Last week we told you about the sale of Mint.com, the financial site to Intuit for $170 million.
Today according to TechCrunch.com, the former owner of the domain, Hite Capital got a “substantial” amount of stock in the Mint.com site’s company when he sold the domain to
“”That stock was worth a “couple of million dollars” after the sale.”” according to TechCrunch source.
It is not clear if the stock was an addition to any type of cash payment made at the time, but still another seven figure sale for a domain.
As a side note it seems the owner of Mint.com, Aaron Patzer, went to the Rick Schwartz school of negotiation, turning down $130 Million for his 2 year old company, earlier this year during the market meltdown, before Intuit came back with the $170 million dollars offer.
Pure and absolute brilliance! This is exactly what I’m talking about, forget domain development!
@Dan: You’re saying to forget Domain Development – but mint.com is a developed domain and full fledged site with many many active users.
@Dan: I meant to add: So while the owner made a huge amount on the sale of the name due to taking on shares of mint.com, he also hugely benefited from the development of the domain name. So development partnerships CAN yield great results, yes.
Mike,
So working his ass off for a couple of years building this giant, he sold it for $170,000,000 and only came away with $2,000,000 for his efforts??? Maybe I am reading it wrong.
I just researched it a bit more – it seems that Clite Capital was the owner of the mint.com domain name, gave them the domain name against shares AND invested in the company.
@Elliot: The former owner of the domain name (Hite Capital) is different that the owner/founder of the company (Aaron Patzer). As I understand the deal: Hite Capital took stock in exchange for Mint.com (the DOMAIN NAME) and came away with $2M only after Mint.com (the COMPANY) was sold to Inuit. Aaron Patzer made significantly more since he was involved in building the actual Mint.com company. Someone correct me if I’m wrong.
Update: I should add I drew some of the above information from Frank’s research over at Domain Name News. Sorry Frank, didn’t mean to overlook your comment.
Elliot
I think Jon is correct, the guy who worked his ass off got the $170M the former domain owner of Mint.com got $2M for his domain because he got stock in the Mint.com company for his domain
Great result –
MINT!
Great result – Gene