[tetomb]

But the more valuable it is the more unlikely it is that it will be given away. Is spending time and money on the extremely small chance of getting hold of zap.com smarter than using those efforts to get hold of zap.co or zap.me? How much more is zap.com worth to your business over other alternatives?

If a few days and a few thousand pounds isn't worth much to him then I understand but if resources are scarce, using them on long shots that might not even pay that much over the alternatives is not good business.

edit: punctuation, grammar

[wpietri]

For a startup, time and energy are always scarce. Payments are a hard space to break into. Putting even 1 second into a particular name is a mistake if that isn't the highest priority.

And given that Paul Graham turned Stevie Graham down for not having thought things through, rather than for lack of a good domain name, then I'd say the time and money was wasted. With those resources he could have conducted 20 user tests against prototypes. If PG was wrong about his concern about the business model, Stevie Graham would have had real evidence from real users. And, if as is more likely, PG was right, then Stevie Graham would have discovered the problem before he was pitching somebody so important to the future of his company.