I remember some time ago getting a piece of email that basically said, “Hey, is anybody using start.com?” I have since learned that that domain was registered by the marketing department, presumably to “synergize” with the “Start Me Up” campaign or something like that, but nothing ever happened with it. Nevertheless the registration kept getting renewed year after year. (Perhaps we should also put marketing in charge of renewing passport.com since they seem to do a better job of keeping on top of expiring registrations than whoever is in charge of Passport.) It was probably at about the time I got that email that the start team (except that wasn’t their name yet) was looking for a domain name they could use to host their little experiment, and they stumbled across start.com and wondered whether anybody was using it. Nobody was, so they took it and did something interesting. The rest is history.

(Oh wait, this was history, too.)