> ....
> After weeks of gentle negotiating, they came to an agreement: $54K in cash for the domain.
Yikes. That's 3.6x the max budget they were hoping to spend. I really do hope that in the long run it pays off.
I worked for a start-up that acquired a smaller company (complete with an awesome name) for cash/shares. Smaller company supposedly had a clause in their contract saying they could buy the company back for £1 should the new owner run out of money. Fast forward 2 years: parent company failed and smaller company carried on...
Like goatforce suggests, I would have made sure the deal includes a buyback clause. I'd do that even as a founder, because a) it's the right thing to do in this case, and b) it would let me negotiate a lower price because I'm not making the guy give up his 15-year dream of making sure it is used for something good.
I'm in this business. It's quite common to claim things like that. And being offered a sum of money and actually closing a deal are two different things anyway.
That said they did get a good number on the domain and it is possible that the seller did get offers for 6 figures. But the fact that he said that really means nothing as there is no way to verify that. It's a negotiating technique.
I certainly hummed and hawed about attaching clauses to the sale, but feared they would make the transfer overly complex.
It was better for me to err on the side of being zen about it. A big driver was the feeling I got from the microryza team.
They're the real deal and they are going to be able to do very well by this name.
I told them during negotiations that what I'm most interested in is their succeeding so that they don't need to enter into the domain name speculation business, because they would be very very sad.
I will mention, though, as part of this story, that I was once approached by someone who wanted to use the domain name for a sex toys store. And while that's reasonably noble, I was comparing at the time to my own aspirations for the name in the realm of pure science.