Lawsuit reveals details on the company’s deal with Oak Hill and its subsequent fall from prominence.
But the story has an unhappy ending. While we already knew some of the story about the company’s fall, including the precipitous decline of domain parking that hurt its DomainSponsor business and its ill-advised purchase of SnapNames, Domain Name Wire has uncovered new revelations thanks to a lawsuit filed this year.
Oversee.net co-founder Frederick Hsu, through the Frederick Hsu Living Trust, sued Oak Hill Capital Partners and many former board members and executives earlier this year, alleging (pdf) that they undertook a campaign to sell off the company’s productive assets to “tunnel” money to investor Oak Hill.
To understand the allegations, you need to understand the history of Oversee.net.
Domain Name Rocket Ship
Frederick Hsu co-founded Oversee.net with Lawrence Ng in 2000. The company amassed a large portfolio of domain names and its DomainSponsor domain parking service became an industry leader.
It used profits and part of a $60 million line of credit to acquire SnapNames in 2007.
Then, the first week of 2008, the company announced that it acquired domain name registrar Moniker. Just weeks later, the company revealed a $150 million investment from Oak Hill Capital Partners. This valued the company at $400 million, according to a court filing.
Weaknesses Show and the Sell-off Begins
Soon thereafter, Oversee.net’s rocket-ship trajectory started to taper off.
Earlier in 2007 (shortly after the SnapNames acquisition but before the Oak Hill investment), eNom and Network Solutions announced a collaboration to launch NameJet. Not only would this create competition for SnapNames, but it also meant that one of SnapNames’ best inventory partners, Network Solutions, was gone. (It turns out Oversee.net knew Network Solutions was leaving before it completed the deal.)
SnapNames went further south in 2009 when the company discovered that an employee had been bidding against customers using the screen name ‘halvarez’.
Meanwhile, the DomainSponsor business peaked just as Oak Hill made its investment.
According to court documents published during a lawsuit brought by former Moniker CEO Monte Cahn, domain monetization generated $153 million for Oversee.net in 2007. That number dropped to $129 million in 2008, $102 million in 2009 and $92 million in 2010.
Oversee.net subsequently sold SnapNames and Moniker in early 2012. It sold DomainSponsor in 2014. And it sold off some of its “vertical sites” after that, leaving it as just a shell of its former self and without an engine to generate substantial profits.
Oak Hill’s Partial Exit
The Hsu trust’s lawsuit sheds some light on what might have been going on behind the scenes at this time.
Like many outside investors do, Oak Hill wanted protection when it committed $150 million to Oversee.net. It demanded redemption rights that would allow it to redeem its preferred stock for $150 million in cash starting in February 2013 if Oversee.net had “legally available funds” to do so.
In 2009, after Oak Hill’s initial investment, co-founder Lawrence Ng sold much of his common stock to Oak Hill for $24 million. This gave Oak Hill more control of the board. Hsu tried unsuccessfully to block the deal.
Oak Hill exercised its option to redeem its preferred stock for $150 million in February 2013.
But the company didn’t have $150 million. Instead, it redeemed $45 million. It redeemed a further $40 million after Oversee.net sold DomainSponsor to Rook.
Hsu’s trust argues that Oversee.net hatched a plan in 2011 to liquidate its assets in order to provide the cash necessary to redeem as much of Oak Hill’s investment as possible on the February 2013 option date. It alleges that the board had conflicts of interest that led to it approving the deals as part of this plan. It also alleges that Oversee.net did not have “legally available funds” to disburse to Oak Hill because the Oak Hill investment functioned like debt once the redemption request was formally made in 2013.
The lawsuit alleges that former Oversee.net CEO Jeff Kupietzky had an incentive to set the divestitures in motion because he received a $632,813 bonus after the first redemption. (It’s worth noting that Kupietzky left Oversee.net in August 2011, before the divestitures and redemption. It appears from the lawsuit that he received the bonus after leaving the company.)
