How My Big Fat Greek Ego Lost a Mega Million Dollar Opportunity
The untold story about how I was so smart, so awesome, that I thumbed my big nose at a massive deal that lost me countless millions.
A Painful Story of Big Head Biting Hard
Peter Kay, your Feral Entrepreneur here. I was so full of myself in 1995. I thought I was the king of the hill, the guy who had it all figured out. My company, CyberCom, was riding high as Hawaii’s first web development shop. We’d just launched the state’s first commercial website, outrigger.com, and the Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau’s site, hvcb.org. I was strutting around like I invented the internet itself. But man, I learned a brutal lesson about hubris, about thinking I knew better than everyone else. This is the story of the one that got away—a missed opportunity that could’ve been worth millions, all because I poo-pooed someone else’s idea.
Land Grabs During The Internet’s Wild West
It was the mid-90s, the dawn of the commercial internet. Domain names were free back then—can you believe that? Free. All you had to do was go through a simple registration process, assign a name to an organization, and if it was available, it was yours. Nobody had quite grasped the value these names would hold. That’s why they were free. It was a wide-open space, a gold rush I didn’t recognize. I was registering domains left and right, partly for entrepreneurial kicks, but mostly altruistically. I wanted to secure names for local companies I knew would eventually want to get online. Get this: I registered boh.com for Bank of Hawaii, fhb.com for First Hawaiian Bank, khon.com, kitv.com, kgmb.com—the call signs of every major TV station in Hawaii. I was holding them for these businesses, thinking I was doing them a favor. What did I sell them for? Nothing. Yes, I gave it to them.
Getting My Piece Of The New World
At the same time, I was dreaming up my own ventures. I registered surgery.com for a joint venture I was working on. Realmen.com was going to be the ultimate guy’s website—think rugged, macho content. Today it’s gay dating site - the furthest thing from my mind back then. Hsbs.com was for a project called Hawaii Small Business Server, a Microsoft server idea I had. Votehawaii.com was my early stab at online politics. Secureinput.com was for a secure website concept, and ycm.com was tied to my media arm, Your Computer Minute. Then there was wnn.com, a project with Steve. We envisioned it as a World News Network, a kind of Reddit before anything like that existed in 1995. I was juggling all these ideas, feeling like an entrepreneur on fire, like I was shaping the future.
A Genius Idea Presents Itself
One day, Steve, my partner on wnn.com, saw me snapping up all these domains and came to me with a wild idea. He said, “Hey, why don’t we register all the callsigns of every radio and TV station in the country? There are thousands of them.” I can still hear him pitching it, his eyes lit up with possibility. Thousands of call signs—16,000, to be exact (well according to Grok anyway). Each one a unique domain, ripe for the picking in a world where nobody was claiming them yet.
But I’m Too Full Of Myself To See It
But me? I was too full of myself to listen. I was the man in Hawaii in 1995. CyberCom was killing it. We had a reputation for building the most beautiful, functional websites. Hawaii’s blue-chip businesses were lining up, begging us to build their sites. I thought I was above it all. When Steve pitched his idea, I barely gave it a second thought. I dismissed it outright. Registering domain names and selling them? That was too simple, too trivial for a big-shot web developer like me. I was charging tens of thousands—$50-$100k (today’s dollars)—for websites. I had the state’s top companies on a waiting list. Why would I stoop to something as low-rent as domain name speculation? It felt borderline scammy. So I passed. I didn’t act on it, and as far as I know, Steve didn’t either. That was that.
The Easy Math That Hurts So Bad
In retrospect, that was the dumbest thing I’ve ever done. Let’s do the math. There were 16,000 radio and TV station call signs in the U.S. If we’d registered them all—free at the time—and sold each one for just $1,000, which became trivial money soon after, that’s $16 million. A $16 million business for the cost of a little paperwork. And today? Those same domains could easily fetch $10,000 each (Grok says up to $100,000). That’s at least $160 million and as high as $1.6 billion. I want to kick myself just documenting this painful memory right now. All we had to do was register them. It would’ve been trivial to execute. I was staring at a fortune and was too blind to see it.
She Blinded Me With Ego
The irony stings. (But wait, there’s more!) I was building websites for thousands of dollars, each one tied to a domain name, and yet I couldn’t see the value in the domains themselves. I was so caught up in my own pompous pride, thinking I was too good for Steve’s idea. I couldn’t fathom that something so simple could be so valuable. I was charging clients tens of thousands for sites, and every one of those sites needed a domain. Of course domains were valuable—I was living proof of it! But my ego blinded me. I thought I was above such a “basic” business. I was wrong. Steve was thinking differently, seeing something I couldn’t. He deserved more than my dismissal.
Bearing The Pain Of The Rearview Mirror
Looking back, this whole episode gives me a massive dose of humility and countless regrets. I was so full of myself, so convinced I had all the answers. I hope I’m not that guy anymore, but who knows? Maybe in 20 years, I’ll look back at this moment—writing this memoir—and cringe at how boastful I still was. Wait, am I boasting right now about being so stupid back then? Those domains I did register, like ycm.com and realmen.com ended up selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars, but that was by accident. I grabbed them for businesses I never launched, not because I saw their true value. I got lucky, not smart.
To add to the pain, I lost track of the wnn.com domain in the project that Steve funded (which unfortunately went south). I could have at least kept that domain for Steve to recoup his investment. But I was so blind to the value of domain names that I let that one go. Just a few years ago I apologized to Steve and took full ownership of my pomposity. Today, Grok says that domain could be worth from at least $50k to as much as $500k. Thank you Sir may I have another!
Don’t Believe Your Own Press Releases
Here’s the takeaway: don’t be so full of yourself that you believe your own press releases. You’re not that smart (well at least I certainly was not). Never, never, never dismiss someone else’s idea just because it seems too simple or beneath you. Unless it’s an obviously terrible concept, let the market decide instead. When someone comes to me with an idea these days, I don’t roll my eyes or shut them down. My response is simple: show me customers willing to pay for it. They are the judges—not me. I’m not the gatekeeper of great ideas. The market is. My hubris cost me at least a $160 million opportunity. Don’t let yours do the same.