#18 - The Big Business of Wacky Domains

**Sheel Mohnot** (0:02)
I sold Internet real estate to the tune of a half a billion dollars worth..app,.blog,.church. Some of these you've probably seen. My company was responsible for selling a lot of those.
It's what's called a ascending clock second price auction.
The way it works is, in this case, every 20 minutes, it increments up and it's ascending. We'd start the bidding at $200,000 times the number of bidders. $600,000 to start. Every 20 minutes, it goes up by $600,000, with a minimum increment of 20%. You know, once we get to 3.6 million, it goes up higher.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:46)
Your top auctions went for how much? What is it, like 10 million or is it more like?

**Sheel Mohnot** (0:50)
It's over 100 million.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:57)
Sheel, you're here.

**Sheel Mohnot** (0:58)
Yeah.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:59)
Did you bring your A-game?

**Sheel Mohnot** (1:00)
I always bring my A-game.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:01)
Do you stretch in the mornings? Do you eat your breakfast? What do you do to get going in the morning?

**Sheel Mohnot** (1:05)
I actually eat no breakfast, drink no coffee ever.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:07)
So you're like a faster now. You're like intermittent fasting. That's not what you called it. You happen to not eat breakfast.

**Sheel Mohnot** (1:12)
I just happen to not eat breakfast because I don't like it.
And then if I drink any coffee, I won't sleep at all, like a wink at night. So no caffeine for me. I just naturally am lucky that I wake up with a lot of energy. It's awesome.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:22)
Great. And so you're here to tell your story. I met you maybe four or five years ago. I don't remember how long it was. You came over to my office and I don't even know how you got there. To be honest, I don't even know. Did I reach out to you?

**Sheel Mohnot** (1:34)
I don't remember.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:35)
But I remember sitting at the bar in our office and you told me one of the craziest stories of how someone made it that I've met here in San Francisco. So million dollar question. You've made a million bucks. How did you do it?

**Sheel Mohnot** (1:47)
Yeah, so I sold Internet real estate to the tune of a half a billion dollars worth.
And when I say Internet real estate, I mean top level domains, which is like a domain would be like million.com, but a top level domain would be the.com part. So that all these new ones that came out dot app dot blog dot church, some of these you've probably seen. My company was responsible for selling a lot of those.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:18)
Gotcha. If I wanted to create shaan.com, which I do and was taken and sounds like, okay, shit, what do I want to be instead? I can do shaan123.com. That's less cool. Could I get shaan.co? Could I get shaan.xyz? Shaan.xyz?

**Sheel Mohnot** (2:34)
Shaan.badass?

**SPEAKER_2** (2:35)
Whatever, right?
So these other domains, these other dot whatever's exist now, and you were responsible for selling them to the highest bidders. That the whole class of dot. What's one of the famous like not.com, not.co, but like what are some of the other big ones?

**Sheel Mohnot** (2:50)
So dot app is a big one. A lot of these have just started to come out in the past couple of years, so you have not heard of them that much yet. Dot app is gonna be a big one, I think. Dot blog, potentially all the blogs have gone decreased in value since this whole thing came out. Dot xyz is a friend of mine owns, and his thing is the alphabet ends in dot xyz, why shouldn't your domain name?

**SPEAKER_2** (3:14)
Okay, he made a bet on that.
Okay, so there's a whole bunch of these that are out there and you were selling them. So let's rewind to the beginning of that. You're sitting around, where do you get the idea to even go do this? How do you even realize that this is an opportunity worth chasing?

**Sheel Mohnot** (3:26)
Yeah, so I just heard through the news that you could buy your own dot whatever. In 2012, it was all over the news, like people can get your own dot whatever.
And so I wanted to find out more about this.
And naturally, there are a few things that come to mind. Like if you were doing it today, you might wanna do something like in the crypto space, like dot PTC. Unfortunately, in 2012, nobody did that. So in 2012, you had to apply, you had to pay $185,000 to apply for your own dot whatever. So what would you apply for?