There’s a lively discussion happening on my blog about the eShares rebrand

discussion

A couple of days ago I wrote a post about equity management platform eShares rebranding to Carta after they failed to secure eShares.com. Most people would assume that any company that can raise north of $67M would surely already own their .COM. They didn’t, and the CEO came out and said that the reason they changed their name is due to the fact that they couldn’t come to whatever price/terms the current owner has for the name.

It seems my readers are pretty divided about whether this was a good move or not. In one camp there are people who think that this was a huge mistake and that eShares should have done more to acquire their .COM and the rebrand is a branding downgrade. In the other camp are people who say that eShares sounds dated and that Carta is a solid upgrade. Oh, and there’s also a third camp that feels like the people who use a service like Carta are tech savvy and fans of other non-.COM gTLDs so they should have branded on a .CO, .ME, .IO and secured a better name.

One of my favorite comments which I do have to say I agree with is from Barry who said:

Well haha 😂 and good luck now to the current owner of eshares.com
Your golden goose just left the building.. ‘regrets I had few, but to few mention…’
What is never mentioned much by domainers is the greediness and ridiculous price expectations many have..

I wouldn’t be too surprised if the owner of eShares.com watched the startup raise more and more funding, and with it increased their price. The question is, how far up did they go? $1M for a domain like this could make a lot of sense for a company that has spent a lot of time and money building a brand on the name. At the same time, the owner could have gotten a little too greedy and asked for something in the $3M+ range which probably wouldn’t make sense.

I’m not sure we’ll ever know how it all went down…but that won’t stop me from trying to get in touch with the owner of eShares.com to get his side of the story. With the limited data that we have right now, it’s hard to say if the domain owner just wanted too much for the name, or if Carta didn’t chisel out a meaningful budget for a domain. One thing is certain, like the comment above says, whoever owns eShares.com and thought they were going to have a big payday just got some very bad news.

What do you think happened? Oh and if you’re the owner of eShares.com and want to chat, I’d love to give you the chance to tell your side of the story!

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton