The Man Who Sold Pizza.com for $2.6 Million

Posted by Adam Kuban, April 4, 2008 at 1:15 PM

The New York Post has a profile on Chris Clark, the guy who just sold pizza.com at auction for $2.6 million:

During the Internet's early days, Clark ran a Web site-consulting service and bought pizza.com hoping to convince a pizzeria to do business with him. There weren't any takers, but he maintained the site as a pizzeria directory ever since, never imagining that his $20 investment would grow into an obscenely large pie with extra dollar signs.

As the story goes on to say, there are many domains like CIark's, all generic terms that domain speculators sit on in hopes of striking it rich. That's not to say Clark is a speculator of that ilk; he actually had a pizza directory on there (it's still there for the time being, as the transfer hasn't happened yet). He just sounds like a normal guy who just happened to luck out.

I remember back in '97 or '98, for some reason going to soup.com. These days it forwards to a site for Knorr, the bouillon people, but in the late '90s, I recall it housing only a sort of artful picture of a bowl of tomato soup on a round table covered in a white tablecloth. It always gave me a kick to hit that site every now and then and see the bowl was still there. Alas, not even an Archive.org search pulls up that version.

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Tags: pizza weirdness, technology