In late 1994 Alan was thinking about what to name the easy-to-use dial-up internet company he planned to start. In addition to connoting easy access, the company name had to be available as a domain name too.
Luckily in 1994 just about any domain name was available, so Alan was able to grab opendoor.com for the new Open Door Networks’ email addresses and, a really new thing, its worldwide web site. Fast forward to the new century, and almost no domain names were available, especially if you wanted a coveted “dot com” address. Big companies and startups alike had to pay big bucks if they wanted a “good” domain name.
Another internet trend that carried into the new century was that just about anything was being sold online. The founders of Opendoor Technologies (a hot meme stock last week) took this trend to a new level in 2014 when they decided to try to sell houses online. They of course needed a good domain name to have any chance of being successful.
That’s where Alan and opendoor.com came in. One of the Opendoor (not Open Door) founders contacted Alan to see about purchasing the domain name opendoor.com. Open Door Networks was a well-established company by this time, and many of its internet customers (along with Alan himself) had email addresses @opendoor.com. Moving to a new domain name wasn’t going to be easy.
Alan had previously acquired the domain name opendoor.biz in anticipation of the need to move someday, and could easily change the company website to that. But email addresses that had been in use for 15 years were another story. The Opendoor founders agreed to “grandfather” in these addresses indefinitely, so Alan and others could keep using them.
Even after months of due diligence, Alan was still pretty skeptical as to the likelihood of success for a company selling houses online. So the buyout deal included a clause where the opendoor.com domain name would revert to Open Door Networks if Opendoor ceased operations early on.
But of course quite the opposite happened, with Opendoor going public in late 2020. Alan knew the company had made it when he started seeing Opendoor ads along the boards at NHL hockey games.
Seeing those ads on TV and elsewhere, along with Opendoor’s multi-billion dollar valuation, gave Alan a bit of “seller’s remorse.” Maybe he should have asked for seven figures instead of six. But six figures seemed pretty good at the time, it’s fun to see the ads, and how many people can say they started a company whose domain name went public!