Real estate has an intuitive hold on the financial imagination because the underlying logic is simple: land is finite, demand for it is not, and proximity to desirable things creates value that can be captured without being the desirable thing itself. Domain names operate on an analogous logic that most people either dismiss or don’t take seriously enough. The namespace is finite — there is one .com and the generic words within it are exhausted — demand for legible, memorable, brandable names compounds with every new business formation, and holding the right name at the right time creates value that has nothing to do with what you build on it.

Growth is the default objective of startup culture because it serves the interests of the investment model that funds startup culture. Investors need returns that justify the risk of failure across their portfolio, and returns require exits, and exits require scale. The logic is internally consistent and completely irrelevant to the question of what a particular business should optimize for when no investor is involved and no exit is required. The assumption that growth is always the right answer for every business is an artifact of the particular funding structure that makes it true for the businesses in that funding structure, imported wholesale into contexts where the structure doesn’t apply.