What ever happened to the dot.com millionaires?

**CureCancer** · 02-09-2010, 09:27 AM

The office that once housed a dot.com company valued at £20m is now just a storage closet filled with toilet products and a vacuum cleaner.
"It's a very surreal experience. It's actually quite depressing," says Benjamin Cohen, returning to the place where 10 years ago, aged just 17, he became the UK's first dotcom millionaire - at least on paper.
Early in the year 2000, the bubble was about to burst on the first wave of internet start-ups.
The Nasdaq index of technology shares peaked in March 2000 before losing 80% of its value in two years - about $5 trillion in paper wealth.
Mr Cohen says that back then "the value of a company could be based on how much positive publicity you got."

Adding "e-" or dotcom to a company name could dramatically alter its share price

His company, JewishNet - a religious community site - was reported in the national newspapers as being worth £5m.
This turned out to be his own father's estimate, based on a similar site's more official valuation.
But the headlines spread and suddenly Mr Cohen was thrust into the spotlight.
Mr Cohen was touted as the "first millionaire teenage dotcom success story" by Jon Ronson of the Evening Standard.
The London Jewish News offered to invest in the company and a partnership was formed.
It was a time when adding "e-" or dotcom to a company name could dramatically alter its share price, a time when investors were willing to risk vast sums of money on young computer-savvy entrepreneurs with little more than idea and a catchy company name.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8505260.stm

**stock_post** · 02-09-2010, 09:48 AM

I am one the millions of people who lost a lot of money.

**Acro** · 02-09-2010, 10:39 AM

In 2000, Microsoft spent $65 million in stock to buy MongoMusic.com - a domain I now own

**Adam Dicker** · 02-09-2010, 10:47 AM

Originally Posted by Acro

In 2000, Microsoft spent $65 million in stock to buy MongoMusic.com - a domain I now own

Now that's cool!

-=DCG=-

**stock_post** · 02-09-2010, 11:01 AM

Originally Posted by Acro

In 2000, Microsoft spent $65 million in stock to buy MongoMusic.com - a domain I now own

See if they want to buy it for part of that amount - you may just retire.

**Acro** · 02-09-2010, 11:43 AM

Nah, it's just a lesson from the .com bubble era.

**Credit** · 02-09-2010, 11:53 AM

Originally Posted by Acro

In 2000, Microsoft spent $65 million in stock to buy MongoMusic.com - a domain I now own

Wow. Just wow.

**David G** · 02-09-2010, 12:14 PM

There were a lot of other big stories from that era in addition to MongoMusic. Does it get any traffic today?

The one experience I had was a 5 word .com I sold the year 2000 to a an end-user with no negotiating needed for x,xxx which surprisingly dropped a year later when the bubble burst. I re-registered it for $9 and still have it today.

**DTalk** · 02-09-2010, 06:44 PM

Originally Posted by trader

The one experience I had was a 5 word .com I sold the year 2000 to a an end-user with no negotiating needed for x,xxx which surprisingly dropped a year later when the bubble burst. I re-registered it for $9 and still have it today.

Classic Dotcom era...

Question is....Why did you re-register a 5 word domain, after the bubble burst?...

Love to hear more stories from that era.....Anyone?...

**David G** · 02-09-2010, 08:10 PM

It's a good name which gets regular traffic over the years. I have other 4 or 5 word or even longer names which get traffic. It's a common misconception long tails can not be valuable.

**Tia Wood** · 02-09-2010, 08:28 PM

Originally Posted by Acro

In 2000, Microsoft spent $65 million in stock to buy MongoMusic.com - a domain I now own

MongoMusic's assets include a Web-based music player dubbed RadioMongo, which implements MongoMusic's patent-pending Intuitive Music Search System technology. The company in February announced agreements with Riffage.com, Infobeat, Sony, Tower Records and Seagram's Universal Music Group to implement the technology in their online music offerings. The status of those partnerships after Microsoft's acquisition is unclear.

I bet Acro knows.

But, wow. That is insane they died so quickly.

**amplify** · 02-09-2010, 09:35 PM

I would like to know what happened to all the money these companies lost from their investors. Who were the ones that walked away millionaires?

**Acro** · 02-09-2010, 11:52 PM

Originally Posted by amplify

I would like to know what happened to all the money these companies lost from their investors. Who were the ones that walked away millionaires?

In the late 90's and early 00's a lot of start-up and post-IPO companies lost millions - if not billions in certain cases - due to mismanagement, bad investments or just plain lavish spending. I worked for a company that the CEO spent $6 million on a boat; after the company went under they got clean with a chapter 7 liquidation.

**PokerPie** · 02-10-2010, 01:06 AM

There are a lot of people who cashed out and are on to new ventures (see the resume's of the founders of many of the current hot start-ups) or living lives of leisure. I've come across quite a few of the latter in the poker world. Many people traveling the poker circuit playing $10,000 buy-in events for fun. The money means little to them they just enjoy the lifestyle. Phil Gordon and Paul Phillips are two people who stand out in this crowd because they have also had some success at poker, they aren't just donators - they both cashed out of tech companies for many millions before the crash.

Lots of other people also made money as the stock market crashed. It is somewhat taboo for them to brag about it but the market falling so far so fast made a lot of people rich.

**ksinclair** · 02-10-2010, 01:57 PM

Originally Posted by amplify

I would like to know what happened to all the money these companies lost from their investors. Who were the ones that walked away millionaires?

There might be a market for a small flip to sell a domain like MongoMusic.com to one of the original investors.

**Acro** · 02-10-2010, 02:03 PM

Originally Posted by ksinclair

There might be a market for a small flip to sell a domain like MongoMusic.com to one of the original investors.

Funny that you mentioned, the domain receives traffic on occasion from articles that research the .com bubble era and mention it as an inverse pyramid example. Since I am not a flipper, I have no interest in selling; it's catchy enough and the $65 million story behind it is sad/amusing to tell.

**amplify** · 02-11-2010, 08:25 AM

Originally Posted by Acro

Funny that you mentioned, the domain receives traffic on occasion from articles that research the .com bubble era and mention it as an inverse pyramid example. Since I am not a flipper, I have no interest in selling; it's catchy enough and the $65 million story behind it is sad/amusing to tell.

I agree, it would be one of the nicer domains in any portfolio because of the history behind it.

**Gerry** · 02-11-2010, 09:05 AM

Originally Posted by amplify

I would like to know what happened to all the money these companies lost from their investors. Who were the ones that walked away millionaires?

The classic examples would be companies like eToys.com and Pets.com.

Their revenues were sky high, stock in the stratosphere, and then the sky crashed.

No one walked away from those companies as millionaires.

For those that were savvy, buying eToys.com stock one day for 10 cents a share and selling it the next day for $1.20...that was fun. It bunched back and forth like that for weeks as rumors flew about new investors, new money, etc.

I know one millionaire from all of this - a girl who shorted stocks like Yahoo, AOL, eTrade, Cisco, and so on. She made an absolute fortune shorting those stocks, especially Yahoo when they were over $300 a share