Angel investor, serial entrepreneur, and host of the This Week In Startups show, Jason Calacanis, is no stranger to a great domain name.
Calacanis once owned 20.com before selling it for $1.75 million in 2017, a name he acquired in 2006 for $75,000 through domain marketplace Sedo.
In short, Calacanis appreciates a good domain name, and sometimes that can even help to sway him into investing in a company.
In a recent episode of This Week In Startups, Calacanis’ guest was Ryan Breslow, former Bolt CEO and current co-founder of Love Health Inc., a new company operating on Love.com.
It looks as though the domain is registered to long-time owner Yahoo!, which would suggest that Breslow and his team may either be leasing the name or working with Yahoo! on the project.
In the show, above, talk soon turns to Games.com, a domain also registered to Yahoo!.
Calacanis reveals that he originally advised on the acquisition of Games.com while he was working at AOL. Yahoo! and AOL are both owned by Apollo Global Management after the firm bought Verizon’s media business in 2021 for $5 billion.
Just after the 4-minute mark of the show, Calacanis shares that AOL bought Games.com for $10 million. He also explains the logic behind paying a $10 million fee for the name. Calacanis also suggests that the current value of Love.com would be “at least $5 million.”
These domains are discussed between 2:03 and 4:53 in the video above. I found the video thanks to @Big Mac on NamePros.