Rob Schutz - Driving Ro's $7B Growth & Revolutionizing Domain Acquisition with Snagged.com

All right, welcome back to the Casey Adams show. Today we are joined by Rob Schutz, the co founder of ro&snag.com Rob, thank you so much for coming the show today.

Hey, thanks for having me, Casey. Appreciate it.

Of course. So we connected quite a while ago on Twitter, man, and I've truly been not only impressed by what you've built at ro, but we initially hit it off on all things domains. And I'm a big fan of what you're up to nowadays@snag.com but before we really dive into all the fun conversations and the story of, you know, what led you to where you are today, I'd love for you to give a quick background and high level overview of what RO is before we dive in and then how that led to, you know, launching snag, which we'll dive into all things and have a good time today.

Yeah, and I, I'm happy to even take a one, one quick step back prior to that, which might give you a little bit more context course into my kind of weird and nerdy journey here. Yeah, so I kind of grew up around performance marketing, marketing brand comms. I was one of the first hires at a company called Barkbox, Treats and Toys for dogs out of New York City. Number seven, Employee number seven. At least that's what I say. Yeah, first marketing hire and got an opportunity to really go in and kind of learn how to grow a business, how to, how to market, how to use paid platforms. We're very early on paid social and really just how to build a team. And so I got a very early taste of building a company and from there I kind of got the itch to start something again. I'd had back in the day a daily deal startup when those were a thing, but really was excited to go out and build something again. And I wound up meeting my two co founders, Z and Saman through tangentially through bark. They were sharing kind of a similar building and really hit it off and had really good complementary skills and you know, knew I wanted to build a business with the two of them. Very unique guys. Simon is a design and product and tech guy, which doesn't happen a lot as a combination. And he had built companies, he'd been through Y Combinator, raised money to kind of absorb any subject and become an expert in it really quick and also had I a dad who was a really well known sexual health doctor. And so as we talked about it, we talked about different areas and opportunities. Jumping into healthcare and starting with erectile dysfunction was actually a really big unlock for us, starting with something that was taboo and that people felt uncomfortable talking face to face and looking a doctor in the eye around. But telemedicine could offer a really, really powerful opportunity for us. So RO is a telehealth company. You're able to go online, establish a relationship with a physician by answering a series of questions and then depending on your interactions, you may be prescribed medication, may be recommended over the counter medication which can be shipped to your door. So we started in 2017 and there's a lot to unpack about the beginnings of ro, but it's been quite, quite an exciting journey.

Yeah, absolutely, man. And I love hearing like the co founder and how you guys met in a sense and speaking on ro, for those that may not know, I believe you guys raised over a billion dollars, if I'm not mistaken. Correct. Throughout the journey.

Yeah, something, something along those lines. You know, we started in 2017, certainly in a different, in a bit of a different market and you know, know, really put the foot on the gas pretty quickly around growth and acquisition and required a fair amount of capital. I think the company's in a different place right now. I'm no longer part of, I'm no longer in the day to day, I'm on the board and spend time with, with the guys. But company has evolved along with the market, understanding what is, you know, what is preferred in terms of moving towards like unity, economic profitability, growth versus burn, et cetera. It's made pretty significant adjustments to how the business is operated. But yeah, especially in the early days, just required capital and we're really fortunate to bring on some fantastic investors.

Yeah, no, it's, it's so cool to hear and to take a step back. Right. I know I referenced, you know, raising a billion dollars and just to bring people back to those first six 12 months of the business. It, with it being a capital intensive business. Like what were some of the key levers that you guys pulled when bringing ROE to the market that allowed you guys to catch that growth early on with you being, you know, from, from the growth mindset.

