Hands down, but at the same time if he hadn't run the site properly the domain would probably be linking to amazon.com or something by now.
The domain grab really was like the land grab of the west in the US, first come first serve and if you defended your property then you're now a millionaire!
What I personally find interesting about the story is the execution and optimization to get such remarkable margins in what should be a commoditized business:
"We built software with computational algorithms to determine what the optimal number of boxes to have in the warehouse is and what the sizes of those boxes should be. Should we stock five different kinds of boxes to ship product in? Twenty kinds? Fifty kinds? And what size should those boxes be? Right now, it's 23 box sizes, given what we sell, in order to minimize the cost of dunnage (those little plastic air-filled bags or peanuts), the cost of corrugated boxes, and the cost of shipping. We rerun the simulation every quarter. Using the right box probably adds close to 1 margin point."
1% is incredible - that works out to being 890K+/year (though that might depend on what their "null" case is/was).
I remember being shocked that "packaging" was a four-year bachelor's program when I went to my university. After some examination of the curriculum, I was convinced. (Though I still don't know what you do for a PhD....)
Anyhow, my point is that rather than stunning innovation, that sounds rather like Packaging 101. However, I'm sure that's because that's the summary for the journalists and I wouldn't be surprised that they are doing actually innovative stuff beyond a journalist's grasp... because as we should all know by now, getting past a journalist's level of knowledge is not a challenge.
I read the 89M as a topline gross revenue -- so 11.57M if that "teens" (i.e. 13%) figure applies to the past year. He's more or less admitting he can't scale while retaining that, but it's still a nice chunk of change to reinvest into growth.
Sounds like fun. I wonder though: if all he wanted to do was maximize his net worth, would he be better off hiring a statistics graduate student who knows R and training his replacement so he could go start another company?
