Ask HN: Do dead YC companies sell their brands/IP? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do dead YC companies sell their brands/IP?

When YC companies - any funded companies for that matter - exhaust their runways and call it quits do they sell the IP portfolios (business name, domains, trademarks, patents when they exist, social media profiles)? If so, where? Marketplaces? Leverage the YC network in private deals, if so who are the buyers?

YC companies generally have quality brandable names. In the old days when I took the time to apply to YC .com TLDs were emphasized by PG himself for applicant startups.

Good business names and domains are always in demand, being able to acquire those together with trademarks is even more attractive as a business investment. If branded social media accounts are included, now you have a startup package that many established businesses don’t have.

Of course every IP portfolio would have its own valuation, but acquiring a dead YC company IP portfolio/brand would likely carry a premium from due diligence to the story/narrative.

Any insights, thoughts or stories?

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> Good business names and domains are always in demand, being able to acquire those together with trademarks is even more attractive as a business investment. If branded social media accounts are included, now you have a startup package that many established businesses don’t have.

How could you legitimately use the brand name, domain name, or branded social media accounts of a different company?

Sketchy SEO could use it. Or a criminal enterprise that needs a veneer of respectability. Or a business in a country with PR challenges could use the identity of a different company that didn't have those barriers.

But what legitimate things could, say, a US startup do with a defunct YC startup's brand?

Maybe you could do it legally, but wouldn't it be confusing every time you talk with a prospective investor, customer, or vendor?

"Oh, I see the confusion, ha ha... No we're not the Foobr that lost everyone's money, shut down abruptly on their customers, and maybe had to negotiate on their final bills from vendors... We're actually the Foobr that has the resourceful grit to graverob a failed brand. I know, it's a feather in our cap, we're not too modest to admit!"

Company names get recycled all the time. People have short memories.

I wouldn't recycle the Twitter account but the domain, for sure, if it is generic enough.

https://www.fountain.com/ today is an HR company. Yesterday, it was an advice marketplace: https://techcrunch.com/2015/10/29/porch-acquires-mobile-expe.... And so on.

At the first glance I thought you meant starting a different service called Twitter.

"oh, you mean the dumpsterfire platform filled with porn bots?"

I don't know if the irony was intentional, but X.com is a recycled Musk IP and also a generic domain name!

Honestly, almost all of the companies that shut down will be unknown because they failed to make something people wanted.

Additionally most startups are somewhat niche in the beginning. As long as you are planning to use the brand/domain for a different customer audience I don't think it would be confusing.

Effectively it’s no different than any other acquisition. There is nothing inherently nefarious about buying business assets for the brand and not the actual business itself.

As an example when RadioShack was in bankruptcy a PE group acquired the brand/IP for $26M. A couple years later that PE group resold the IP to a group in South America that relaunched RadioShack retail stores, but they could have used the brand in connection with a business unrelated to electronics retail stores.

Great question. I'll have to Kagi the answer.

Amusingly, I think this FAQ on Kagi's site:

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/faq/faq.html#are-you-affiliated-w...

got added in response to a question I asked on HN when they announced their search engine here.

You mean like Shinola?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinola

https://www.shinola.com/

It does seem to be a shame to throw away hard-built branding, especially when much larger brands get bought and sold every day. It seems like a win to restore an old vintage brand (vintage in HN terms might be anything from the previous batch!)

Shinola appears to have been around for over 80 years, and the IP wasn’t used for decades

This approach was cleverly used by a PC company in the 80s/90s, Packard Bell. That brand had been a radio company from the depression into the late 60s, when the company failed.

When PCs were starting to take off, parents of boomers were interested in getting a PC but unsure what to buy, so a familiar brand was attractive.

This was widely discussed in the business press at the time, and various other bramds were revived for this reason.

In the case of Shinola they aren’t reviving the brand in this fashion, but I assume they think a bit of familiarity, even as a joke, might help (I only knew Shinola from “can’t tell shit from Shinola” and only after I saw a Shinola shop a few years ago did I bother to even look it up).

