About

My name is Morgan Linton (as you might have guessed) and I currently live in Los Angeles California with my girlfriend Daina and our wonderful cat Samsie.

I am originally from Northern California (Berkeley) however just moved-back to California after living on the East Coast for nine years.

During High School I started my own web design company designing web sites for high-end real estate companies. Since I was just a young lad then I worked with a partner who was older and had a BMW and some nice suits – he was our deal-maker, I was our developer. This was an amazing experience and we built the websites for some of the largest real estate companies in California. I even had my own technology for a little while that I called “GIF TV” – this was the first-ever animated GIF used to allow people to virtually walk-through a home.

I graduated High School in 1999 and went to Carnegie Mellon University where I received a B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering with a minor in Computer Science. Being the geek that I am I decided to stay longer and graduated with my Masters in Computer Engineering in 2004.

During University I was lucky enough to get an internship with IBM where I worked for two summers as a software developer. IBM was a great place to work and I made some incredible friends while I was there. During the school year I was IBM’s student ambassador and worked in recruiting helping IBM find great intern candidates at Carnegie Mellon. It was exciting to have the opportunity to work in both software development and HR for a company like IBM.

After finishing grad school in engineering I came to a shocking conclusion – I didn’t want to be an Engineer! This is a great way to completely terrify your parents after you’ve just spend the last five years at University! So why didn’t I want to be an engineer? While I loved the problem-solving that came-with engineering I missed the interaction with people. For those who know me you know that I’m a big people-person and I love working with people – sitting in an office writing code all-day just wasn’t for me.

So I went to intern for Dreamworks in Los Angeles. I worked in the story department reading screenplays and coming-up with new movie ideas (none were accepted so I have no claim to fame there!). I’m fairly certain I was the only person to ever to intern at Dreamworks after finishing grad school in Engineering. Much to my surprise I was well-accepted there and had the opportunity to work with some amazing people. The pressure is high in the film industry but it is an exciting place to work!

About two months into my internship at Dreamworks my cousin called me from a house they were renting in Santa Barbara – he told me I had to come to SB to meet the owner of the house they were renting. All he said is that the guy was working for some cool new music company and that I should meet him. I drove to SB and met a very nice, young successful guy who worked for a company called Sonos. The company was just starting-out but the idea sounded incredible – wireless music throughout the home.

Before I knew it I was interviewing for a position at the company – a job in the “Channel Sales” department. With an engineering background I had no idea what this meant but I was so inspired by what the company was doing I didn’t care – I wanted to get involved.

Well, I did get involved and that was over five years ago! I moved to Boston to work for Sonos in their Cambridge office helping to train and setup our first dealers in the U.S. A couple of years later I was promoted to Channel Manager of our International Sales in Asia, Australia, and Latin America. Before I knew it I was on a flight to Asia setting-up our business in the far east. It was a great adventure and very satisfying to help bring a product that I love to other countries. This was a big learning experience for me but I found that my engineering-background helped a lot as I was used to structuring large amounts of information into digestible chunks – which is what I had to do here in structuring our business deals. My strong technology background also helped me explain our technology to anyone regardless of how tech-savvy, or non-tech-savvy their were.

In Cambridge I met the woman of my dreams – Daina – who came from Canada to do a summer program at MIT. It was actually after I came-back from a trip to Hong Kong that she appeared in my house. One of my roommates (an MIT alum) had moved back to Korea and we were looking for someone to rent his room. Daina rented it for just a week and if my trip had been one week later we would have never met!

We shared many an adventure together and started dating and moved-in together in Boston about a year later. After spending a year living in Back Bay (on Marlborough St. for those of you who know Boston) Daina and I moved to Los Angeles so she could start her Ph.D. at UCLA.

In September 2009 I celebrated my five-year anniversary with Sonos and I can honestly say I enjoy every minute of it. It is important to do something you love and I feel very fortunate to work for such an amazing company and have a job that I really enjoy and that lets me use a number of my skills together. I’m a fanatical music-lover so nothing could be better for me than helping people enjoy music all over the world!

As you can probably tell from my story – I’m a huge geek. In college I bought some domain names that turned-out to be quite valuable and I sold these and started buying more and more domain names over the years, developing some and selling others. In July of 2007 I was looking to buy some investment property but the real estate market had started to decline so I started Linton Investments as the holding company for my domain portfolio. Then in October of 2007 I started a blog about Domain Flipping which evolved into a blog about Domain Investing called Domainvestors.tv which has now become my blog – MorganLinton.com!

My blog has build quite a following over the past two years and I continue to write and share my domain name investment ideas with other fellow Domainers (a term used to describe Domain Name Investors). Along with my blog I also wrote a book detailing some of the investment strategies I’ve used to make money with domain names. I’m a natural teacher and love sharing my ideas and interests with others. The book and the blog have been a great way to share some of my successful strategies in the Domaining world with others.

I have also been investing in the stock market since I was around thirteen years old and absolutely love the intricacies of the financial world. I watch CNBC at least once a day and also read a number of investing blogs online. I was lucky enough (okay maybe a bit of my research paid-off too!) to see my portfolio value increase by 60% by June of 2009. In 2010 I have some great ideas about where to invest my money and you can always email me if you’d like to know where I’m placing my bets

On the weekends I still find myself developing websites for the large portfolio of domains I now have as well as selling and helping others to sell their domains online. On Sundays I record a video blog post which has been a great way to experiment with providing more interactive content to my blog readers. In 2009 I hired a great team in the Philippines that has helped me develop my domains using the system I developed back in 2008. This means that work is being done just about every day of the week. I also hired a broker in 2009 who helps my clients sell their domain to end-users. My big lesson for 2009 was – you can’t do it all – hiring great people has been the key to building my business…but it is VERY hard to find good people!

Daina and I love to go to the beach, hike, watch movies, and explore the LA-area. We brought our beloved cat Samsie with us from Boston who has definitely made the move to California very gracefully – he’s a California kitty now!

We both have very busy lives but always make time for each other every day and every weekend. My weekdays are very busy managing Sonos accounts around the world and on the weekends Daina is usually studying hard while I work on developing more of my domain name investments.

The one thing I can say about me is this – I am a very passionate person who works hard and loves to teach people the things that I learn. I find that life is one incredible learning experience and find myself always learning more everyday. The motto I live by is simple – “Got a job big or small, do it right or not at all.”

That’s it folks – now you know me! Subscribe to my RSS feed or come-back often to hear of my latest adventures! Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy my blog!