DomainSherpa published an interview with businessman Michael Saylor, the CEO of MicroStrategy, which blew up expectations in the domain market last year by selling the domain name Voice.com for $30 million. This sale set a record in the history of domain name values, at more than double the previous top price paid – the sale of the Sex.com domain for $13 million in 2010.
Michael Saylor was interviewed by Head of DomainSherpa Andrew Rosener (he is also CEO of domain broker Media Options). The video of the interview is somewhat lengthy (about two hours; the full written transcript is available on the DomainSherpa website). For this reason, the whole of the interview cannot be repreduced, but one quote deserves special attention. Regarding the sale of Voice.com, Saylor said he considers the price of $30 million to be fairly low. He is confident that in the next 10-15 years the price of top domains will skyrocket.
This is Saylor’s unedited quote: “…I felt like we needed to put a peg in the market to set it, yes but it’s worth a billion, yes, domains are billion dollar assets early [that is] why I like the guy that sold the first Picasso you know so that people would know that Picasso is art, but I’ve got the vault of the other Picassos and I would rather commercialize them for 100 X the money and this is kind of a wakeup call hopefully that people will realize that domains are insanely valuable and if you’re still saying Lee valuable for everybody that’s spending the billions of dollars on Google and Facebook advertising because their domain is week yeah they might wanna repurpose some of that energy to do it the right way…”
To be fair, it should be noted that not all of Saylor’s predictions come true. Seven years ago he predicted the death of bitcoin within months.
This year his MicroStrategy became the first US public company (traded on Nasdaq) that invested the majority of its assets (over $400 million) in bitcoin.