At least until very recently (and to a certain extent even today still) many different companies would have the same name and similar branding despite being in vastly different industries.

Good names are hard (something any programmer should be familiar with) so it really just doesn't make sense to not use a name or domain that would work well for your brand just because a previous company existed at one point in the past.

it happens all the time, companies go bust and get sold for pennies. they get bought and then pivot towards something the new owners want to invest into.

It wasn't YC, and the company is around in other non-handset markets, but Nokia phones sold today are made by an unrelated company that merely licenses the brand name.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMD_Global#Products_and_Servic...

HMD is basically former Nokia executives and employees though.

Where I'm from there is a group of companies that buy old brand names to sell generic crap. You can buy shitty Vaio notebooks and some other brands.

I'm curious how a failed startups can liquidate IP, since I've seen startups go under with "secret sauce" code that could've been a whole new startup... but assets are sold for a token amount of money to someone who presumably had no idea what they own, since it's never heard from again.

(Sorta like when an app startup builds an enabling piece of infrastructure tech, and realizes that's more golden than their original idea, so they pivot to B2B that tech to other startups and/or enterprises. Only sometimes the company is liquidated before that pivot or open sourcing.)

its not uncommon for the founder to buy the IP out of bankruptcy for some token amount, since the technical ip of a filed company is pretty much unusable by anyone who doesn’t know the code base.

I’ve never seen such a company successfully revive, though some get close (for example Tilt5 is selling hardware and doing some interesting license deals, so could make it).

Worked at a dotcom which ran out of funding after Series A. After all the staff got laid off, the email list, domain, brand materials, and web content were all transferred to the lead investor of the Series A.

Not sure if they were just “first in line” for it all, or if they passed anything on to minority investors.

It probably comes down to who has how much equity in the business, and what the terms say. It is essentially a bankruptcy so it could end up in court I guess, but typically the value is so low compared to the investment that it’s not worth any lawyer time.

And if it’s not in court, there’s really no vector for public visibility. If you’re interested in a particular company you will need to do some detective work to find out who still has what.

Feels like there’s an opportunity there for a business that will maximise dead tech startup IP

That used to be Computer Associates, now CA Technologies, owned by Broadcom:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CA_Technologies>

"Where technology goes to die" was the verbatim description I'd heard of it directly from someone whose former startup had been acquired by them. That's a reasonably widely-held reputation:

<https://www.theregister.com/2018/07/12/broadcom_ca_technolog...>

Funny because Broadcom is where IP goes to die in general lololol.

It does seem a poetic fit.

Startups often have liquidation preferences in the fundraising contracts. This means investors get paid out first in a liquidity event before anyone else.

Imagine the founders raised $20M in exchange for 50% of the company. The founders make precisely zero if they sell the company for less than $20,000,001 because the investors get first claim to their share up to the amount they originally invested.

If the company goes out of business and the brand could be sold off for $50k, it doesn't really benefit anyone to do it. The VCs have better things to do with their time. They probably spent more than $50k researching and securing the initial investment. They are in the game of chasing 100x returns, not trying up their lawyers trying to reclaim peanuts. Plus, they don't want to sell their failed brands to someone who might sully their name by association. The founders would get nothing anyway from a small sale, so they just move on. The assets end up in limbo somewhere and no one cares enough to do anything with them while they wither and die.

Usually there’s a broke founder who refuses to let the dream go.

I have no insight, but I always wondered what happens to the $100k+ domains that VC-funded startups buy and then go bust.

Do they sell them at a bargain?

I have only one example (dont want to give any attention though) the company started maybe 5-6 years ago, lasted 3-4 years and last I checked the company sold to a "media company" who oddly just took the site and made it a generic "news" ad page.

My guess is these domains can be juiced for a few $1,000 in ad revenu just from people searching the old name.

