Nov 8, 2024 - Technology

Why HubSpot's founder sold Chat.com to OpenAI

Dan Primack

Animated illustration of a pattern of speech bubbles made of search bars with blinking cursors. — Illustration: Shoshana Gordon/Axios

OpenAI paid around $15 million to purchase the Chat.com domain from HubSpot co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah.

Why it matters: This is believed to be one of the most expensive domain purchases ever, albeit a far cry from the $872 million that Gannett paid in 2014 for Cars.com (as part of a broader purchase).

What they're saying: Shah insists that he wasn't domain-squatting, telling Axios:

"I had not actually bought the domain with the intention of selling it. I had originally planned to build an application similar to what ChatGPT has become now, because at the time, I didn't think OpenAI would really want to build an application. I thought they were going to be a pure 'platform' play.

Once I realized that they were indeed committed to ChatGPT (which happened at a talk Sam Altman gave), I figured out that I was accidentally competing with OpenAI. So, decided to sell the domain to them — because I'm not smart enough to compete against OpenAI."

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Why HubSpot's founder sold Chat.com to OpenAI

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