive, and it's mostly about domain names and we talk about a lot of other things. But if you're not really interested in geeking out on domains, it's probably not for you. And I am pretty active on Twitter or X Drew Rosener or Edioptions and yeah, that's it.
- [91:55]
B
Amazing. And if people want more information on what you were talking about, that's starting in 2026 with those opportunities, with the dot, whatever. Where can they look that up?
- [92:05]
A
Yeah, I mean, you could reach out to me. We actually might get involved in helping companies get a dot brand or a dot whatever they want. We just took on one client for that and so we're kind of. My COO is an intellectual property attorney and he was very much involved in the last round. So we're thinking about, you know, expanding that a little bit. But at a minimum we can point you in the right direction or just Google ICANN I C A N N G T L D generic top level domain so I can gtld program and you'll, you know, that'll open up the rabbit hole for you to go down.
- [92:45]
B
Amazing, Drew. Thank you. It was such a pleasure speaking to you, getting to know you. I wish you the best of luck and I can't wait to see the next big stuff. I might have to listen to one of your podcasts and see what other fun domain conversations you're having.
- [93:00]
A
Thank you very much. This was a pleasure.
- [93:08]
B
Thank you so much for listening to Misunderstood. I'm your host, Rachel Yukatel. Please be sure to subscribe to the show and give us a five star rating and review. You can support the show show by joining our patreon@patreon.com misunderstood with Rachel Ukitel. Do you have ideas for the show or want to reach out? Email us@infomisunderstoodpodcastmail.com that's spelled M I S S. Understood. Thank you so much and I'll see you next time.