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You completely ignored PG's argument about it signaling weakness. This is one of those perception versus reality things, where people's perceptions (those who are judging a startup) ARE the reality, whether those perceptions are theoretically refutable or not.

In other words, let's say you're right, and owning the .com domain name is becoming less meaningful (an argument that PG already addressed, by the way). That doesn't mean that .com domains are becoming significantly less meaningful to people's perceptions. And perceptions matter, when going after customers, funders, employees, business partners, etc.

I wouldn't say that the perception that having the .com domain name is important is an incorrect one. Maybe you would disagree and say it is an incorrect perception. But even if you think the perception is incorrect, the perception is still part of the reality that the startup lives in.

This classic "perception IS reality" pattern is something that a lot of people miss.

signaling weakness is an important factor for a fraction of companies for most others that is the very least of their worries.

PG talks from a perspective that does not apply to most companies in this world.

Again if you get a .com name that is great. But whether it's worth the effort of finding one it if you don't have it already is another discussion all together.

> But whether it's worth the effort of finding one it if you don't have it already is another discussion all together.

Whether or not you agree with pg, finding a decent .com is pretty cheap in terms of time and money when you have free domain name checking services that give you available .com variants of desired keywords. Even though I know this, I'm still always surprised when I see the 2-3 syllable .com domain names that I wanted, being available without auction or private seller inquiries.

Thats just not true. It's not some universal law you can apply. You have to take into considering the amount of time and what kind of name you have access to.

> You have to take into considering the amount of time and what kind of name you have access to.

I'm not sure I understand. Free name checking services do take into account what names are available to you and they give you variants of your desired keywords. Results are returned in seconds. It takes a few hours at most to go through a bunch of keywords.

But changing perception is in our hands. If everybody starts not giving a F for the .com, then people will start not caring about that... If we keep fighting for the .com we are just supporting that ugly business of buying nice domain names in order to sell them for a ridiculous price to people that actually want create something.

When you're trying to get your company off the ground, fighting the good fight for the betterment of other companies is not something your can afford.

re:Signaling weakness.

True, but to whom. Most people don't know the difference between getDropbox.com and Dropbox.com.

Investors, is I think the implication.

I agree here with Natch, compare point about signaling weakness with sending your CV from "fancy_kid_45@gmail.com" to "firstname.lastname@gmail.com" or even "firstname@lastname.com" what looks most professional? Can you imagine reading CV of a person with fancy kid mail?

> Can you imagine reading CV of a person with fancy kid mail?

Yes. In fact I did quite a bit of hiring at some of my previous companies and I never cared about email (why would I care about email? This isn't a signal, this is noise). Do people, at least in tech, really care about such things? At least in my deals I never found one. I'd imagine in stuffy jobs it might be something to look down upon but in tech? That seems silly considering how progressive our industry typically is.

If you want to hire someone detail oriented will you look inside his CV if he has "detail oriented" listed or you just see he has typos?

Wouldn't appearing weak by not shelling out potentially tens of thousands of dollars for a domain name be, well, accurate? I mean...these are startups, not established companies. I think showing weakness could be to the advantage of a startup, which PG seems to ignore.

How is showing weakness an advantage?

It can signal value, though you might end up chasing worse customers.

How does it signal value?

I think it can signal breaking the mold. "We are new, we are not constrained to use a .com domain, come and find cool stuff here"

It can signal a prioritization of values. Startups tend move fast and be flexible, and tend to have less customers so each one is more valuable. Established companies tend to move slowly and often provide worse customer service. By being honest about being a startup (or being an established company) expectations can be set between company and customer. Pretending to be established when in reality you are not seems disingenuous, and I think it's pretty easy to argue that being genuine is good/can be an advantage.

I don't really see how .com or not translates into being genuine or not.

Having been a founder for four years now, I have learned that the word "startup" usually scares potential customers. It is actually a good thing to seem more established than you are. However that doesn't mean you are disingenuous either. It is not black or white. You can look more established: .com domain, decent website, proper terms and privacy policy, no beta or "coming soon" wording on website, etc. However if someone asks directly how established you are, you are truthful.

What the potential customer wants to know is if they can trust you, and you won't be gone tomorrow. Therefore if you are truthful about the company's state, but seem like you are established then more people will look past the word "startup" since it will be obvious to them that you are serious and have some idea what you are doing.

In other words, you dont need to go around yelling at the top of your lungs that X is a startup. That strategy will most likely fail. But you certainly shouldn't deceive people either. There is a line.

I suspect that your parent is conjecturing that the fact of not having X.com will eventually stop being perceived as a sign of weakness.

