Marcus Dantus: The Shark shared his failure in Fuckup Nights

Shark Tank shark Marcus Dantus launched his first tech startup in 1993, dedicated to selling email addresses and registering digital domains. But the dotcom bubble finally burst and his first failure came when lawyers contacted him to cease and desist from buying Internet domains for brands he didn't own.

He bought more than a thousand domains, including mexico.com, which he sold for millions of dollars. Listen to his story of failure in our eighth anniversary about his first steps in the Internet business and how he became president of mexico.com.

We interviewed him after his appearance on * Fuckup Nights * to find out what he did after his failure. Marcus shared some of the worst pitches he's ever heard and offered some advice on what NOT to say when you're giving a pitch.

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The story: I registered thousands of domains

“I started thinking about what domain name would truly represent me. I knew that ‘México ’ had to be part of it, but the Internet was also very slow back then. Do you remember when we used to connect with modems? So I figured speed was really important. What truly represents México and speed? I registered speedygonzalez.com.”

By some miracle it wasn't registered, but as I was about to put my website up at speedygonzalez.com I received a cease and desist letter from Warner Brothers lawyers asking me to return the domain. I was in my early twenties and didn't want to fight with the big corporations, so I gave them back the domain. All my friends said, "You're an idiot. You could make money. It would cost them to sue you.

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Out of spite, I registered andale.com—it was a generic domain, and it also represents Speedy Gonzalez, “ México ,” and speed. Before uploading my website to andale.com, I got an email from a couple of guys in Silicon Valley asking me to sell them my domain—I didn’t even know that was possible. They were offering me 10,000, and I thought it was a joke; I thought they were kidding, so I said, “Okay. Give me 20,000 dollars, and I’ll give it to you.” They deposited 20,000 dollars into my account!

I thought 'this is amazing, this is the best deal ever'. Over the next couple of months I registered a couple of thousand domains. They were all generic. I registered nations, states, cities, sports, everything you could think of in Spanish. No one was registering domains in Spanish. Finally, I registered Mexico.com.

Listen to the full story in the video above.

“What do ‘ México ’ and speed really mean? I registered speedygonzalez.com.”

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After the Screw-Up: How NOT to Pitch on Shark Tank

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