A co-founder of LinkExchange came away with the Drugs.com domain which fetched $823,456 at an online auction.
Tony Hsieh is a co-founder of Venture Frogs LLC, a San Francisco-based investment company focusing on Internet startups. Hsieh was the winning bidder in an auction conducted by GreatDomains.com.
Hsieh said Venture Frogs plans to use the domain for one of their portfolio companies, a “drug/pharmacy portal,” which will initially be housed in the new Venture Frogs Incubator space at the Marquee Historical Building in San Francisco.
Hsieh and Alfred Lin formed Venture Frogs after selling LinkExchange to Microsoft in November 1998 for a reported $250 million.
“$823,456 is definitely a lot of money, but we believe that if combined with the right team and a good business plan, Drugs.com has the potential to be much, much more,” Hsieh said.
Broadcast live on two television stations in Mesa, Ariz., which is the hometown of GreatDomains.com, the price sat around the $300,000 mark until the last half-hour in which the domain skyrocketed more than $500,000.
GreatDomains.com is the Internet’s leading domain name broker and has been dealing with name transactions since 1996.
Venture Frogs focuses on the Internet, e-commerce, information, and telecommunications technology markets. Thus far this year, the company has made over a dozen investments, ranging as high as $3 million.