So yes, they 100% do see off their domains to "media" compaines who fill them with ads.

I know of a few people whose relatively high traffic sites domains expired for whatever reason, and the sites reappeared under new owners with some of the content recreated from archive but now with a shitload of ads.

You are right, it probably just expired, might not have been "sold".

Back in the day I read that a lot of the desirable domains used by startups are leased, it would be interesting learn more how that part of the industry actually works.

It's good to be very careful about what you do with your email account at such a place. Most companies are tolerant of some incidental personal use of your work email address, but just remember that whoever gets control of the domain later will also receive all "your" email. So if you're using it as a recovery address for any personal online services, they will now have that.

Best policy is to use work email addresses strictly for work, even if they are OK with some personal use. This is true even if it's your own business. Are you going to want to pay for that domain forever? If not, keep it separate from your personal email.

It’s not an industry. It is an ordinary business practice that makes suing a company less attractive and less lucrative when successful.

Bob controls Acme.LLC and sets up Assets LLC. Assets LLC buys acmellc.com and leases it to Acme LLC for $1,000,000/year. Acme LLC now has less cash assets and no valuable domain name asset to loose in court. In addition there’s a $1,000,000 less net revenue to be distributed as profits among non-controlling Acme LLC shareholders and all that money went to Bob.

Setting up holding companies has been ordinary for many decades and is easy to do. It’s a practice not an industry.

I’m very familiar with IP/asset holding companies, but I am referring to an actual practice within the “domain industry” of leasing domains which is common and not just with high value domains (6-7 figures) but even with 5 figure domains.

Within the domain industry “leasing” is a little misleading because these are typically more like “rent to buy” deals where the original owner continues to retain maintain ownership until the leasee makes the final payment.

Leasing is leasing. Domains and desks are not very different from the supply side.

My advice is attend a domain leasing industry conference should such a thing exist.

My apologies for previously taking your question at face value and bothering to answer. I did not intend to bruise anyone’s ego.

> My apologies for previously taking your question at face value and bothering to answer.

That’s a weird response on account I didn’t ask a question, you apparently replied to my comment answering a question that never existed.

> I did no intend to bruise anyone’s ego.

Far from it, I am a corporate transactional attorney that structures holding companies and drafts the licensing agreements you were attempting to mansplain as you confused that with the practice of domain leasing.

Good luck to you.

They sell them, not usually at a bargain. They used to have vastly more SEO juice than they do now -- there is a little more intelligence going on these days from the search engines in regards to domain registration changes.

Still, lots of newspapers and magazines have great "page rank" for their domains, and they are going out of business at an extraordinary rate, being bought up, all the content pulled from Internet Archive and replaced to make them seem legit and then a couple of links installed in the footer to your favorite off-shore casino.

A YC Company is no different than any Business when it comes to failures. Once it has failed, it will either sell its "assets" (very commonly known as Asset Sale), do an acqui-hire or just fold completely because no one wants to buy even their "assets".

I personally was involved in trying to acquire a failed YC product (wont call it company by that time) that was already sold earlier by original founders and the previous buyer was reselling because he couldn't do anything with it. We didn't agree on a price so I walked. At that time, it was already listed for a much smaller value than what a VC would like. Think really small like in the low hundreds of thousands, forget millions.

I also have spoken to a previous YC founder whose startup failed and they basically got acqui-hired and he was really unhappy with how everything turned out. No one remembers their brand name.

As few other comments have already pointed, brand names are overrated especially for failed companies. No one remembers that name because they weren't popular to begin with. Its not like every YC company has a well known brand. Far from it especially nowadays when YC funds so many.

Thanks for the comment, (I think) it’s really interesting. I have a bunch of questions about that experience, but limiting to just one:

>At that time, it was already listed for a much smaller value than what a VC would like.

I understand you were in talks with a product not necessarily the entire business or even the brand assets, but can you expand on “listed”? Makes it sound like a public marketplace with a price.

