Web Address Value Skyrocket

1E chief executive Sumir Karayi negotiated the sale of his company’s rare two-character website address from a bloke in Hong Kong for the bargain-basement price of $600. Only a couple of years later, the address was worth around $750,000.

Karayi says: “At the time we founded the business, there were some websites available and I had a very interesting discussion with a guy in Hong Kong about the one we liked – www.1e.com. It’s actually one of the stop messages that Windows has so it’s a geeky kind of name. They weren’t going to release any other two-character websites but I managed to negotiate a fantastic price.”

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