Reprinted from Time Digital, Monday, September 6, 1999:
by Maryanne Murray Buechner
What do you do when a Web start-up wants to buy your domain name? You take your family to Disneyland — on the start-up's dime. Eve Rogers, 6, of Williamsburg, Va., wasn't interested when Mariam Naficy and Varsha Rao first approached her last year with an offer of $5,000 for eve.com. To a first-grader, it's more exciting to send school pals e-mail with your name in the address than to have money. Besides, her mother said if she took any cash, it would go straight into her college fund. But Eve couldn't resist The Mouse. After she rejected the five grand, Naficy and Rao, who just had to have eve.com for their new online beauty-supply store, lobbed a counter offer: plane tickets to Los Angeles for Eve and her whole family plus four days at the theme park, all expenses paid. They also threw in $500 worth of toys, a new PC, stock in their company, some money for that boring college fund, a six-month board membership and the e-mail address of me@eve.com for 25 years. Sold! The new eve.com launched this summer. Says Naficy: "It was probably one of the tougher business deals I've had to negotiate."
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