Take care of your employees. Employees like us because
we are stable. The Internet
is a big part of the equation
— how much of your own
assets do you really own?
For us, we have a large portfolio, about 800,000 domain
names. From a stability
standpoint and from a
standpoint of scale, we are
one of the largest in our
space and still with a lot of
opportunity.
We do a good job of taking
care of our employees.
Here, actually in all the
offices every Friday, we do
lunches. We make sure that
we have the stuff employees
want that is nonwork.
While we grew the company, we always had a game
room in our old office. We
sort of grew up shooting a
lot of pool. We started hiring
a couple of employees who
came from companies that
played foosball.
They asked us, ‘Gee … we
don’t really shoot pool.
Would it be possible to get a
foosball table?’ We said,
‘Absolutely.’ There’s actually
a foosball table here in L.A.,
there’s another one in
Florida. Our office in
Portland, Ore., has air hockey and foosball.
My view is that folks spend
a lot of hours at work. If you
look at any company and
take the ratio of hours in the
office compared to waking
hours or hours not at the
office, it is a pretty large
ratio. My view has always
been just make sure the
right balance is achieved
while you are in the office.
We always have a summer
outing; we have holiday parties. We try to keep it light.
Talk to your customers. What’s
next? That’s a tough one
for anyone. The path isn’t
fully laid out. A big part of
it is listening to our customers. We are constantly
talking to our publishers
and figuring out what they
want to do to grow their
business. That is one way
we think about it — develop the assets.
There is a lot of thought
that goes into that, in terms
of what we want to develop, what categories we
want to be in, what is too
crowded, what is too competitive, what will support
a large enough business for
us to make sense.
It comes down to the classic questions, ‘Is the market big enough? Is it too
crowded? Is there an
opportunity for us based on
our own track record?’
Another thing we do is we
try to hire the best and
brightest. We look for
industry experience. If not,
we look for if they are coming from a good background. We definitely look
for people who are sharp,
who are hungry.
We want folks who have
a little bit of passion, who
are looking to achieve and
accomplish more and
more.
HOW TO REACH: Oversee.net, (213) 408-0080 or www.oversee.net
