In the video testimonial below, Shri Ganeshram, founder of Awning, discussed the benefit of his company’s Awning.com domain name. In particular, Shri mentions the credibility that is earned by the brand for having a premium domain name like Awning.com.
A Whois search shows that Awning.com has been registered under Whois privacy at Uniregistry for quite some time. This is likely because Awning doesn’t actually own Awning.com. Instead, the company leases it via Venture.com. Instead of having to spend a significant sum of money to acquire the domain name, the company is able to pay a monthly fee to lease the domain name.
According to Crunchbase, Awning has raised more than $9.3 million in funding. Shri mentions that the company was not hampered in its fundraising by leasing the domain name rather than owning it.
Thanks to Steven Sacks for sharing the video.
Google took a picture of every single family home on every public street.
It took 3 years to take all the pictures (2010 -2013), but it would take a 1000 years
to click on each arrow and proceed frame by frame to each house.
If you wanted to figure out who owns each house, it can’t be done with Google maps.
Businesses maintain a legal competitive advantage thru trade secrets.
A trade secret can’t be patented. A patent requires public disclosure of a process.
It’s impossible to claim rights to a secret.
The only way leasing a domain makes business sense — the only way — is if the agreement contains an iron clad provision granting the lessee the sole and absolute legal right to purchase the domain at a set-in-stone price by a set-in-stone date.
Imagine Amazon having to switch from Amazon .com . . . to any other domain.
Does Venture include such a provision in their leasing agreement?