How Michael Saylor Sold A Domain For $30 Million

You own a ton of domain names, right?

Yeah, I bought a bunch.

Like, how many do you own now? Or how many have you owned?

I won't count all the—

I mean, I own hundreds and hundreds, but the ones that are our top-level primary domain names, about 16. Like, words in the English language that everybody understands. Like, I own Emma, Frank. I own my own name. I own michael.com. I also own my nickname, Mike.com. So like my personal website, I've got it on Michael.com. You just type Michael.com, you see all the stuff about me. Hope.

Yeah, Sam, go to Hope.com, see where that takes you.

Go to Hope.com.

Yeah, well, actually Bitcoin is hope.

So if you type Hope.com, you'll get everything there is to know about Bitcoin.

Oh my gosh.

Because I actually repath Hope to all of our Bitcoin resources and materials. Uh, speaker, I, I owned voice.com and I sold it for $30 million a couple years ago. That's the largest, uh, naked domain sale in the history of domains.

Tell the short version of that story. The story is kind of crazy. I've heard it once before, but I would assume Sam and most people have not heard the story of selling voice.com. You bought all these early on in the web. You kind of recognized, oh, these are These are probably going to be valuable to own these names. There's only one owner of each of these names. You own it and you hold it for a really long time, over a decade. And at some point you decide, okay, maybe we should see if somebody wants to buy some of these. So tell the story of selling voice.com real quick.

Well, I bought all these domains because I thought, wouldn't it be great to own a part of the English language? I mean, owning hope or owning voice. I mean, eventually there'll be a Google Voice or there'll be You know, some, some telco company that'll want to launch some service and what a great domain to launch on a word like voice.com. So we held them a long time. And, and, uh, I think at some point we were looking for joint ventures. We were looking to commercialize them and we did commercialize a bunch. For example, I created a company called alarm.com and alarm.com is now publicly traded on NASDAQ. It's like $4 or $5 billion market cap company. and you can guess what it does. It actually integrates your home alarm into the internet, you know. And I created another company called Angel.com, and we sold that for a bit more than $100 million. And that was actually a speech interactive voice response like Siri or Alexa before Siri and Alexa came along. And so I had voice, and I was holding it, and we were looking for some kind of good commercialization, and someone out of the blue, they contacted us, one of the domain brokers, and they said, well, you know, do you want to sell it? We'll give you $150,000.

And, and, you know, I was like, someone came to me, said they offered $150,000.

I said no. So I thought nothing of it because I just, I couldn't see the point. A week later, they come back, they said, well, they doubled it to $300,000. I said, tell them no.

So a couple days later they go, well, the broker's really insistent, and so they went to $600,000.

I said no.

So they said, well, what should you say? I said, don't tell anything.

Tell them, you know, like, we're not interested.

It's got to be something serious.

So they went to $1.2 million.

I said, tell them no. I said, well, they want to know what you want for it. I said, well, send him a note or something and just tell him, I said, it's like, it's the word voice in the English language, right?

So it's going to have to be something, you know, north of, I don't know, I don't think I said 7 or 8 figures, but I just said, A lot of money. And so it went on and they doubled again to $2.5 million, and then $5 million, and then around $10 million.

Then they said—

I had like 18 people in my office, or not 8, but 8 people. They're like looking at me like, aren't you— are you going to take the money? It's like a lot of money now.

I said, no, send them back.

At this point, send them back a note pointing out that this is like the word voice in the English language, and it's worth a billion dollars to the right company. And they said, "Well, you're going to give them a response?" I said, "Okay, tell them $30 million. Tell them I'll take $30 million for it." Because I thought if I didn't give them some number, they would stop negotiating after 5 nos. So I said, "Tell them $30 million.

I don't want to sell it for $30 million.

I want to sell it for $100 million or more, but I guess I'll say $30 million." So at that point they said, "Well, you know, they offered you—" I think they upped their offer to like $12 million. I said, "Tell them no, but if you want, I'll take a meeting with them." So when it got to $12 million, I said I'd get on the phone for half an hour.

So then we got on the phone and the call started with someone saying, "Well, "Okay, how about $22 million?" And I said, "Let me explain.

This is like my daughter. I'm willing to marry her off, but only to a man that values her more than I value her." Never looking back.