Amazon acquires meeting-productivity startup Do to expand Chime | Hacker News Reader

Amazon acquires meeting-productivity startup Do to expand Chime

techcrunch.com

55 pointsttam16 comments

From their shutdown blog post [0], it looks like they gave users just 9 days warning before they deleted all user data. Also, the login link (still present in the header) takes you to a page they seem to have forgotten to add content to [1].

[0] http://blog.do.com/post/157299307009/announcing-our-next-cha...

[1] https://www.do.com/login

I'm curious how much of this startup value is just in domain name.

They might not own it...

Salesforce had the domain in 2013, and was an investor in Do.com. The domain may have been on loan/lease.

I previously worked at a startup that was using a domain on a "rent to own" basis. I suspect something similar here.

Interesting! Do you have any info how terms of these leases look like?

We were in a negotiation to purchase photo.com. The asking price was around $1.5M and we had worked out an agreement where we would purchase the domain at a discount (in exchange for revenue share) and make the payments in equal parts over 12 months.

There were target revenue numbers and penalties if we were unable to make the monthly payment of around $80k.

Thank goodness the deal fell through.

My business does this as a part of its offerings. The deals are usually all custom as they are potentially very valuable domains involved.

Most of the time though they have a buyout component after a certain period of time and they sometimes allow part of the lease payments to apply to the final payment price.

It really just depends. More leverage for the terms on do.com vs say "Ilovewebsiteswithorangeheaders.com"

Noah Kagan did a podcast on the deal he made to buy Sumo.com. Not a straight lease but more like a payment plan. He talks about how Mint.com was purchased this way too.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/noah-kagan-presents-form...

This sounds like seller financing, it's very common in real estate transactions and other large asset purchases.

Well technically, we all rent the domains from our registrars.

I avoid however, to rent from a 3rd party who is the domain owner within the registry.

As with all things, it depends on what someone is prepared to pay.

It seems unlikely that Amazon is overly concerned about the domain name

(Disclosure: I work at Amazon on the totally unrelated product "Go")

I wonder how much they got acquired for. It seems to have been in an early stage? 2-10 employees from the screenshot in the article.

google g suite competition? next add file collaboration or buy dropbox. mailbox chat ...

That headline is incredibly hard to parse.

Yeah, let me go Google "Do"...

Well the founders are kinda of stupid to choose 'Do' as their company name, showing zero awareness of SEO. Maybe it is not far in the future, until The startup emerges...!

There's something to be said for the dot-com-era fad of actually having "dot com" in your company name.

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