I do not know to which extent I agree. I find it sad but likely that people may eventually stop paying attention to URLs altogether; the main counter-argument I would have would be phishing, because, no matter what, you'll still have to check that you are on the right website at some point. That said I do believe that if it may happen for the general public, it may not happen before a long time for more knowledgeable people (prospective funders, employees, partners, etc., as you mentioned).

I didn't ignore PG's argument at all. My point is how can there be any perceived weakness when the thing in which we're calling a weakness doesn't exist to most users?

When I, admittedly anecdotally, poll people I've met who were practically born after the Internet started, almost none of them even type in .com and a few didn't even know what that was. I'm convinced this sentiment is going to become more common especially with so many squatters on .com domains it's almost impossible to have a good company domain name anymore without spending stupid money to get it. Yet you can get the same name with a different TLD for cheap and you show up at the top of search results.

I'd love to see more search engines or maybe even a decentralized search infrastructure to help facilitate this but that's pretty difficult.

It sounds (unsurprisingly, of course) like the perspective of an investor or other tech industry insider. Notice the phrases like "it signals weakness" and "suggests you're a marginal company." Those don't seem like phrases most people are ever going to think about a company, and especially not based only on their domain name.

I disagree.

My parents are typical web users. Fairly tech savvy, but not tech insiders. I recall telling them about bit.ly. It took a while to explain that it wasn't bitly.com, bit.ly.com, etc. They ended up just searching for it instead of typing in the domain name.

Think of the added friction this causes... and as we all know, every added interaction detracts from the conversion funnel. Taken in aggregate, many startups cannot afford the attrition of a shitty domain name.

Isn't that a slightly different point? You're talking about ability of a user to discover or find the site, not the user's perception of the strength of the business.

...but the point is that to some non-technical users a "new" TLD won't even look like a full URL.

That is beambot's point, and it's valid, but it's different than the point in this essay.

Don't typical web users these days always search instead of typing in the domain name?

They ended up just searching for it instead of typing in the domain name.

And they found it. That's how a large, large number of people find web sites these days, and it works fine.

In B2B weakness in the form of undercapitalization is important because companies don't want to make middle term or long term bets on a technology with uncertain prospects for support, maintenance and further development. Signaling "this product might be legacy in 18 months" is worth avoiding.

A rose by any other name still smells sweet, but thornbush isn't the way to market it.

Insiders usually have ungainly phrases for things that outsiders sense but cannot/do not put into words themselves.

The public are hugely influenced by branding, advertising, look and feel, and experiences. They might not put the feelings they have into words like insiders do, but those things absolutely exist and insiders to the retail, advertising, and similar industries have all sorts of jargon to analyze the behavior of the public.

An easy thing for a well funded start up to spend money on is their domain name. A good question to ask is when did the top 20 YC companies by valuation buy theirs. Did they pass over really talented devs just so they could drop $500k on a dot com?

Things are changing. Talk to 18-20 year olds about how they are using the internet. Throw out an address using one of ICANN's new extensions. Do they even recognize its a website? EV Certs don't even show URLs in some browsers. Do mobile users look for you on Google, or in the app/play/other store? Personally I'm uncomfortable with the positions ICANN has taken.I don't trust them to protect domain's owner rights. We need better alternatives.

Exactly! Referring to your domain name is something you do so rarely it's not even worth mentioning. Most of the time people get redirected to your website, it's via bitly or a number of other url shorteners.

You're assuming most people search first; many users don't even understand the difference between entering a search term versus a URL in a browser address bar. Yet, non-techy people know ".com".

I dont have the data but I would argue such minority is very less and even if they are unable to find what they are looking for in first attempt (by using .com), they do check search engines result afterwards.

I think it is the opposite. Among most of the "non tech" people I know, they enter a name at a google search box rather than a URL. Even if they know the URL, they enter it at a search field!

Correct. I have seen this with my own eyes. Me: Go to Facebook. Them: Google, Search Box, Enter Facebook.com in search box, Click.

Actually many non-techy do this:

1) Open browser, 2) Defaults to whatever search engine that add-on they have switch them to, 3) Type facebook, or facebook.com, or whatever they are looking for, 4) Click first result. If fails, go back, look around, click other result.

Yeah. I heard this 13 years ago too. http://shirky.com/writings/domain_names.html

> Yeah. I heard this 13 years ago too. http://shirky.com/writings/domain_names.html

So because someone suggested it 13 years ago makes it not true today? Look at how the new TLDs are working out; if you want to find a company using a funny TLD you just search for their name and unless the .com is higher ranked the company comes right up to the top.

Look at it from a user's perspective; do you know anyone who actually types in a domain name anymore that isn't a technie? If a user wants to find a specific company they just simply use voice and ask their phone or open a browser and just type it in.

Typing in a TLD adds friction especially since ICANN added all of these stupid TLDs that no one is even used to. The lower the friction the better, right?

