Before Soothe, there were the people who gave Merlin Kauffman their domain names. Richard Lau, a fellow domain investor, remembered checking three of Kauffman’s acquisitions after someone questioned how a teenager had obtained such desirable internet addresses. Lau tracked down the previous owners. Their explanations were disarmingly similar: a polite young person had contacted them and asked. They had handed the names over. In one case, the owner had even paid the renewal fee for another two years. Somewhere in the history of digital commerce, a seller was picking up the postage, too.
Lau’s account has the pleasures of a good business anecdote: suspicion, investigation, an ending more charming than the premise. It also introduces a quality that keeps appearing in Kauffman’s career. He is willing to approach the person on the other side of a transaction. An internet address can look like a technical asset. To acquire one, sometimes you have to talk to its owner.
Indianapolis, with an internet connection
Kauffman grew up in Indianapolis and attended The Orchard School, then Park Tudor. His first encounters with the internet were early enough to belong to the AOL era. He has described working for AOL at 11, learning its proprietary RAINMAN language and helping manage online communities. The detail is useful less as a prodigy’s calling card than as an indication of how long he has been interested in the machinery behind a screen.
As a high-school student, he co-founded eWireless, supplying wireless internet access to local communities and coffee shops. His Wellfound work history dates that venture to 2003-2004. The service joined a practical need to an available technology: people wanted to connect, and somebody had to arrange the connection. It was an appropriately literal first business for someone who would spend much of his career getting customers and suppliers together.
He sold his half of eWireless to his partner as he headed to Temple University. After transferring to Indiana University, he left college to concentrate on domain investing. True Magic began in 2004. College had supplied one route forward; buying and selling internet names had started to supply another. The decision placed him in a business where a short, memorable string of letters could be an asset with several possible futures.
The address was only the beginning
His domain portfolio included names such as Exclusive.com, Lookup.com and Conferences.com. These were useful words before they were internet addresses. Their appeal required very little explanation: a visitor could make a reasonable guess about the business waiting behind the name. A good address had already done a small portion of the marketing before anyone designed the homepage.
By 2010, Kauffman was describing a strategy that went beyond buying a name and waiting for a higher offer. He paired Lookup.com with an established personal-data business to develop a search service. With iLoan.com, he explored leasing the domain with an option to buy while becoming a partial owner of the company using it. The name became an entry into a working business, with another operator contributing the skills needed to develop it.
He warned against holding out indefinitely for an extravagant sale price when a workable partnership was available. That is an interesting position for a domain investor: the asset could become more useful through cooperation than through a prolonged display of its asking price. The shift also foreshadowed a career in which Kauffman would increasingly have to share the work. Naming something is pleasantly compact. Building the thing behind the name tends to involve a larger cast.
“Take a bigger risk instead of a lot of small ones.”
Merlin Kauffman, domain-investing advice, 2009
His published advice to other domain investors was equally direct. Rather than spreading a budget over many small purchases, he suggested concentrating it in fewer, more valuable names. It was an argument about selection and conviction. His subsequent career would test those preferences against a company that needed considerably more coordination than a portfolio of registrations.
An appointment that would not fit
Soothe began with an inconvenience. Kauffman traveled frequently and found that booking a service around his schedule was harder than he wanted it to be. Opening hours, advance reservations and the journey to an appointment all stood between wanting something and getting it. He developed the idea while attending Harvard Business School’s Owner/President Management program, where his public education history records attendance from 2012 to 2014.
In 2013, he and technical co-founder Bradley Herman launched Soothe. Customers could book a professional to come to a home, hotel or office, sometimes with about an hour’s notice. The attraction was easy to understand. The customer stayed put; the service traveled. A booking interface made the arrangement appear simple, although the table still had to get through the door.
The company’s own account describes availability seven days a week, from morning until midnight. Those extended hours mattered to the original idea. Kauffman was questioning the timetable around the transaction as much as the transaction itself. There was already a market for the service. His proposition was that its existing arrangements left customers who wanted a different time or place poorly served.
Soothe also gave independent professionals another channel for bookings. That made the company a marketplace with two groups to satisfy, rather than merely a convenient button for customers. Each additional city brought a fresh set of schedules, journeys and local relationships. The appeal could travel quickly. The actual service required people who were available nearby.
The arithmetic behind the app
In March 2016, Soothe announced a $35 million funding round. It was operating across 22 U.S. markets, with plans to add more. Kauffman spoke about the economics of individual bookings as well as growth. At the time, a standard hour cost $99 in most markets, with $70 going to the professional and the remainder to Soothe. Those were the historical terms, rather than a promise about today’s prices.
Kauffman argued that a company needed enough margin to function. Soothe was still operating at a loss during that expansion, despite his description of profitable unit economics. The distinction matters. A booking can contribute money toward a business while the business spends more than it brings in overall. New markets, recruitment, marketing and software all have a way of presenting their own invoices.
The expansion budget had concrete destinations. In 2016, he described plans to increase marketing and customer acquisition, make key hires and invest in the technology platform. The company had around 40 employees. Raising money was one event; using it to deliver the same experience in additional cities was the work that followed. Even a service designed around convenience has an inconvenient amount of administration.
The company grows; the job changes
By early 2017, Kauffman was talking candidly about the demands growth placed on the organization. Software needed room for a much larger customer base. Employees needed training as their responsibilities changed. A person suited to the first year might need different abilities in the second or third. He distinguished managers equipped for rapid expansion from those better suited to sustaining an operation, and argued for having both.
That year, he was named a semifinalist for the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year award in the Greater Los Angeles region. The recognition arrived while Soothe was adding markets, including international ones. It offered a public marker of the distance from a teenager arranging wireless access in Indianapolis. The underlying problem had also become larger: coordinating a company’s growth while keeping the service recognizable to the customer.
In May 2018, Kauffman moved from CEO to executive chairman. Simon Heyrick, the chief financial officer since July 2016, took over daily operations. Soothe announced another $31 million in financing alongside the change. Kauffman described Heyrick as someone he had watched at work for nearly two years. The handover reflected a practical decision about who would run the next stage of the company.
His public message about the transition thanked Herman, subsequent CTO Chris To and the wider team. It also acknowledged the mixed feelings of reaching that moment. There is a particular awkwardness to building a company that grows into a job someone else will do. In Kauffman’s telling, gratitude and anticipation sat beside that feeling. He remained involved, with a different seat at the table.
A dinosaur enters the picture
In October 2021, Kauffman publicly identified himself as the creator of Metasaurs, an NFT project built around a fictional scientist called Dr. DMT. The premise combined dinosaur imagery with a Bored Ape character. It was a considerable change of scenery from appointment booking. The project’s collectibles belonged to an imagined world, while its founder had to decide how visible to make himself in the real one.
He revealed his identity on Chainlink Live and advocated transparency from NFT founders. Later that year, a partnership announcement introduced MetaGames, co-founded with William Quigley and Ben Bindell, and described plans for games with economies that shared value with players. These were announced ambitions. They show where his interests had moved at that point, without making a forecast into an accomplishment.
His more recent public professional description returns to building and buying internet businesses. He is based in San Juan, Puerto Rico. In February 2026, he became a director of Urban Massage Ltd, extending his formal involvement in service marketplaces. The sequence brings an old question back into view: once people want to transact, what arrangements will help them do it?
Kauffman’s career has supplied several answers: a wireless connection, a useful domain, a partnership, a booking system. Each required a different kind of work. Lau’s story about those early domain acquisitions remains a pleasing place to begin. Before the portfolio, the funding rounds and the director’s appointment, there was somebody willing to make an approach. Sometimes the first piece of infrastructure is a conversation.