I suspect a large helping of hope and too much spare time and cash lying around that you can afford to lose.
Here's my take on going in in a BIG WAY on non .COM...
With most new extensions it's literally just luck and usually for a limited time until the next fad comes along. Anyone that invests that much in an extension for which, at the time, there is zero indication of it succeeding other than "I believe in those 2/3/X letters at the end of a domain" and then it does succeed for them in a big way is lucky and arguably deservedly so, but only because of the risk, not cause they knew something that others didn't. It's what everyone dreams of doing, the differentiating factor is having the funds to do it all in and sticking with it instead of cutting your losses early. People talk of "believing in X extension"... Almost all domain extensions have been in this position at one point or another, usually at sunrise and it was more commonplace when there were fewer extensions, this forum was born out of and thrives out of such scenarios and people go along for the ride cause they believe they can ride some sort of wave, even it doesn't exist. You can't just "believe" in 2/3 letters at the end of a domain like it has some kind've magic behind it, the magic is luck.
When it comes to .com and early adopters, it's a different story. It wasn't a belief in something completely abstract. In the case of Rick, he had success with selling rare phone numbers and he saw the utility of a new thing, the internet (aka information superhighway
) on the horizon. Can the same be said for a random domain name extension of your choosing, not really in my opinion... But to see that something in a new type of technology platform and to decide that it was going to be of incredible utility is very different. Oh and it was 99cents for a .com back then, I think he said it was 70 USD a year and you had to go out of your way to register them