Yeah, I mean it was really interesting, especially early on because I had, you know, I had built out my playbook at Bark with Truth and Toys for Dogs and there was actually a lot of similarities. Taking that playbook around performance and channel based marketing and moving into a different, a different topic, but things that consumers were looking for. I think that early on we actually were kind of successful despite ourselves and despite a lot of challenges like early on, I remember first couple of weeks we got kicked off of Facebook and Google almost every week. They just didn't know what to do with us. They're like, are you a pharmacy? Are you like healthcare, you know, a hospital? There was just no categorization that we fit into cleanly. And so when that happens, these platforms are just kind of like, we don't support your business model. I remember getting email from Google, they were like, we do not support your business model. Thank you for using Google. And I was like, oh shit, that's not good. We gotta figure this out. So early on it was kind of, it was, you know, it was a lot of word of mouth, it was a lot of press. We got, we got a fair amount of press right out of the gate. And then as we built up more credibility with the platforms, we brought in, you know, world renowned doctors and healthcare professionals that were talking about the treatment plans that were built out, et cetera, we gained a lot of credibility and were able to start to unlock more of the traditional channel search, social, you know, audio tv, et cetera. But early on it was a real, it was real hand to hand combat trying to get folks to, you know, take us seriously, to take erectile dysfunction seriously. It always kind of been this joke everyone remembers, like, weird couple in a bathtub. Right. And so we kind of had to dig ourselves out of kind of that entrenched mentality. But once people saw what we were building and how, you know, we were bringing reputable doctors and, you know, treating it as a healthcare condition, we were able to open a lot of doors.

Wow. No, that's really cool to hear it. And you said something earlier. Was it your father or your co founder's father that was a sexual health doctor?

Yeah, Z's father, one of my co founders, father, doctor, Dr. Michael Roitano.

Yeah, got it. How did that play a role in leaning into that space and industry with having that ear on the door of like, hey, let's see what he has to think about this and the industry as coming from that, being a renowned doctor in that space?

Oh yeah. I mean, a lot of what we did early on came from Doc, as we called him. He was kind of our unofficial 4th co founder. He would be in the office, he'd work on a bunch of different stuff, he'd take a nap on the couch in the break room. And early on it was really just kind of leaning on his decades and decades of experience in sexual health and what he'd seen from patients, what he'd heard from patients, what his colleagues had studied and written clinical review papers, etc. And so he was able to bring a tremendous amount of credibility early on and also bring kind of his cohorts in. We pretty quickly had the world, you know, the biggest and most highly regarded sexual health doctors on our, on our medical advisory board. And so we built content with them. We did TV spots with them. You know, we use them in ad creative. We had them review treatment plans and make sure that everything that was being presented to patients was, you know, by the book. So it was an incredible, it was an incredibly valuable tool. And Doc is still involved to this day and he's, he. I consider him a good friend.

That is, that's so cool to hear having that Doc on the team from the early days. I want to one topic and more so concept that I, I love talking about. I was, I just had Shrimp Christian on the show recently from a 16Z and he just moved to London from SF and was talking to me. We talked about this concept like the white space in life where, you know, transitioning from either, you know, Barkbox to a new company you're starting or from living in a city your whole life to then moving somewhere new like that time of creation and where things are just different, you know, that white space of time when you're making these big transitions in life, I feel that you can find so much value in that from the decisions you make there and sort of how things play out from that. Talk to me about that transitionary time for you coming from Barkbox, scaling that company significantly to then going on this journey with your co founders. Like were there other businesses that you were debating starting or what was your world like within that transitionary time?

Yeah, yeah, that's a great point. And I, look, I always like to say there's no good time to do anything. Like there's never a perfect time to do anything. And that, that certainly applies to kind of my transitionary career from from Bart to ro. I was about five years in at Bark. We'd actually just implemented. There was a three month paid sabbatical. When you got to five years, I was very excited about taking that. We're about to, we're about to have our second child. It's true. We were about to have our second kid. Um, we had just bought a house in New Jersey, was taking on a mortgage and so I was actually very ambivalent. Like I was anxious, I wanted to do something, but I also now have like real financial obligations that I had to balance. And so for me, that was, that became a big decision. I wasn't, I wasn't like gung ho right out of the gate. Z and Simon kind of had to convince me and, you know, I, I wound up really struggling with the idea of leaving, given the stability and seniority I'd built up at Bark. And, you know, I remember having a conversation with my wife and I was like, hey, I, you know, I think I want to do this, but I'm not sure. Like, what do you, what do you think? And she, you know, gave me some very great advice. And she was like, are you going to look back and regret not doing this and think about it that way? I was like, probably. I think this is a pretty unique situation with these two individuals who have unique complementary skills. And she was like, well, you should probably do it. So we wound up doing it and I talked to Matt and the Bark leadership team and they were sad to see me go, but super supportive. One of the first checks in a row came from that team. And so it felt like, you know, again, never a good time to do anything. I wasn't planning on changing, like, jobs and having a kid and buying a house and moving to New Jersey all within the course of a month. But sometimes you just gotta do stuff and roll with it and see what happens. And, you know, it was fortunate that, you know, fortunate in a bunch of different ways.

