wallstreet.com, it was solving a problem – I needed a good e-mail address. And I immediately went from this horrible AOL address to eric@wallstreet.com.” But like cryptocurrency, being early was an incredible opportunity. “We started getting e-mails, people saying, ‘Hey, I’ll buy that from you.’ And the value of it just mushroomed after that.” As Wade points out, though, “The only way we got $1 million for wallstreet.com is we said no to $60,000, we said no to $250,000, we said no to $500,0000. And then, at $1 million you say, ‘OK, that’s it – we’ll take it.’” AGAIN AND AGAIN it in to see what would happen.” Wade’s wife, Ana Montoya-Wade, likened the domain to the “most prime beachfront property on the Internet.”
In 1999, Wade became the first seller of a domain name for more than $1 million. He received press ranging from the Wall Street Journal , Wired , and PC Magazine . His prediction at the time in the Washington Post looks prescient now... “This is only the beginning,” he said. “These dot-com names are the Rodeo Drive and Fifth Avenue addresses of our industry. Once they are gone, they can’t be replaced.” The book The Domain Game: How People Get Rich From Internet Domain Names put it this way: [WallStreet.com] was an ideal name for many different businesses, from an investment bank to a financial news outlet. And it drew a lot of traffic. “Between 4,000 and 17,000 people a day would just type ‘Wall Street’ into their browser,” Wade said. “We called it background noise. People were just typing
Of course, not every early venture is a success...
THE ONLY PLANE IN THE SKY It was September 13, 2001. A plume of gray smoke and dust still rose from the Twin Towers. And Wade was flying in the only plane in the sky. All other civilian air traffic in the U.S. had been grounded – a precaution against further terrorist hijackings – but the Federal Aviation Administration had authorized this one flight from Albuquerque to New York. On board was a rescue team that hoped it could help find bodies underneath the World Trade Center rubble. Wade was a former stockbroker, an investor, and entrepreneur. He didn’t have rescue experience. But some months prior to the September 11 tragedy, a filmmaker friend
44
November 2019
Made with FlippingBook HTML5