Here’s the story. Kevin Rose has started up a mobile development lab named Milk. He recently raised $1.5 million and his investors are a list of rockstar Silicon Valley investors. Michael Arrington, Ron Conway, Tim Ferriss, Dave Morin, Philip Rosedale, Evan Williams, Shervin Pishevar, Joshua Schachter, Anthony Casalena, Ashton Kutcher, Philip Kaplan, Chris Sacca, Gary Vanyerchuk, Tony Hsieh, Chamath Palihapitiya, Matt Mullenweg, Don Dodge, Matt Williams, Tony Conrad via True Ventures, Rob Hayes, Floodgate’s Mike Maples and Greylock’s David Sze. Currently the domain they are using is MilkInc.com. If they want Milk.com they are going pry it from a guy named Dan Bornstein.
Who is Dan Bornstein? Besides owning Milk.com, Dan is a Virtual Machinist at Google and presently working on Android. You may have heard of Android. It’s that little operating system that runs every mobile device in the world that’s not run by Apple. So let’s see. Milk Inc. is a mobile development lab and Dan is a mobile operating system developer? Sounds like these two might get along. Not only should he buy the name from Dan but I should offer him a job as well.
Unfortunately, I don’t think Kevin raised enough money in the first round to buy this domain. According to Bornstein it’s going to take more than the $1.5 million Rose raised. Here is a quote from Milk.com
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In reality Rose doesn’t even need this domain. It’s going to be more about the technologies and sites he creates through Milk than Milk himself. We also know from history that Rose could care less about killer domains. Digg with two ds. Revision 3, wefollow, about.me, ngmoco. Not exactly category killers. I expect more of the same from Rose. As usual, I expect hand registers or low value purchases for each of his releases.
I doubt that he’ll call his mobile apps Milk as well. No one is going to pay high $x,xxx,xxx for that domain.
Correction: Digg with two ds – Should be Digg with two gs
I honestly can’t believe the got milk campaign people and the association funding that haven’t picked it up for a couple mill… their ad campaigns, celebrity endorsers, etc cost way more than that… guess they just don’t get it.
One of the large dairies with a retail slant should buy it and launch their own line and capitalize on the got milk campaign…
Years and years ago, I sold MilkMustache.com to the “Got Milk?” campaign. I can assure you that while they pay handsomely – and provided a bunch of goodies as well – they aren’t budgeting $1.5 million for a domain. It’s always the incentive of the marketing team that would lead a client to make such a large investment. From a domainer’s standpoint, it’d totally make sense though.
I don’t think Kevin cares very much about domains. Consider that he launched his newsletter on a domain like http://foundat.io/n. He’s also an investor in http://www.formspring.me
I love the quote from the Milk.com page.
Along the same lines, I’m curious if Jack Dorsey will be able to pry away Square.com from the owners — square-enix.com — whoever that is. Square.com doesn’t even resolve.
SquareUp.com is a rough replacement. Unlike ‘milk’, which is just the name of the incubator, ‘square’ is the actual name of the product.
Square was a very popular video game developer that merged with Enix, hence the name.
Surprised they haven’t at least redirected the domain.
Wonder how much Milk.CM would go for??
I want $10mill for milk.com? What a douche bag you are Bornstein!
How about give the domain to Kevin Rose or lose your job?