Yeah, that's so cool to hear. It's like these massive changes from all directions came into your life at one time. I want to. Speaking of doing stuff when you were growing up, one, I would love to hear some of the, you know, the early childhood ambitions and kind of hear like, what was, what was Rob's plan growing up? What were, what were the stuff that you were doing and how that, how did that lead to business, entrepreneurship and, you know, going down this path in life as an entrepreneur?

Yeah, that's a good question. I don't get asked that question a lot. What was young Lil Robbie up to? Yeah, I mean, I think I was always like really intrigued by computers and the Internet and the ability to kind of start a business as like a one person team just doing that behind a screen. I remember, I remember I took some early computer science classes, C in high school. And my biggest project that I made was I created like before you could just do March Madness online and sign up on Yahoo, I programmed the ability for people to input their picks and then it would create scenarios for who could win, depending on what teams, et cetera. And I would just recompile C and it would spit out the HTML code and I'd throw it on my Geocity site or whatever it was. So I just love building stuff like that and kind of harnessing the power of technology, kind of accelerate what you could get done. And then, yeah, I'd always been entrepreneurial. I had a little web design startup company and then right out of school, soon after school, I started a daily deal company kind of similar to a Groupon. Just always liked the idea of being able to use the Internet and roll up your sleeves and get people to pay you money. I like the idea of being able to earn money on the Internet. That was always very exciting. And so, yeah, just, you know, one thing leads to another. But this industry hasn't been around so long where if you spend time doing it when you're younger, you know, you have. You have a pretty significant amount of experience.

Yeah, no, that's. That's cool to hear. So in high school, you were, you know, picked up computer science class when it comes to. And I know we talked about this prior to starting the show, and you said it on 20VC, the podcast, and it really stuck with me. You know, you said when making hires, you always like to ask, you know, tell me about a project that you've built that has failed. And I want to ask the same to you. Like, throughout those early years of building and launching your first startups, what were some of the moments where things went wrong, things failed, and what did you learn from those moments in the early days of your career?

Yeah, I don't think we have enough time in the podcast to talk through all my. All my failures. But, yeah, I mean, look, I think one example I'd give is, you know, I had my daily deal website that was like me just figuring out how the Internet kind of worked, how commerce and the Internet worked. And I was really fortunate that timing wise deals got very hot. Groupon, you know, had a $6 billion acquisition offer from Google. Living social was flying high. Like, I wound up selling that company to a competitor, which, again, was another really good piece of advice I got from. From a friend. But after that, I kind of had this mentality. I was like, I'm an entrepreneur. It was, sell your company. He was like, no. He was like, do you see this getting bigger? Do you see this getting hotter than it is right now? Or is now the right time? If you were ever going to sell, now might be the right time to do that. And I was still very green. I didn't know how to raise money. I Didn't know how to really expand or expand the technology. I also could see that the current structure of deals was not going to scale forever. And so I was anxious to find, like an exit and kind of have a check like, hey, we got an acquisition. But after that, I kind of got this, like, a little bit of an attitude like, I'm an entrepreneur and, like, I can come up with ideas and build things and they're all going to be successful. And so I had this idea that I still kind of like, but it was. It was called Chirp Guide. It was for. It was essentially live. It was. It was live tweeting. It was TV Guide for live tweeting. So if you're watching a baseball game or a football game or the Bachelor and you want to find all the people that are live tweeting that specific event, you could kind of create your own streams for that. You could have a comedian, you could have former contestant, you could have a sports guest or whatever and create your own streams. And then if you're watching it later on dvr, you can even run it back so you could see how people were live tweeting at the time. So I fell in love with this idea, and I wound up spending a fair amount of time, a fair amount of money getting it built out, only to kind of realize that, like, this was not a great business idea. It was a cool feature. It was a cool feature for Twitter to. Or X to potentially build, but not like a great business. And so I. I spent a fair amount of time on that. And then I realized I should probably get a job. I should probably get a job at this point because, like, I was a founder who had sold my company, but I really hadn't learned enough of, like, the hard skills that I think you need when you're. When you're building a business or you're starting a business. And so that's when I kind of got a kick in my pants and went out and started talking to folks. And that's when I wound up at Bark.

Wow. I think it's so. Hey, I like the idea a lot, but the. It sounded. It sounds like the self awareness crept in and you just had that moment of realization of, like, hey, like, what am I good at? What am I. What do I not know? And kind of have that self awareness to recognize, like, hey, let me go try something new instead of trying to.