It also alleges that other managers, including Kupietzky’s replacement CEO Debra Domeyer, had a similar incentive but it only kicked in if Oak Hill was able to redeem a total of $75 million of its original investment.
This, Hsu’s trust argues, is part of the reason she worked to sell off the DomainSponsor business. The lawsuit alleges that she pocketed a $587,184 bonus when this happened.
Hsu’s original filing suggests that the DomainSponsor business was sold for $40 million, the exact amount of Oak Hill’s second redemption.
The defendants in the trust’s lawsuit argue (pdf) that Hsu is questioning regular decisions made in the course of running a business, among other defenses. They are asking for the case to be dismissed.
Of course, this brings up an interesting question. Hsu is unhappy that the company was gutted to return some of Oak Hill’s investment. But would common shareholders have ever seen a payout given the decline in domain parking and the poor fate of the SnapNames acquisition?
After all, Oak Hill is still in the hole for $65 million, not including its $24 million investment for Ng’s shares. If the company is able to recover more money, it would go to Oak Hill, not the common shareholders.
This case serves as a reminder to founders of what can happen when they bring in outside investors.
Thanks for sharing. Great synopsis. Despite it’s bad ending its still a fantastic business story.
Quite a lot of high numbers in that piece. Talking about serious money. Shows once more that the real money is not in pushing inventory or flipping names for a couple of thousand bucks. Waste of time just like the whole nTLD program.
too bad domain parking anywhere near those numbers has been dead since 2009.
“This case serves as a reminder to founders of what can happen when they bring in outside investors.” – couldn’t agree more.
“But would common shareholders have ever seen a payout given the decline in domain parking and the poor fate of the SnapNames acquisition?”
Oversee had shareholders in its other employees right? What’d they get ? I’d love to hear this from some of the first few employees perspectives.
Only 1 shareholder seems to have been able to get a payout in all of this.
It’s interesting that Ng walked away with a big chunk but it appears that Hsu, his business partner, got nothing. Any insights in to how that sort of thing happened ? Like what were their share breakdowns to allow one person to exit and the other sits holding the bag.
I doubt common stockholders will every see anything from it since Oak Hill has to get its money out first. Ng’s sale was nicely timed.
The court docs seem to suggest that both Hsu and Ng got some liquidity out of the initial Oak Hill deal, but it’s unclear how much that was.
For the most part, only two Shareholders got paid out (Lawrence & Fred). A few got some big bonuses (in exchange for ceasing to complain about the unfairness of the first deal and stripping the value of their long-held equity via an illegal repricing scheme). The rest got REALLY screwed!
DomainSponsor never paid out worth a damn compared to Parked and others, so they won’t be missed by me. They also regularly ignored emails, etc…. bad company, me thinks.
I remember being asked by one of the Oak Hill executives at the table we were sharing during one of the meals at that L.A. confab Oversee used to put on what I thought of Oversee. I told him (don’t recall his name) that I thought it was an excellent company … as long as their PPC income remained strong …
Complaint says they liquidated all the PPC sites as well, Shopwiki, Farloop, Lowfares, AirportParking, you name it. Did Media.net diversify beyond Skenzo and parking? Of course they did. And what happened… $900 million sale to consortium of Chinese buyers. All the other comps in the industry are strong. Now they only have a small Credit Card lead gen business. Sad outcome. I wish the class of shareholders luck
Great reporting. It is all very interesting.
It was a shady business from the get go. I can tell you as a Creative Director there in the early 2000’s that the culture was a boys network with the standard strip shows after conferences and amp’d up young dudes pretending to play business. Nobody seem to really understand how Oversee made money. And if you did you get the business model — you realize there’s nothing special happening here and certainly nothing innovative. Even when it was “high flying” it was typical, crappy startup in which everyone is just along for the ride and trying to get as much out of it as possible. Investors should be embarrassed that they got behind Oversee.