When he bought the Web domain pizza.com for $20 in 1994, Chris Clark never imagined it would be his meal ticket.
But yesterday, the 43-year-old Queens-born entrepreneur sold the name at auction for a saucy $2.605 million.
As he watched himself move up the ranks of the upper crust with each bid in the online auction that concluded yesterday, Clark and his family celebrated the only way that seemed appropriate – with a pizza party.
“This is life-changing kind of money,” Clark told The Post between bites at his North Potomac, Md., home. “It’s truly incredible.”
Clark, who grew up in Floral Park, said that while this was a financial feat that would make even Warren Buffett’s mouth water, and his wife thinks he is a “visionary,” the truth is it all happened by accident.
During the Internet’s early days, Clark ran a Web site-consulting service and bought pizza.com hoping to convince a pizzeria to do business with him.
There weren’t any takers, but he maintained the site as a pizzeria directory ever since, never imagining that his $20 investment would grow into an obscenely large pie with extra dollar signs.
“I was lucky. It’s like you are on the beach and find something valuable in the sand,” he said, as the family plopped slices on pizza slice-shaped plates. “It was just happenstance.”
In the Internet’s Wild West days, cyber-squatters snatched up corporate domain names and then sold them back to their namesakes.
But in recent years, the biggest money has been in generic domains such as business.com, which sold for $7.5 million, and vodka.com, which just sold for $3 million.
Big companies buy these domains to help direct traffic to their sites. For instance, books.com redirects to Barnes & Noble’s Web site.
Clark, who recently started a company called Minestream, which “protects children from the perils of the Internet,” said news of the sales reminded him he had been holding on to pizza.com all these years.
The 24 bidders who caused the price to skyrocket from $100 on March 27 to $2,605,000 by closing at 2 p.m. yesterday remained anonymous, as is the policy of domain-name auctioneer Sedo.com.
The winner has asked not to be identified for now.
Additional reporting by Arthur Delaney