Yeah, something. I mean, one of the things I.

Go ahead.

Yeah. Yeah. One of the things I took away from that was honestly, like, there were just so many things that had to go right with that business in order to make money like I have in in future businesses and endeavors. I've tried to reduce the number of wins you have to have in order to be financially successful. Like in that business, you needed to gain a lot of users that would use the platform so you could then sell to advertisers who'd want to get in front of those users. There's a lot of different things that go into even just getting users, let alone monetizing them. So that's why I really gravitated to like a bark or commerce in general, where it's like, hey, you can sell something to someone and they will immediately give you money. I like being able to collect money. Day one when I'm building.

I love that. I love the perspective there. I want to transition a topic that I was excited to have a conversation with you about that I've seen you tweeting all about, and I stumbled upon it when I was in the midst of going down this path myself. And that is all things premium domains. So you have a company, snag.com. when did that come about? And why did you go out to start something like that, given now that we know what businesses you do enjoy starting?

Yeah, no, I mean, look, I think I have been a domain kind of nerd for a very long time, not doing it like under the guise of a business, but I've always enjoyed domain social handles, like how to kind of acquire these digital assets. I think of them as the original NFTs. And that's something I did for myself and then I did for all of my businesses. And then investors would ask me, and then founder friends and their portfolio companies would ask me. And so when I stepped back from RO over a year ago, I kind of took a bit of a business break. And as I've come back, I'm splitting my time between some consulting and investing, chair of a homeless shelter and a nonprofit here in New Jersey. And then snagged. Snagged is like one of the things I'm really letting myself lean into and nerd out on. And just I was telling somebody today, like, for whatever reason, my brain is wired in a way where I get such a dopamine hit, helping people get their proper dot com, usually dot com, because it's so complicated. In many cases, it doesn't seem like it should be that difficult, but it takes a ton of time and a lot of research, a lot of outreach and a lot of elbow grease. And I just love being able to help people through what is a very complicated process and hopefully make it simpler for them. So yeah, that's something I stood up. Like, I don't even know. I probably launched a site a year ago and have leaned into more over the last like four to six months and has been pretty incredible. Like a lot of folks reaching out, they're like, hey, this space seems confusing and shady and you seem like a slightly less shady individual. Could you help me? Like, could you help me navigate how to get xyz? And so that's been cool. And honestly, I have more business and inbound than I kind of was anticipating. And I'm trying to figure out, is this something I'm building over the long term? Is this just like a side hobby that I happen to really enjoy? I'm not quite sure yet, but I know that I'm having fun. So I'm really enjoying leaning into that right now.

I, you know, if there's anything that we are super mega aligned on that is all things handles. And for whatever it may be being wired to think that way.

Like I.

For context, I have Casey on Instagram. And looking back, it's been like the best first interaction when meeting people. Hey, get your Instagram. I can't tell you how many times every single time I go to give someone like what Casey. Like when I interviewed Harley from Shopify, that was one of the first things we hit it off on. He has Harley on Instagram and then I have Casey and I mentioned it briefly and he's like, oh my God, Like, I love that. It was. That was the biggest thing for me, getting my first name.

Yeah, it's the first name club first name.

I know you have it on. On X. Yeah, give it on Instagram or no.

No, I'm Rob on X, but Instagram, I. I'm just less active there overall. But I never shuts up if should you be interested.

Love that. So I'm curious as someone. And we were jamming on a little bit. Excuse me. Before I just myself went through buying a premium domain late last year, October listener.com and I've never, you know, I.

Shouldn'T say it's a great domain.

I've never bought a premium domain like that before. My last company was mediakits.com, which was still great, but for people that are unaware of this world. Right. Like, obviously some people, entrepreneurs, they may think, okay, like I want to get a domain, I go to da daddy. I can just buy it for, you know, $0.99, $5 and hopefully a Domain's available, buy it directly from Dodady. Well, how does Snag.com work? What does this world of premium domains, high ticket purchases, how does it all work for people that are so unaware or maybe they know about it and they know the values in there in terms of like that digital real estate. But where does a company like snag.com come in?

