A domain registration, a Google announcement and a windfall for a 29-year-old Silicon Beach exec

At the ripe age of 29, Daniel Negari has launched successful businesses in advertising and real estate.  But with his latest venture — in Internet domains — he appears to have caught lightning in a bottle.  

Negari is the CEO of .XYZ, which he founded in 2011.  In 2012, he bought the rights to the .xyz domain extension by applying to the nonprofit ICANN, which governs internet names. The application cost $185,000. Negari was the only person interested in .xyz. so he didn't have to win a bidding war.

Fast forward to last Monday, when Google announced it was forming a new parent company called "Alphabet" and launched it at this site: abc.xyz.   Negari had no advance warning. His phone started buzzing and ringing with congratulatory messages.

"I went and spoke to my team, and I explained to them that this was the biggest thing that could have ever happened," Negari says.

His company had started registering domain names on .xyz last year. It had some momentum, registering about 3,000 domain names per day. But the abc.xyz launch has sent sales skyrocketing.

"Our servers have been going crazy," Negari told KPCC. "We've been registering in some cases thousands of domain names in an hour."

XYZ is what's known as the "registry operator" for the domain extension, and the company acts as a wholesaler of domain names, with retailers like GoDaddy.com selling the domains to end users. The cost of registering a domain name on .xyz is $10 or less per year, and Negari says that's the price whether the end user is a search giant like Google or a backwater bait-and-tackle shop. At any rate, when accounting for the thousands of customers who have registered domain names with the xyz extension, Negari's cut of the ten bucks per year adds up to more than a return on his initial investment.

Negari is an entrepreneur who practically grew up on Silicon Beach. He's a graduate of Beverly Hills High School and USC (Business with an emphasis in Entrepreneurship).  XYZ now employs nine people at its Santa Monica headquarters near Bergamot Station, but Negari is looking to hire more.

He also owns the rights to the .college and .rent domain extensions and plans to begin marketing them next month.  His logic in locking down the rights for the .xyz :  it's the most generic domain ending in the world. 

"You end the alphabet with X-Y-Z, so you should end domain names the same way," he says. 

Luckily, Google — and its newest venture Alphabet — embraced that logic.  Negari says prior to the search giant's arrival to .xyz, he'd spoken with many of his small businesses customers who needed to be reassured.

 "A lot of times their main concern is, 'Well, will this domain and website rank on Google?'" he explained. "This move of Alphabet provides the ultimate validation that these new domains can be used successfully."