>brand names are overrated especially for failed companies.

I think this is where my post wasn’t clear and misinterpreted. My post is being interpreted as an acquisition for the purpose of trading off the goodwill of the prior business. Whereas, I’m envisioning an acquisition because the dead company has a great name and a portfolio (short branded .com, branded social media handles, trademark) that would be a great name for any business/startup rather than leveraging the goodwill of any prior business operating under that name. For example, I’m just making something but if there were a YC company “telehealth” and they owned Telehealth.com and @telehealth social media handles, there would be plenty of established businesses/startups that would want to acquire that brand portfolio having nothing to do with the prior business.

I was curious about this a few years ago also. Seems to me that, as of now, the YC strategy seems to be to hold on to these brand names indefinitely. That's why so many YC companies that are obviously dead continue to occasionally release press releases and blog posts.

Do you have an example?

Most of the time, the remaining assets are lost to the world. Often despite efforts to release the code and other media. Typically, the people involved in the wind down are not people who care about the assets and generally only care about liability.

I would imagine it’s the same as any other business. They declare bankruptcy, put the business into administration, appoint administrators who then determine how much the assets are worth and how to realise any value from those assets to pay off any creditors/shareholders/take their fee.

Realising value from the assets (both tangible and intangible) might be via selling the business or just a fire sale of what they can make a return on.

Source: owned an investment backed company that we put into administration after 8 years when something happened that we couldn’t trade through.

Very interesting data point, I’d have thought bankruptcy would be the exception not the rule, only applicable when there is startup debt. Maybe this is actually far more common than I’d thought due to SAFEs and convertible notes.

I don't think bankruptcy is the norm, since most startups don't fail with outstanding debt.

Debt in the sense of formally borrowed money? Maybe not. But unpaid invoices, rents due and lease obligations, possibly even payroll due, I think would be pretty common.

It can be entirely frustrating to find out who owns IP, code, etc. often is seems to disappear into an unknown abandonware type limbo.

Domains eventually revert to the registrar and someone snaps them up.

The domains are an interesting asset because the annual renewal fee.

If business A owns the domain and becomes insolvent, then dissolves, the registrant of the domain no longer exists and there is no longer a business bank account to pay the renewal. This likely leads to what you’ve described, the registrar or a domainer/squatter benefiting.

But you can at least buy the domain from the squatter afterwards, so the deadweight loss is limited. This is analogous to proposals for Harberger taxes on IP, or requiring copyright registration/fees for renewal after a few decades - if the rights are lost or so low value, then this elegantly restores it to the public domain, rather than locking it up for the next 100+ years.

I’m strongly against Harberger Taxes - I see them as an attack vector by market incumbents - but you just made them sound as non-objectionable as I’ve ever seen.

On the domain side I’d like to see a small extension of ICANN UDRP to cover trademark owners against unused/forwarded domains irrespective of the domain being registered prior to the trademark registration.

It could be a competitor (Stark Industries) that is getting large. If the brand still has SEO or social juice, buying it then rebranding it as something like "Wayne Enterprises, now a Stark Industries Company".

It could be a cheap relabeling of existing products but if all the company who is doing that say is, "Yo, we bought the brand." and doesn't hide it or make false claims, that is completely legit.

It's a pretty smart move if the price is right, which can be a big "if".

I have no inside knowledge, but I'd guess that if those are valuable, they probably acquired. If not, those things won't amount to much. Sure, you could sell your brand and domain and fetch a couple of thousand dollars, but would that be worth the effort and risk of someone using your (even if dead) brand to do illegal stuff? I guess not! It's better to just write the whole thing off.

I’d love to start a business buying up old band brands, licensing them out. HMU if you wanna join me

How would one go about selling a good domain name and twitter handle for a failed project?

Not to mention that domain names and twitter handles are worth much less money these days. gTLDs something something...

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Are you asking for shits and giggles or are you looking at doing a business here?

Going to email you

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