The absolute lowest friction is to have a .com domain. And yes, it's still true.

I'm not convinced; if you look at Google Trends there are many, many company names in the top 100 searches. Why are people only searching the company name instead of going directly to their website? Typically their website is the first several results depending on the size of the company.

Also, only anecdotal because I can't find any studies one way or another, but I can't find anyone in the younger generation who actually types in any domain names. I even had a frustrating experience telling someone who's used the internet all his life what .com even was as he had never typed it before. Plenty of people in my generation still type it though.

Also many of the older generation folks I've worked with who had their internet start with AOL don't seem to type in domain TLDs either.

So until I see some solid, current research regarding the behaviors of the different generations I'm not convinced a .com is lower friction; you type less when you just type the company's name and most browsers nowadays will give you the option to autocomplete directly to their website.

> do you know anyone who actually types in a domain name anymore that isn't a technie?

That's a problem. It means we rely more and more on search engines, thus centralising the web (and with it, the internet) more than it needs to be. Centralizing the network means centralizing the power. Not a good idea. It never was.

DNS is already centralized.

Yes, and that is a problem. But that's not nearly as bad as having Google and Bing have the same role. DNS goes through a highly decentralised network of name servers, many of which aren't at all controlled by the ICANN. Each country based top level domain has its own set of servers, and there name requests are generally cached on other servers still.

But when you type "company name" in a search engine, you give away your search to an ad supported private company in real time. Juicy profiling, no privacy. Much worse than using DNS.

Besides, when you click on a link from your favourite search engine, you're still using DNS. Now you have two single points of failure.

I don't see the problem with G and B in this role; at least they answer to the end user. Who does ICANN answer to? What is your alternative if you get crappy service from the .com operator? If what PG says is correct, you don't really have an alternative.

> at least they answer to the end user.

Yes they do. Just don't forget that the end user is the advertiser. We poor schmucks who type text in the search box are the product.

That's a different kind of centralized.

Everything going thru search engines, means you depend on someone who has no responsibility towards the people they have power over. That's bad; you have to waste time understanding their incentives and staying on their good side.

DNS suffers the same flaw.

Err, I've just read this article, and it seems its main thesis is, domain names are probably not going away. Because people will likely always need memorable, globally unique identifiers. I didn't see any talk about .com going away either.

I agree with you.

Name of the company and domain name has very little to do with company's success. There so many things you need to worry when company is small and getting domain name or renaming company is really very dangerous distraction.

I'm not saying domain name does not play some role but spending time on it is a very dangerous distraction.

So, does it show as weakness? Yes. Is that biggest weakness of your company in relationship to how hard to fix it? No - but if answer is Yes then you are already made it and all this discussion is moot.

> Domain names are transitioning into becoming useless

That's an astute observation...however, they are not useless YET. Perhaps in 5 years .com's will be obsolete and every browser will have powerful company lookup utilities that everyone can use. The issue is that startups don't have the luxury of losing that sort of time.

Remember this is in the context of startup businesses who may not have much on the web. Your position works out okay if you are confident in google's "I'm feeling lucky" kind of search. For everybody else, having a solid .com name still reigns supreme.

It seems like we are going back to the AOL keyword days... not a good sign.

> It seems like we are going back to the AOL keyword days... not a good sign.

Not really comparable in my opinion. In AOL, if I remember correctly, you had to register or pay for your keyword much like a domain name. So all keywords were owned by a central authority, could only be used within their ecosystem and had the same type of squatter issues as domain names.

What's happening today are "keywords" being associated with specific websites when, and only when, the users are actively looking for and using that website. This isn't centralized (sure most people using Google but people forget Bing is actually really good and used by many!). You can't simply pay for the top spot anymore.

You can "simply pay for the top spot". This is why the results at the very top of the Google search are paid ad placements.

I was referring to search results not advertisements. You can pay one fee, like a domain TLD or AOL Keyword, and get that spot. With those advertisements you have to constantly put money in to stay at that spot.

Domain names are also a constant, on-going cost.

While there is an on-going cost (i.e. domain renewals), it is very small compared to the initial payment one might make to acquire a premiere domain.

Sadly my parents don't know that the top yellow box is an ad, they think it's the top search result. I expect most people are the same.

Does it really matter, though? If they find what they're looking for, what difference is it if the result was paid or organic?

In most cases the ad is not what they are looking for.

> You can't simply pay for the top spot anymore.

There's ton of money being made (sometimes even by honest businesses) on the opposite assumption. Instead of paying the gatekeeper to put you higher on the list you pay some third parties to game the sorting algorithm.

The preponderance of the evidence suggests (proves?) you're wrong.

Google's search results page is pretty much a DNS Server.