When Lawrence Ng founded Oversee.net with Fred Hsu nine years ago, he was 21
years old and saw domain
names on the Internet as virtual
real estate — empty lots at
prime locations.
Since then, Ng’s company has
purchased more than 800,000
domain names, which he compares to properties in areas
with little foot traffic.
“There are tremendous parallels,” Ng says. “If you have a
piece of land in a great area and
you do not want to develop it,
you turn it into a parking lot or
storage facility or so forth. But
today, we decided to develop it
into a full-fledged property.”
When Internet users bypass
search engines and type what
they want directly into their
browser’s address bar,
Oversee’s technology takes
over. By driving search-based
traffic to advertisers, Oversee
has grown by leaps and
bounds, posting 2007 revenue
of $206.7 million — up from
$124.6 million in 2006.
Smart Business spoke with
Ng about how to make your
company’s own domain a place
employees want to be and how
a foosball table can improve
employee retention.
Delegate. The key to being a
good entrepreneur is knowing when to delegate and
when to hire the right people. The classic entrepreneurial trap is the ‘do everything yourself’ approach.
You can’t do it all, and you
don’t get any more credit for
doing it all yourself.
My feeling has always been
that there is a lot of stuff to
do, and there is only so
much a single person can
tackle. Especially in our
space, there really are a lot
of different things that anyone in our space could be
doing — and there is only so
much one person can do.
Deciding what to keep and
what to delegate — that is a
combination between things
I enjoy doing more and the
things that are critical, for
instance, maintaining relationships with some of our
largest domain publishers.
That is an area where it is
critical to the business, and
it is also something I enjoy.
