There are easier ways to save a company than selling the word painted on its front door. Rich Milgram did not have the easier ways. By 2014, the founder of Beyond.com was caught between an investor ready to leave and his own refusal to leave with it. Offers existed for the whole business. Taking one would have solved the investor's problem, enriched the executives and handed Milgram a future with fewer payrolls in it. He kept thinking about the people whose futures were already tied to his.
Then a lawyer called. An unnamed public company wanted Beyond.com - not the recruitment business, just the domain. Milgram said no. The buyer returned. He said no again. The approaches continued, and so did the price. In a story crowded with bankers, contracts and economic timing, this is the pleasingly human bit: the founder needed several knocks before he realized that someone was not trying to buy the house. They wanted the brass numbers screwed beside the door.
That distinction offered a third choice. Milgram could sell the name, use the proceeds to help buy out Safeguard Scientifics, and keep the enterprise he had built since 1998. Beyond could become Nexxt. The identity would go; the responsibility would stay.
First, the expensive word
The symmetry was extravagant. Milgram had bought Beyond.com in 2005 for $150,000. It was the largest purchase his company had made, equal to about three months of revenue. His father thought he was crazy. Fathers have been saying this about internet domains since internet domains began, often with impeccable household logic and unfortunate commercial timing.
The name served the business well. Beyond organized a sprawling set of career sites around geography, profession and community. A 2007 Safeguard report described more than 2,100 domains and 15,000 career communities. At that scale, the company was less a single job board than a federation of small entrances, each designed to meet a particular worker or employer where they already stood.
That year Safeguard invested $13.5 million and took a 37.1 percent stake. Milgram welcomed more than the capital. He later said he understood that he could not expand alone and needed experienced people to guide the next steps. The company added senior management, acquired businesses and widened its reach. Then, eight months after the investment, the recession began. A recruiting company had secured growth money just before employers stopped doing much recruiting.
Investor time and founder time rarely use the same watch. Safeguard invested to grow and eventually exit. Milgram wanted to keep operating. The recession stretched the expected timetable; the improving economy later made an exit more attractive to the investor. By the middle of the next decade, the disagreement had become structural. Safeguard wanted a sale. Milgram, still the majority owner, would not accept one.
“I was able to get Safeguard to exit. It gave me the funds to do what I wanted to do to secure the future for us.”Rich Milgram, on the domain sale and buyout
The domain deal broke the stalemate. In March 2017, Safeguard left the board and surrendered its ownership through a transaction that included $15.5 million in cash and a three-year note. The old name went to Bed Bath & Beyond. The recruitment company introduced Nexxt that June, carrying forward its niche sites while emphasizing recruitment marketing, candidate data, text, email and social outreach. The company survived the loss of the very name that had once seemed bold enough to contain its future.
An engineer builds introductions
Milgram's route into recruiting began far from human resources. He studied electrical engineering at Boston University from 1986 to 1990, then joined GE Aerospace as a systems engineer. He has said the job taught him more about business than engineering. Large government contracts interested him less than smaller, more immediate business problems, so he moved into technology consulting and built software for clients including Comcast.
The germ of the company was practical. He wanted to grow his consulting practice through the internet. Companies needed technical people; technical people needed assignments. Match the two and a consultancy could become a network. Monster.com was one of the few visible precedents. Milgram combined an interest in the early web with an emerging fascination for hiring, and in 1998 started the venture that became Beyond.
The underlying idea remained surprisingly stable while the industry changed its nouns. Job boards became networks. Networks became recruitment marketing. Keyword search gave way to behavioral signals, then skills-based matching and AI-assisted sourcing. Nexxt's audience grew from nothing to more than 40 million members by 2014, nearly 60 million candidates around the 2017 rebrand, and a company-reported pool of more than 150 million in recent years.
Milgram has always preferred the plain word “matchmaking.” It restores some modesty to a field that enjoys dressing introductions in technical finery. The software can sift profiles, study behavior, segment audiences and select a channel. The desired result is still two people deciding they should speak.
The reluctant salesman
Here the plot acquires a useful contradiction. Milgram built a company around connection while regarding connection with strangers as a learned skill. In 2017 he described himself as naturally introverted. He admired Steven Kraut, a boisterous business-development executive who could recognize someone five years after a meeting and walk into a room without flinching at rejection.
Milgram watched him. Observation became practice. He did not claim a conversion into the sort of person who collects a room by instinct. He found that conviction in the product could carry him across the distance his temperament resisted. If he believed the company could help people, speaking for it became less like self-promotion and more like an operating duty.
“I'm naturally an introvert. I had to learn to be an extrovert.”Rich Milgram
The confession explains something about the company, too. Nexxt's history is full of systems designed to make an approach easier: a relevant alert instead of a blind search, a text instead of a missed listing, a behavioral match instead of a stack of keywords. Its founder had personal reason to understand the awkwardness before a useful conversation.
Outside the boardroom, the official biography loosens its tie. Milgram's first job was delivering newspapers. He practices his golf swing at work when he thinks colleagues are not looking. If the CEO role disappeared, he says he would like to coach youth golf. His dog, Twizzler, shares a name with his favorite candy; Peanut M&M's appear when stress does. These details are not strategic, which is why they are welcome. A quarter-century in recruitment technology is a long time to spend entirely inside a pitch deck.
After the rebrand
Nexxt kept moving from listings toward an employer's full sourcing process. It added hiring-event tools in 2023. In 2024 it introduced a talent-sourcing platform with an AI-enhanced assistant for candidate messages, followed by free and low-cost organic traffic options for employers. In May 2025 the company joined the NFL Players Association on NFLPA Jobs, a portal meant to help players translate their experience into work beyond football.
Those products belong to the latest version of a problem Milgram first saw while consulting: people with ability and organizations with need routinely fail to find one another. Technology can narrow that failure. It can also make it louder, faster and more impersonal. Nexxt's wager is that better data and more channels can create a more relevant approach, provided the system remembers that a candidate is a person rather than an inventory unit.
The old Beyond name suggested a horizon. Nexxt, with its extra consonant, suggests sequence: the following job, message, candidate or version of the company. Milgram's own sequence is less tidy. Engineer becomes consultant. Consultant becomes recruiter. Introvert becomes spokesman by practice. A domain bought at a frightening price becomes the asset sold to preserve everything around it.
Founders are often encouraged to identify with the companies they build. Milgram's best-known decision required the opposite discipline. He separated the company from its sign, the mission from its URL, and his obligation from the romance of a familiar name. Beyond.com was valuable because people knew it. Selling it proved that he knew what was more valuable.