Yeah, well, we, you know, we do a lot of different types of projects. Some, some are people that are coming in, they're looking to get kc.com right. They're a, you know, more mature company. Maybe they're a series B going into series C. They want to do TV advertising and out of home. And having more of like a premium.com is really important in those cases. But we also do the other end of the spectrum. I work with a ton of companies coming out of yc. Gary Tan is a friend and has been really helpful there. And some of those folks don't even really have names yet. They're like, hey, help me think about a name. And I think one thing that I've pushed folks on is thinking about what digital assets are available should be. Well, maybe not the most important input. An important input when thinking about naming, what you don't want to do is you don't want to pick a name and fall in love with it and then you go out there and finding something reasonable for that domain name is incredibly expensive. So I always think it's an important input. So we'll work with folks on like, hey, let's go through keyword research, let's go through the sortus, let's look at what's available, pull pricing, et cetera, and kind of do more of like research based projects. And then the other end of the spectrum are those bigger guys who are like, hey, obviously these names are not available. They've been probably registered since 1994. How do I go out running these people down and understanding who they are? Because in many cases it's pretty opaque. It's not clear who owns a domain name, how to get in touch with them, what price should it be priced at, how you negotiate, how you actually handle a transfer, et cetera. And many times it's the founders that are just trying to figure this stuff out on their own. They're trying to do it at one o' clock in the morning after they've done all their other 11 jobs. And so it's been great where people will be like, hey Rob, I know you, or we invested in one of your companies or you know, we've interacted in the past, like, help me navigate this. I trust that you are like a reputable individual and help me figure out how to get this done. So, yeah, it can really, it can really be across the full spectrum. And that's part of the fun. It's not just go work on really big deals with really big clients. I love working with the early stage folks too, who are just like trying to figure it out and thinking through almost like a progressive strategy where you say, hey, you can go with this name. This is where you can start. And then, you know, if things go well, you kind of earn the right to pay more money and go acquire some of those premium domain names. But I'm probably a bit, I'd say I'm probably a bit of give some advice that's maybe counter to what other folks in the domain industry would say. But my advice, especially for early stage is like, do not invest in a super expensive domain name. Like, you have enough challenges to get your business off the ground and define product market fit. Like, don't. In certain cases, it can be helpful. If you're cars.com, that makes sense. But in the vast majority of cases, you really just need to make sure that your business works. And you can usually get that done with a prefix or a suffix or a dot co or whatever it might be until you validate it and you feel like, great, we're at a good spot and we want to upgrade and we're willing to pay like a premium to get there. But I have talked several folks who've come to me out of buying domain names because I try and take a more holistic view of their business and say, like, hey man, you don't need this right now. You actually need to spend money on, use this on a performance marketing consultant or like, go back and revisit your unit economics or like, why is your conversion rate so low? Like, a domain name is not going to fix those things. You have a lot of work to do to just get a business that kind of works. And then again, you earn the right to go out and spend more money on these premium domain names as you have fit.

That's a great perspective. And I'm curious now, now knowing that when you as a founder, when do you think you've earned that right? Is it, you know, obviously you see a lot of companies upgrade after sometimes they raise a round of funding. They obviously built the brand, they've proved the model. Like in your eyes as a founder, when's that transitionary period of hey, you've earned the right to do this and now you can go spend, you know, X dollars on, on a domain.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't think there's any perfect like boilerplate answer to that. I think it depends on the price, right? Like, and that's why I always find it useful to say like, hey, we can go out, we can, we can do a gut check and see if we can get in contact with this person, understand what their expectation is. Maybe it's not that expensive, maybe they need cash. Maybe they would work with you on a five month payment plan, whatever it is, and in that case you can do it earlier because if it's reasonable, it doesn't cut into your Runway. Why not? You know that, that feels fine. I think it's more of like, hey, if you're going to go out and spend six figures, seven figures, you need to be in a point where like that doesn't really impact the trajectory of the business or the Runway. And you're also not pissing off your investors. Like you don't want to show up at a board meeting and say when spent all this money on domain name and they're like, what are you talking about? Like we have a thousand other fires. That's not the most important thing to spend money on. So it really depends. I would also say it depends on the business and the industry you're in. Right? Like, sure, an upgrade is helpful in terms of reputation and legitimacy in some cases, but if you're not consumer facing, it's probably less important earlier on, right? Like if you're not running TV spots or billboards or audio. Like, it's less important if you're sending digital clicks to the site. In my opinion, I think you should pass the radio test. You should be able to say, you know, say it on the radio and people should be able to understand what the word is and how to get to your website. But again, I think it's really dependent on how much does it truly cost and how much of an impact is that going to have in your business. And I'm always of the mindset of you should not mortgage any, any percentage of your future in order to make that upgrade. Unless you feel like it is going to have such an enormous impact on like the core economics of your business.

