On Tuesday, the wildly popular marketing automation software company Marketo (which was acquired for close to $1.8B last year) accidentally let their domain name, Marketo.com, expire. While you might not use Marketo every day, imagine if a core app that you did use every day suddenly stopped working…so you went to their website and it didn’t exist.
Scary town.
While you might think that someone hacked the marketing giant, this actually is a good old fashioned case of someone just accidentally forgetting to renew the domain name at the core of the multi-billion dollar company. I think a lot of big companies would be so embarrassed to have something like this happen to them that they’d cover it up but the CEO actually did the best thing you can do in the situation.
Honestly, this is probably the most awesome response a CEO can give. No excuses, no pretending you were “hacked” just honest. So that’s pretty awesome right. Well as you know from the title of my blog post, it gets better. Marketo was also pretty lucky because a nice guy named Travis Pebble who bought the domain off a drop and gave it back to the company.
Today Steve Lucas, the CEO of Marketo announced that they will be giving $10,000 to Project Pinball, a non-profit that puts pinball machines in Children’s Hospitals.
It really great to see a big company like Marketo not only admit right off the bat when they made a BIG mistake, but to then have the domain rescued by a good guy who didn’t try to extort a fortune from the company and in the end seeing $10,000 go to a great non-profit. All I can say is “wow” – there’s a lot of good out there, and it comes in all forms.
