In other words, let's say you're right, and owning the .com domain name is becoming less meaningful (an argument that PG already addressed, by the way). That doesn't mean that .com domains are becoming significantly less meaningful to people's perceptions. And perceptions matter, when going after customers, funders, employees, business partners, etc.

I wouldn't say that the perception that having the .com domain name is important is an incorrect one. Maybe you would disagree and say it is an incorrect perception. But even if you think the perception is incorrect, the perception is still part of the reality that the startup lives in.

This classic "perception IS reality" pattern is something that a lot of people miss.

When I, admittedly anecdotally, poll people I've met who were practically born after the Internet started, almost none of them even type in .com and a few didn't even know what that was. I'm convinced this sentiment is going to become more common especially with so many squatters on .com domains it's almost impossible to have a good company domain name anymore without spending stupid money to get it. Yet you can get the same name with a different TLD for cheap and you show up at the top of search results.

I'd love to see more search engines or maybe even a decentralized search infrastructure to help facilitate this but that's pretty difficult.

I do not know to which extent I agree. I find it sad but likely that people may eventually stop paying attention to URLs altogether; the main counter-argument I would have would be phishing, because, no matter what, you'll still have to check that you are on the right website at some point. That said I do believe that if it may happen for the general public, it may not happen before a long time for more knowledgeable people (prospective funders, employees, partners, etc., as you mentioned).

PG talks from a perspective that does not apply to most companies in this world.

Again if you get a .com name that is great. But whether it's worth the effort of finding one it if you don't have it already is another discussion all together.

Whether or not you agree with pg, finding a decent .com is pretty cheap in terms of time and money when you have free domain name checking services that give you available .com variants of desired keywords. Even though I know this, I'm still always surprised when I see the 2-3 syllable .com domain names that I wanted, being available without auction or private seller inquiries.

I'm not sure I understand. Free name checking services do take into account what names are available to you and they give you variants of your desired keywords. Results are returned in seconds. It takes a few hours at most to go through a bunch of keywords.

Yes. In fact I did quite a bit of hiring at some of my previous companies and I never cared about email (why would I care about email? This isn't a signal, this is noise). Do people, at least in tech, really care about such things? At least in my deals I never found one. I'd imagine in stuffy jobs it might be something to look down upon but in tech? That seems silly considering how progressive our industry typically is.

Having been a founder for four years now, I have learned that the word "startup" usually scares potential customers. It is actually a good thing to seem more established than you are. However that doesn't mean you are disingenuous either. It is not black or white. You can look more established: .com domain, decent website, proper terms and privacy policy, no beta or "coming soon" wording on website, etc. However if someone asks directly how established you are, you are truthful.

What the potential customer wants to know is if they can trust you, and you won't be gone tomorrow. Therefore if you are truthful about the company's state, but seem like you are established then more people will look past the word "startup" since it will be obvious to them that you are serious and have some idea what you are doing.

In other words, you dont need to go around yelling at the top of your lungs that X is a startup. That strategy will most likely fail. But you certainly shouldn't deceive people either. There is a line.

True, but to whom. Most people don't know the difference between getDropbox.com and Dropbox.com.

My parents are typical web users. Fairly tech savvy, but not tech insiders. I recall telling them about bit.ly. It took a while to explain that it wasn't bitly.com, bit.ly.com, etc. They ended up just searching for it instead of typing in the domain name.

Think of the added friction this causes... and as we all know, every added interaction detracts from the conversion funnel. Taken in aggregate, many startups cannot afford the attrition of a shitty domain name.

And they found it. That's how a large, large number of people find web sites these days, and it works fine.

The public are hugely influenced by branding, advertising, look and feel, and experiences. They might not put the feelings they have into words like insiders do, but those things absolutely exist and insiders to the retail, advertising, and similar industries have all sorts of jargon to analyze the behavior of the public.

A rose by any other name still smells sweet, but thornbush isn't the way to market it.

Things are changing. Talk to 18-20 year olds about how they are using the internet. Throw out an address using one of ICANN's new extensions. Do they even recognize its a website? EV Certs don't even show URLs in some browsers. Do mobile users look for you on Google, or in the app/play/other store? Personally I'm uncomfortable with the positions ICANN has taken.I don't trust them to protect domain's owner rights. We need better alternatives.

1) Open browser, 2) Defaults to whatever search engine that add-on they have switch them to, 3) Type facebook, or facebook.com, or whatever they are looking for, 4) Click first result. If fails, go back, look around, click other result.

So because someone suggested it 13 years ago makes it not true today? Look at how the new TLDs are working out; if you want to find a company using a funny TLD you just search for their name and unless the .com is higher ranked the company comes right up to the top.

Look at it from a user's perspective; do you know anyone who actually types in a domain name anymore that isn't a technie? If a user wants to find a specific company they just simply use voice and ask their phone or open a browser and just type it in.

Typing in a TLD adds friction especially since ICANN added all of these stupid TLDs that no one is even used to. The lower the friction the better, right?

That's a problem. It means we rely more and more on search engines, thus centralising the web (and with it, the internet) more than it needs to be. Centralizing the network means centralizing the power. Not a good idea. It never was.

But when you type "company name" in a search engine, you give away your search to an ad supported private company in real time. Juicy profiling, no privacy. Much worse than using DNS.

Besides, when you click on a link from your favourite search engine, you're still using DNS. Now you have two single points of failure.

Yes they do. Just don't forget that the end user is the advertiser. We poor schmucks who type text in the search box are the product.

Everything going thru search engines, means you depend on someone who has no responsibility towards the people they have power over. That's bad; you have to waste time understanding their incentives and staying on their good side.

Also, only anecdotal because I can't find any studies one way or another, but I can't find anyone in the younger generation who actually types in any domain names. I even had a frustrating experience telling someone who's used the internet all his life what .com even was as he had never typed it before. Plenty of people in my generation still type it though.

Also many of the older generation folks I've worked with who had their internet start with AOL don't seem to type in domain TLDs either.

So until I see some solid, current research regarding the behaviors of the different generations I'm not convinced a .com is lower friction; you type less when you just type the company's name and most browsers nowadays will give you the option to autocomplete directly to their website.

Name of the company and domain name has very little to do with company's success. There so many things you need to worry when company is small and getting domain name or renaming company is really very dangerous distraction.

I'm not saying domain name does not play some role but spending time on it is a very dangerous distraction.

So, does it show as weakness? Yes. Is that biggest weakness of your company in relationship to how hard to fix it? No - but if answer is Yes then you are already made it and all this discussion is moot.

That's an astute observation...however, they are not useless YET. Perhaps in 5 years .com's will be obsolete and every browser will have powerful company lookup utilities that everyone can use. The issue is that startups don't have the luxury of losing that sort of time.

Not really comparable in my opinion. In AOL, if I remember correctly, you had to register or pay for your keyword much like a domain name. So all keywords were owned by a central authority, could only be used within their ecosystem and had the same type of squatter issues as domain names.

What's happening today are "keywords" being associated with specific websites when, and only when, the users are actively looking for and using that website. This isn't centralized (sure most people using Google but people forget Bing is actually really good and used by many!). You can't simply pay for the top spot anymore.

There's ton of money being made (sometimes even by honest businesses) on the opposite assumption. Instead of paying the gatekeeper to put you higher on the list you pay some third parties to game the sorting algorithm.