by Bruce Jaffe, President & CEO
Today, Donuts was named the fastest of the Deloitte 2017 Technology Fast 500™. It’s awesome to be first in a fast crowd and after receiving the award, it got me thinking about speed and what “fast” means.
For us, “fast” began with market demand for our product. New top-level domains (TLDs) are an emerging, rapidly-expanding category. Yet despite the growth, we often find businesses and consumers that are just discovering this category. That’s why at Donuts we are constantly working to find new ways to introduce end users to our portfolio of 238 TLDs. We realize there’s plenty of work ahead to drive category awareness, so we are eager to shine the spotlight on individuals and organizations using new TLDs for their websites, for email and other business-critical purposes such as social links, for branded links to online advertising campaigns, for dedicated landing pages, and more. Every day, we find and share inspiring examples, such as
- home.credit – advertising displayed during international soccer matches for the global loan provider, Home Credit
- motion.social – a sponsor of the Seattle Half Marathon and creator of a running app for teams and clubs, and
- mapr.agency – a boutique integrated communications firms in Denver with emerging growth company clients
Our co-founder Paul Stahura likes to say, “use begets use” – the virtuous cycle of usage increases awareness, which then motivates others to embrace new TLDs, which in turn increases awareness and the cycle continues.
Equally important, at Donuts we strive to be “fast” in the way we operate. However, our early years were a different story. As hard as we tried to move quickly, it was the opposite of fast. The regulatory process for applying, awarding, and ultimately launching new TLDs took a long time. In establishing the foundation for growth, our efforts were deliberate and measured and, yes, even at times “slow.” Yet, during this period, Donuts’ co-founders realized that excellence in setting up the business would be just as critical as scaling out the business. They were right.
Once we had built a firm foundation, we began to execute “fast.” Over the past three years, we’ve seen our revenues grow dramatically. And so too our business processes. More recently, our pace has been accelerating: we’ve expanded our leadership team, our donuts.ventures group has invested in two promising start-ups that are leveraging the DNS for novel (and exciting) new uses, and we moved quickly to merge successfully with Rightside this past July. We’ve also been busy in the last few months with new products and solutions, with more exciting news to come in 2018.
Fast revenue growth – achieving the top spot in the Deloitte Fast 500 – is the result of excellence during many phases. Our success is due to the hard work of our team at Donuts and the millions of businesses and individuals who are embracing our products; together, they have made this achievement possible.
