I love hearing stories about how well-known entrepreneurs obtained their domain names, and a recent podcast about Lynda Weinman — and her <lynda.com> domain name — is a perfect example.
Weinman founded the company known by its domain name, a company described this way in a recent episode of NPR’s “How I Built This”: “Linda and her husband, Bruce Heavin, turned a passion for teaching computer-assisted graphic design into an online learning platform called Lynda.com.”
Lynda.com (created in 1995) grew from a company that offered a limited library of teaching videos into one of the leading websites for online learning, all before YouTube was even founded (in 2005). And by 2015, the Lynda.com website was so popular that LinkedIn acquired it for approximately $1.5 billion.
Obviously, the Lynda.com website was about a lot more than the domain name. But, as Weinman explained in the NPR podcast, the domain name was an important part of her business. After she had written a proposal for one of the earliest books about HTML, which was rejected by a publisher, Weinman said she turned to writing the book in installments as a magazine column:
While I was researching my magazine column, I came across a Debbie at <debbie.com>, and she wrote me an email and she said, “Hi, I'm Debbie, and you know I have a web page with all the Debbies who are on the web.”… Her web page looked like a single page with just 20 links to different Debbies who were currently on the web that she could find. And I thought, “You know what. I wonder if <lynda.com> is available?” And sure enough it was, for $35.
The <lynda.com> domain name was registered on December 21, 1995, and I remember that $35 price very well. If I recall correctly, .com domain names were available at the time from a single registrar, Network Solutions, for an initial term of two years for $70 — a fee that apparently was not enough for Network Solutions to make a profit, even though it had a monopoly on the market that was later broken up, leading to hundreds of registrars and far less-expensive prices.
Of course, <lynda.com> is an attractive domain name because it is a short, one-word .com. And interestingly, it was created at a time when few people recognized the value of domain names, including cybersquatters. In fact, the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP), the popular tool used by trademark owners against domain name registrants, was not approved by ICANN until almost four years after Weinman registered the domain name.
Weinman’s company later filed — and won — at least two UDRP complaints for domain names that contained the LYNDA.COM trademark:
in 2007 for <lyndas.com> (which was used to “maintain a commercial web directory with links to [Lynda.com’s] competitors in the educational goods industry”); and
in 2011 for <lyndastore.com> (which was used to offer counterfeit versions of Lynda.com’s products).
Since its acquisition by LinkedIn in 2015 (which itself was acquired by Microsoft the following year), the Lynda.com brand is no longer in use, and the <lynda.com> domain name simply redirects users to the “LinkedIn Learning” home page, which says: “All of Lynda.com’s content and expert instructors are now on LinkedIn Learning.”
While I’m sure that Weinman is in many ways sad about the demise of her eponymous brand, I’m also sure that she is more than happy to have registered the <lynda.com> domain name at an opportune time, which certainly added value to her company. As she said in the NPR podcast: “Even though [LinkedIn has] done something different with it than what we were doing, I know it's been super successful for them and that they made the right decision…. I can't say it was without casualties. But, nothing in life is.”
