How does it feel to earn nearly 5.5 million yuan from a domain name?

Two years ago (2016), a company called Teem received $13.5 million in financing and obtained the brand domain name Teem.com from "domain name king" Rick Schwartz before the financing. Rick did not reveal much information about the details of the transaction at the time, only emphasizing that the transaction was completed in the form of cash plus stock.

I am afraid that even Rick himself would never have thought that two years later, the domain name Teem.com would bring him an additional generous return of up to $642,000.

This has to start with an acquisition case more than ten days ago...

On September 13, 2018, WeWork, the originator of the maker space, announced the acquisition of software startup Teem. According to industry insiders, the transaction amount of this acquisition was about $100 million, and it was also hailed as the third largest acquisition in WeWork's history. Shiva Rajaraman, chief product officer of WeWork, told the media: "The acquisition of Teem means we have an elite team of hundreds of people who will help us create a more complete and efficient office experience for global corporate customers."

Teem was founded in 2012 and is responsible for developing facility management software, which is basically a conference room reservation system plus analysis tools. The company currently has more than 2,800 customers, including online travel housing rental service Airbnb, office communication application Slack, taxi service Lyft, and online file sharing and cloud content management platform Box.

However, the acquisition of WeWork has led to changes in the equity structure of Teem.

It is understood that when domain name king Rick Schwartz sold Teem.com two years ago, in addition to a portion of cash, he also received 1.5% of Teem's equity. But with the acquisition of Teem, this part of the equity was liquidated and recovered. Rick Schwartz talked about his equity in Teem in his personal blog website, which had been liquidated, and the 1.5% equity in his name was converted into $642,751.92 in cash and transferred to his personal bank account.

In the blog, Rick also mentioned that the cash of more than $640,000 made the total sales price of the domain name Teem.com reach $800,000, and the domain name Teem.com was manually registered by him in 1998. In other words, the cash part of Teem.com when it was sold was as much as $150,000, which was really amazing.

Speaking of Rick Schwartz, he is a very famous figure in the domestic and foreign domain name markets. Some people call him the king of domain names, while others say he is a tyrant and an extreme egoist. He created the myth of investing $1,800 (18 domain names) to make $20 million. Since he started investing in domain names in 1995, Rick has handled numerous domain names, many of which were sold at high prices, such as:

In 2003, he bought men.com for $15,000 and sold it for $1.32 million

In 2009, he bought the domain name candy.com for $3 million (about 20.5 million yuan)

In 2015, he sold the domain name Porno.com for $8,888,888 (about 55.62 million yuan)

In 2015, he sold the domain name Porno.com for $180,000 (about 1 In 2015, he sold the domain name 9595.com for $818,181.81 (about $5.19 million)

In 2015, he sold the domain name 989.com for $801,000 (about $5.1 million)

In 2015, he sold the domain name 899.com for $801,000 (about $5.1 million)

Rick once roughly calculated the total value of his domain names and said that the total value of his domain name assets exceeded $500 million, and that was calculated based on the market's low standard. In reality, it may be closer to $1 billion. In terms of domain name investment, he has a unique vision and often takes the initiative. We can deeply understand this from the case of Teem.com this time.