There was a story published on Bloomberg that featured a short numeric .co. 99.co a Singaporean house-hunting service has caught the eye of Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin.
Now a resident of Singapore for close to seven years, Saverin the venture capitalist helped plug 99.co to real estate agents and sat in with the CEO Darius Cheung on a panel and expressed the need to embrace new technologies.
Saverin making these appearances may seem like no big deal, he put money in the company, but Saverin has been very private since landing in Singapore, he usually turns down requests for interviews or appearances.
The name 99.co moved from the Dot Co restricted list to being registered at Internet.BS in February of 2013.
TechCrunch covered the $1.6 million venture funding 99.co raised in 2015.
Why 99.co ?
Most would think the strong preference for numeric domains in Asian countries would be the driving force behind the name. Actually the reason has nothing to do with that at all.
From the article:
The startup’s name refers to Cheung’s desire to serve the 99 percent. It was during the subprime crisis that he began delving deeper into the financial turmoil that consumed so many homeowners, and decided to start a real estate service that was transparent and intuitive. “People were buying properties they didn’t understand,” Cheung said.
“We don’t take money for ranking,” he argued. “What we can do is to use that as an incentive to make agents behave better.”
99.co has its work cut out for them, PropertyGuru dominates the market with close to 90% of the Singaporean market.
Read the full story here
I had a billionaire’s son as a freshman room-mate when I was in college. Unfortunately, i didn’t pursue this opportunity, as I decided to live throughout the world as a documentary film-maker. 12 countries in 10 years.
Eduardo Saverin has Zuckerberg has a room-mate at Harvard, contributes $12,000 in “family money” to this startup called TheFacebook and maybe 20 hrs of his own time. That investment so far has returned over $1.8 Billion and counting.
It could very well be the greatest ROI eve made since Marcus Crassius burned down homes in Rome and offered “to buy the citizens ‘s homes while their homes were burning — where we get the phrase “fire sale”