Bill Gross that’s Bill T. Gross, is a legendary entrepreneur who has founded many companies.
Gross has been important in domain circles as he founded GOTO.com which later became Overture Services, then Yahoo! Search Marketing.
Domain investors at the time used the overture search tool to find domains on Overture that possessed numerical values with extension. Here is a thread from back in 2004 https://www.namepros.com/threads/chipolte-d0tcom-1000-overture-with-extension.31224/
Personally I have followed Mr. Gross for a long time after becoming acquainted with his company Idealab which made a deal with the island of Tuvalu for the .tv extension. This is a fun listen, http://www.domainnoob.com/media/Mark-Suster-Bill-Gross-twivc40.mp3
Another company Bill founded was Compete.com, the company started up in 2000 and shut down in 2016. The domain name has expired and is already over $62,000.
Compete.com provided two categories of information, Site Analytics and Search Analytics. It was a competitor to Alexa. In March 2008, London market research company TNS purchased Compete.com for $150 million. The Compete.com service ceased activity on December 31, 2016.
The company had a sub 20,000 Alexa ranking in August of 2016.
Update 3/22 after hitting $102,00 it was renewed at 12:50 am Saturday morning.
How could someone with his experience allow such a name to expire?
@Charles Did you not read the whole story –
“”In March 2008, London market research company TNS purchased Compete.com for $150 million.””
I read it, but missed that.
Auction was cancelled so I assume domain has been renewed?
Yes I updated the post a couple days ago. Renewed after it hit $102,000.