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Amazon acquires meeting-productivity startup Do to expand Chime
- skolos 10y agoI'm curious how much of this startup value is just in domain name.
- yojo 10y agoThey might not own it... Salesforce had the domain in 2013, and was an investor in Do.com. The domain may have been on loan/lease. I previously worked at a startup that was using a domain on a "rent to own" basis. I suspect something similar here.
- simplehuman 10y agoInteresting! Do you have any info how terms of these leases look like?
- jmathai 10y agoWe were in a negotiation to purchase photo.com. The asking price was around $1.5M and we had worked out an agreement where we would purchase the domain at a discount (in exchange for revenue share) and make the payments in equal parts over 12 months. There were target revenue numbers and penalties if we were unable to make the monthly payment of around $80k. Thank goodness the deal fell through.
- robalfonso 10y agoMy business does this as a part of its offerings. The deals are usually all custom as they are potentially very valuable domains involved. Most of the time though they have a buyout component after a certain period of time and they sometimes allow part of the lease payments to apply to the final payment price. It really just depends. More leverage for the terms on do.com vs say "Ilovewebsiteswithorangeheaders.com"
- kareemm 10y agoNoah Kagan did a podcast on the deal he made to buy Sumo.com. Not a straight lease but more like a payment plan. He talks about how Mint.com was purchased this way too. https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/noah-kagan-presents-formerly-the-inflection-point/id1187402810?mt=2# https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/noah-kagan-presents-form...
- eldavido 10y agoThis sounds like seller financing, it's very common in real estate transactions and other large asset purchases.
- chinathrow 10y agoWell technically, we all rent the domains from our registrars. I avoid however, to rent from a 3rd party who is the domain owner within the registry.
- pacaro 10y agoAs with all things, it depends on what someone is prepared to pay. It seems unlikely that Amazon is overly concerned about the domain name (Disclosure: I work at Amazon on the totally unrelated product "Go")
- benedictlewis 10y agoFrom their shutdown blog post [0], it looks like they gave users just 9 days warning before they deleted all user data. Also, the login link (still present in the header) takes you to a page they seem to have forgotten to add content to [1]. [0] http://blog.do.com/post/157299307009/announcing-our-next-chapter http://blog.do.com/post/157299307009/announcing-our-next-cha... [1] https://www.do.com/login https://www.do.com/login
- taco_emoji 10y agoThat headline is incredibly hard to parse.
- jawilson2 10y agoYeah, let me go Google "Do"...
- ganfortran 10y agoWell the founders are kinda of stupid to choose 'Do' as their company name, showing zero awareness of SEO. Maybe it is not far in the future, until The startup emerges...!
- nerdponx 10y agoThere's something to be said for the dot-com-era fad of actually having "dot com" in your company name.
- brilliantcode 10y agoI wonder how much they got acquired for. It seems to have been in an early stage? 2-10 employees from the screenshot in the article.
- cammio 10y agogoogle g suite competition? next add file collaboration or buy dropbox. mailbox chat ...