Domain Industry News

Epik Hires Joseph Peterson as Director of Operations

epikRob Monster, CEO of Epik, announced the hiring of Joseph Peterson as Director of Operations at Epik. Many people in the domain industry will recognize Joseph’s name from his articles written on Domain Name Wire, as well as his well thought out written contributions in comments on domain industry blogs and forums.

This hiring is the second big announcement from Epik in the last couple of weeks. Two weeks ago, the company announced the acquisition of Undeveloped.com, a domain name sales marketplace. Although the value of the deal was not shared at the time of the announcement, Rob later told OnlineDomain.com the price was 4 million Euros.

The press release distributed by Epik has more information about Joseph’s background and the role he will have at the company. You can find that below:

Epik Acquires Undeveloped (Updated)

Reza-Rob-Done-DealAccording to  Epik founder Rob Monster, Epik has acquired the Undeveloped domain name marketplace and sales platform founded by Reza Sardeha. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but it appears  that the current team operating Undeveloped will stay on board and the two companies will continue to operate separately. According to the press release “Undeveloped will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Epik Holdings Inc group of Companies with the current management team.”

Rob sent me an email with a press release announcing the news, and I have published that below:

Dutch Startup Undeveloped.com Announces Acquisition by US-based Epik Holdings Inc.


Undeveloped joining Epik allows the company to introduce a full-service solution for buying, selling, leasing and managing domains.

Undeveloped.com announced today that it has been acquired by Epik Holdings inc. The integration of the two companies will help Undeveloped further accelerate the growth of its marketplace for digital brands, after more than doubling transactions in 2016, while accelerating Epik’s international expansion.

“By combining Epik’s reputation, market knowledge, worldwide presence, and complementary technology, we expect to be able to create an even more appealing solution for our customers. A vastly improved Undeveloped marketplace will accelerate the progress of more development-grade domains into becoming thriving Digital Brands used in commerce. All things considered, we could not have asked for a more worthy or more capable partner at this exciting time in the history of the Internet” said Mr. Reza Sardeha, founder and CEO of Undeveloped.

Rob Monster, Founder and CEO of Epik Holdings Inc, who is a Dutch-American, was pleased to announce the completion of the transaction in Amsterdam.

“We have spent the past 5 years developing and operating an integrated set of solutions to help domain investors navigate the life-cycle of their domain investments. With this acquisition, we add another company with potential for hyper-growth. This acquisition has all of the things that I look for in a deal: great leadership, differentiated technology, and complementary locality. The expanded presence in Amsterdam will significantly increase our capacity to deliver to customers in Europe, Middle East and Africa, the type of Legendary Support and customer-centric innovation that our customers have come to expect from us.” said Rob Monster, CEO and founder of Epik.

Undeveloped will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Epik Holdings Inc group of Companies with the current management team. Epik customers can seamlessly use the services of Undeveloped through the same single-sign-on that already powers Epik’s existing services at Epik.com, Anonymize.com and Masterbucks.com. “My team and I are delighted to be part of a rapidly growing company led by a visionary CEO who I have enjoyed getting to know over the past year” added Mr. Reza Sardeha, founder and CEO of Undeveloped.

For further information, please contact Rob Monster, CEO of Epik at rob@epik.com or +1.425-765-0077, or Reza Sardeha, CEO of Undeveloped.com at reza@undeveloped.com.

Update: According to OnlineDomain.com, “Undeveloped and Epik decided to discontinue working together”

Epik Sends CloudBleed Email Update

You may have already heard about a recently discovered security bug called CloudBleed. Based on what I have read about the bug, users of many websites could potentially be impacted, and people may not even know their accounts could become compromised. I presume there is the potential that this could involve domain industry companies.

Yesterday, I received an email from Epik that I want to share with you. I think it is a good idea for Epik (and other companies) to address this ASAP and make sure their customers are aware of the situation. Kudos to Epik for informing customers of the issue almost immediately. Hopefully other industry companies that may be impacted will follow suit.

Elliot Noss Comments on USV Investment

PrintIn a blog post  written by Union Square Ventures (USV) Managing Partner Brad Burnham on the USV blog, the New York City-based venture capital firm announced that it “made a substantial investment in Tucows.” The VC firm did not mention how much it invested in the company, but the amount may eventually be revealed since Tucows is a NASDAQ-listed publicly traded company (TCX). You should have a look at the blog post to see all of the reasons USV made this investment.

I reached out to Tucows President  and CEO Elliot Noss to ask for his reaction to seeing the confidence USV has in what his company has achieved  and the  company’s plans going forward. Elliot was kind enough to reply and had this to say:

I have been bugging Brad to join the board for years. Of course I love all of the folks at USV, but this is really about Brad. As they noted, this is not their typical investment (at all). In fact it is the mirror image in many ways. That being said we have lots to learn from each other and we are both excited to start working on things together. And it is nice to have a sexy VC in the domains space! 🙂

Investing in Tucows is a

35 Layoffs at Rightside Following eNom Deal

Rightside GroupLate last week, I shared news of Tucows’ acquisition of eNom. This is big news for a number of reasons, especially because  Tucows will reportedly become the “second largest domain registrar in the world,” trailing GoDaddy.

One unfortunate side effect of this deal is layoffs. I ran into Bari Meyerson at NamesCon, and she shared the news that she was let go. I worked with Bari for a number of years at Moniker, and I continued to work with her when she went to work at eNom. On the infrequent occasions that  I had an account management issue at eNom, she would either help solve it or connect me with the person who could.

I reached out to Rightside CEO Taryn Naidu to ask about the layoffs, and he told me the company made  about 35 layoffs as a result of the deal. The company now has approximately 125 employees following  the conclusion of the deal. Taryn felt it was important to note to me that “the 35 layoffs were not a result of performance or ability, but the ugly side of deals of this nature.”

It is unfortunate that layoffs resulted, and I would imagine it can be attributed to some job redundancy at the two companies. The good thing, I would think, is that there are now some experience domain industry veterans who may be looking for work in the domain space. Hopefully they land on their feet soon.

Escrow.com Announces “Masters of Domains”

Escrow.com ShieldJust prior to yesterday’s live NamesCon domain name auction, there was a brief presentation of “Escrow.com Masters of Domains.” This was a list of the top ten domain brokers of 2016 by volume of deals put through Escrow.com. The company awarded a trophy to the winners, some of whom were in attendance at the conference. This was the first time the company listed the top domain brokers by volume.

The 10 Escrow.com Masters of Domains for 2016 were:

  • George Hong, Guta
  • Andrew Rosener, Media Options
  • Giuseppe Graziano, GGRG
  • Muhammad Al-Asadi, TopNames
  • Ryan McKegney, Domain Agents
  • Adam Beebe, Latonas
  • Derek Giordano, Giordano, Inc.
  • David Clements, Brannan’s
  • James Booth, BQDN
  • Raymond Liu, 62.com

Escrow.com also set up a website with information about the award and winners: MastersOfDomains.com. The website indicates that this will become an annual award.

I think it would be a great achievement for a broker to be on this list, but it is not necessarily the top 10 domain brokers. Escrow.com is likely the largest domain escrow service, but there are other competing escrow services that brokers use. As a result, this list would likely preclude top brokers at marketplaces like Sedo and Afternic who use in-house escrow options as well as companies that may use private attorney escrow services and/or alternative payment options.

Knowing how competitive some domain brokers are, this will probably become an award people work hard to achieve.

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