Yeah, I was just going to ask about that. Are there any stories that you've either seen or personally have experienced where that upgrade has significantly like proven in terms of positive on the economic impact of the business, like right out of the gate do you have stories personally or just examples that you could potentially reference here?

Yeah, I mean, I think a really good one is probably a deal I worked with. A deal I worked on a while back is actually the roofer.com team.

Oh, wow.

I think that they wound up getting a great domain, and day one for them, they found that they were just having more and more doors opened up for them in terms of the ability to get more meetings and talk to more local roofers to see if they joined the network, et cetera. I think that that's a good example of. For the price they paid, which is, of course, confidential, but they were able to upgrade and I think pretty quickly accelerate the way that people looked at them and overall legitimacy of that business. That's a pretty good one. And then there are a lot of ones that I cannot talk about as well. But, you know, I think that it really depends. It really depends on the business and, you know, the type of impact that you would anticipate from it. But I think there are a lot of good examples there.

Yeah, absolutely. What about how long have you owned snagged.com and what was the. The story there on getting that domain or looking to build a company like that. It is. And what it's become with that specific domain?

Yeah, I think I probably got it, like, a year, two ago. Honestly, I just kind of went on a. What I do, like, when we're doing these research projects, a bit of an exploration being like, what are the terms, what are the words that are associated with, like, this type of industry? What do I personally use when I talk about this stuff? And so that's one that came up and was actually just. It was kind of available. It was, like, available to be purchased on Brand Bucket for not an absurd amount of money. And I was like, okay, I'm just gonna do it. They also accepted crypto, which made me feel better about buying it at the time. Um, and so, yeah, I mean, I investigated a bunch of different avenues, but that felt like the best fit just in terms of price and just the vernacular. And the word itself is something I used a lot. Um.

Yeah.

And it's funny, you know, I find myself really. Yes. Snagged that really well, but I found myself now, like, much more deeply. Like, I have much deeper relationship with words. I feel like, because of dealing with, like, research lists and people looking at specific words and variations of words and spellings. And so it's funny, like, I hear snags come up all the time organically, or for, like, I'm reading a book. I'm like snag. That's. Yeah, that's. That's my word right there. It just, it's, you know, you're just, you're just more aware of it.

Yeah, for sure. And a couple like more thoughts on just all things domains is one is I saw recently, you know, I think a lot of people out there, sometimes you see these domains and they just sort of make you take a step back, whether that's cars.com or. I remember the other. I think it was 2019 voice.com I believe sold for $30 million. And then I believe I just saw chat.com which Dharmesh, CEO of HubSpot, excuse me, SEO is TTO. I believe a co founder of HubSpot bought chat.com and it was undisclosed the price for a while. I've seen over the last week. I believe it was $15 million or so.

I can't confirm more than 15.5 is the report. Yeah, yeah.

So when you see these numbers, I'm just cur. Get your thoughts on, you know, a sale like that, that's more like current in terms of this conversation. What does that mean to the industry? How does one determine that? And you know, I think it. Because it helps a lot of founders like take a step back and say, whoa, you know, you can always see and understand like, oh, domains can be valuable. When you see purchases like that, they kind of just blow you away. You're like, okay, this domain thing like this is serious and there's true value here. And the eye can of course be in the beholder, but what does a deal like that in your mind mean to the industry, to domains and just for everyone listening as entrepreneurs.

Yeah, I mean, look, I think it's interesting. Assigning a value on domain is. Is pretty tough. It's. It's really like, it's basic. But I tell people it's what the seller is willing to part with the domain for and what the buyer is willing to pay. And finding a number that overlaps there sometimes happens and a lot of times doesn'. But yeah, there's no doubt a lot of these, A lot of these short character and single word domains have tremendous value and meaning. And I think, you know, the cars or chat or a lot of other examples like that is the brand and that is the business. And so there's a term, there is a tremendous amount of value that you can take away from that. I think, you know, there's a lot of different takeaways I think depending on the different Types of people you talk to within the industry. Right. If you're a domain investor, you celebrate that because, wow, look how much money that sold for. And maybe some of my domains can sell for, you know, a tenth of that. And, you know, it's. It's a huge win. I think, if you're an entrepreneur. I think it's also an important lesson on understanding the order of magnitude we're talking about in terms of price for some of these things as well. I think if you ask the average technologist how much someone would reasonably pay for some of these domains, that is way higher than they would ever dream or imagine. So I think some of it is grounding as well. But, yeah, I mean, I think a lot of this is trying to match together what people are willing to pay and reasonably doesn't impact their business and their Runway with what investors consider a decent return and they're willing to move on. So it is a constant game of trying to find that overlap in the Venn diagrams.

