Why the facepalm? Selling shares is no different than not buying them. If they weren't investing in tech startups, they shouldn't start doing so just because the shares fell on their lap.

Sure, in this particular case they would have made money, but that's with the benefit of hindsight. What if the domain buyer had been Spoonrocket instead?

1% would be quite a chunk of cash. I wonder if they could have cashed out at the $17b evaluation or if they would be sitting on paper-rich stock right now. I couldn't find how much they cashed out for, but something like $1 million in the bank might end up being worth more than $170 million on paper.

Edit: well, on second thought at the 17b evaluation they could have probably cashed out 1% of their share (0.1% of the company), made as much as when they did cash out and still be sitting on 0.9% of the company. Oops for them.