Yeah, no, that's. I appreciate your perspective on that. And before we talk about, I want to hear about the. The nonprofit that you were mentioning earlier. But last thing for founders that are listening before we switch topics here, if they are curious about, you know, buying a domain for their business, maybe they've gotten to that point where they believe, you know, they feel that making that upgrade is necessary. How can they utilize snag.com and what does that look like in terms of just them reaching out and, you know, being able to lean into something like snag.com to help find that on their behalf?

Yeah, I mean, you can always reach out to me. Robertsnag.com you can also reach me. Hi. @rob.com if you'd like. Oh, yeah, but I think we. Well, I don't actually own that yet. I'm still working on it. But the guy was nice enough to set up an email alias. But that's my version of my Casey Flex. You know, at Casey Flex is. I'll use the high profitable one. But yeah, I'm like, incredibly plugged in and responsive. I can almost guarantee if you reach out and you want to talk about domains and how to work together, I'll get back to you within a couple hours. Unless it's the middle of the night. I really love this stuff. So. Yeah, so just reach out there. You can always go to snag.com, fill out the contact form, and I'll get back to you to. But I'm always happy to be a resource, whether that's on like a paid engagement or just kind of helping set people straight. I do a lot, I do a lot of that where people are like, am I thinking about this wrong or is this a crazy price? And my philosophy is just like paid forward a little bit. It'll come back whether or not they're actually paying you as a client or not. It's also part of just the strategy to build reputation for Snagged overall.

Yeah, I love that. I'll be sure to link that down below. So I wonder about since transitioning out of ro, Obviously we talked about all things snagged. Where do you spend your time elsewhere? I know you talked about the nonprofit that you're a part of. I would love to hear more about that and how that comes into, you know, where you spend your time and why you got involved over there in the first place.

Yeah, totally. I'm happy to tell you more. It's an organization called Isaiah House. Isaiahouse.org is 118 bed homeless shelter in East Orange, New Jersey. It's an organization that's near and dear to my heart and my wife and my kids have volunteered there a bunch. It's a pretty tremendous group of people. I'm now I've taken on the board chair role this year, so I'm getting an opportunity to get real deep in a lot of different areas and getting a chance to work with the executive director of the team has been pretty fantastic. We're actually really exciting news. We were the recipients of a Mackenzie Scott grant recently. So Mackenzie Scott, the ex wife of Amazon founder, she was a very early Amazon employee and is doing incredible work, essentially giving away much of her money to nonprofits. We're very, very fortunate to receive those.

Sorry, go ahead.

Oh, no, I was, I was saying very, very fortunate to receive that. And I think that's helping us accelerate a few different areas and also just plug some, plug some gaps. But Isaiah House itself is pretty incredible. They have an HIV program, there's a. A new mothers program. There is opening up a new facility in 14th street in East Orange which is helping women who are coming out of prison get reintegrated back into society and ready for job training. So it's just really good work the team is doing. And it's been. One of the nice things about Snag is I'm pretty flexible and I can kind of set my own hours and it's really just me and I can kind of do whatever I want. That's allowed me to be pretty active and available for The ISA house team as well. Which is, which is how, how I've been looking to structure all this. So it's awesome. Appreciate you asking about it.

No, of course. No, it's so cool to hear. I'm actually just this week, I don't think there's overlap but I, I got into run the New York City Marathon later this year and I'm running for the charity called City Harvest. Where are you familiar with City Harvest by chance?

Oh yeah.

So yeah, my, one of my good.

Yeah, totally.

Dan Churchill, he's the captain of the team and for people that may not know City Harvest and I might butcher it, but I'll make sure to link it down below. Overall, this charity takes food that otherwise would have been thrown away and provides it to homeless people, mainly in Manhattan. And I believe on the website I remember seeing they've donated or given up a billion plus pounds of food since the origin of this charity. And it's really cool to not only run on behalf, but I feel that I just wanted to mention that because I think it's so powerful when it comes to what you're doing there and having that context there. So I appreciate you sharing that.

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Awesome. So a couple more minutes before we wrap up here. You know, I've, I'm very fascinated by perspective. Right. I, I've done 500 plus interviews different founders and entrepreneurs and I feel that there's always not only so much perspective to lean into but as someone rob that has, you know, gone from learning computer science in class and you know, joining an early stage company and scaling that, then starting a company raising a billion dollars at a multi billion dollar valuation that you've seen and then to now being, you know, as someone that has common interest in all things domains like you've really seen a lot in the world of business and have the experience to have a unique perspective in my opinion. If you were to give an early stage entrepreneur piece of advice in terms of identifying big business opportunities, what are some of the frameworks that you could pass on or you'd want to pass on when evaluating businesses and opportunities for young founders today?

Yeah, that's a good question. You know, I think something that is important, sometimes overlooked is really, really looking at what you are already interested in or things that impact your life. Personally, I think there's always a lot of, there's a sense of I need to come up with this idea like this big idea that is going to be a unicorn and we're going to build big amazing things. And the most impactful businesses, in my opinion. And the things that keep you running against those ideas the most are things that you already kind of feel passionately about. And so, you know, if it's keeping a journal of what are problems that I see in my life or problems that I'm experiencing or things that I'm coming across that I think it could fix, that personal connection, I think is really important because it helps ground you and it helps keep you motivated through inevitably the ups and downs that come with with building a business. I think it also helps both, not just from the narrative perspective, but emotionally being emotionally connected to the idea and to the solution you're building is really power. So that's one is as you're thinking about ideas, make sure that it's, you know, you're very mindful of things around you that you already want to fix or you're already exposed to versus needing to synthesize this net new amazing idea that's going to make you a billionaire. I think the other thing that I learned and I really appreciate about my co founders at Rosie and Simon is I think the power and importance of complementary co founders. That's something that I've talked, I talked to a lot of young entrepreneurs about, but I think there's sometimes a tendency of like, I work well with this person, we should make a company together. And while that can work, I think it is much more powerful when you're bringing different sets of superpowers to the table. For me, I feel like I learned that because again, Simone, you know, Simone, design products like legal, medical, fundraising, me, marketing, you know, marketing growth, etc. We could kind of do the vast majority of everything and then we could hire people to do it better than us over time. But if there's too much overlap, you wind up fighting about small subsets of the business and saying, we'll find other people to do other stuff versus having complementary partners really allows you to tackle those things with a lot more of your own time and energy and resources versus like, hey, we'll go find somebody that we'll bring in as a cto or we'll go find somebody we bring in who, who can run marketing. I do think that's an important input when you're thinking about building a business.

I love that perspective in that thesis. So I appreciate you sharing that last question. Rob, wrap up here. When thinking about the future of what you're building, but also just business life overall, what excites you the most about the journey ahead over these next six 12 months and years to come.

Very deep question. Very deep for a 23 year old. Kasey. Yeah, I mean, to be honest, after I step back, I spent a lot of time kind of reflecting on what do I want to be when I grow up. And I think the conclusions that I've come to or the things I find most exciting are new things. Not necessarily I want to go be an executive at a company doing xyz. I do feel like I've been really fortunate had the opportunity to do those things. But what excites me the most is think about net new stuff. Maybe it's outside of the business world, right? Maybe it's a non profit world. Maybe it's, you know, doing something that I don't even know much about yet. I just like the excitement of new and I think a lot of entrepreneurs feel that way too. They like new stuff and new things and learning new skills. And so I'm very, I'm very mindful of that. And I've tried to actually actively not get too sucked into doing things that I have done in the past to really just leave some say, opportunity for serendipity and for new things to come my way. And so I think Whether it's, yeah, six, 12 months or five or 10 years, I'm excited to find myself in new places where I can apply a lot of what I learned, maybe to different types of industries or different types of companies or different types of organizations and see if I can make a difference in those areas as well.

I love it. Well, Rob, I just want to say before we wrap up here, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show today. Not only am I inspired by your story, but I learned a lot here today. And before we wrap up, I know you mentioned your email in the midst of the episode, but where's the best place for everyone to follow you, to connect with you and to stay up to date with everything that you have going on in your world?

Sure, you can just follow me on Twitter or x. I'm sorry, just at Rob or reach out to me Rob at snag.

Com. Love it. Well, I'll be sure to link everything down below. And once again, Rob, thank you so much for coming on the show today.

Thanks for having me, Casey. It was great to chat.