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In Rook Media's case the
founder's lineage can be traced back to Sedo
a decade ago, with it
continuing through NameDrive
before reaching full flower at Rook. In
addition to the work of the founders - CEO Ash
Rahimi, COO Daniel Law, CIO Ed
Russell, CSO Martin Andersson, VP
of Sales Simon Pupo and Director Matthias
Muller - Rook Media benefited greatly by
adding beloved DomainSponsor veteran Joe
Higgins to their management team as Senior
Sales & Strategy Consultant. Together
movie fans might look at them as the domain
industry's version of The Magnificent Seven.
The Rook Media story
starts with Daniel Law, a U.S. Army
veteran (enlisting straight out of high
school) and Ivy League Economics &
Political Science |
| graduate (from
Columbia
University) who joined Sedo as a young
executive in 2003 (Daniel's role there was
detailed in a 2004 Cover
Story we wrote about Sedo). At Cologne,
Germany based Sedo, Law (who was stationed in
Germany during his stint in the military) was
eventually given the responsibility of managing and overseeing the
company's global business, outside of Germany.
Law put
together a team to meet this new challenge and
three of the people he added to that team were
Ed Russell, Ash Rahimi and Martin Andersson,
all of whom years later would join him in
founding Rook Media. |
(L
to R) Rook Media Co-Founders Ash
Rahimi, Martin Andersson, Daniel
Law, Simon Pupo,
Ed Russell and Matthias Muller
with Senior Sales & Strategy Consultant Joe
Higgins.
"Unfortunately the efforts
to keep Sedo costs low, combined with ever
growing staff numbers resulted in pretty low pay for all involved on the
European Union side
of operations," Law recalled. "This was a real challenge for
the staff and myself, and keeping employees
motivated and focused on growing the business
that was so obviously profitable was becoming
increasingly difficult. There
was no real potential on my side, not being an
owner, to both effect change and share in the
upside, neither with me nor my team, of what
we were building and running", Law said,
adding that "being a founder
myself now I very much understand the other
side of it and all relative complexities
involved."
"I really learned a valuable lesson
in those days on ensuring that you share with
your team the fruits of the labor as much as
the labor itself! Making a long story short
when the opportunity presented itself to help
start a new endeavor in which I would have
much more say on structure and operations, I
jumped at the chance and helped to found and
run NameDrive."
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Daniel
Law
COO, Rook Media |
"Together with the core of
the team that had brought so much success and
growth at Sedo, I managed to help grow
NameDrive from a fledgling start up with no
customers into one of the leading industry
parking platforms. We were so successful that
we caught the attention of Oversee.net
(the parent of DomainSponsor)
for
acquisition purposes," Law said.
"Obviously discussing a
buyout with a competitor is a delicate dance
and can take significant time, but after an
almost two year long tango, we had come very
close to terms for a buyout. Unfortunately in
this time the strategic goals and visions that
the partners had for the company had grown
apart, and this extended as well to the
potential for an exit. The initial founder,
Greg Manriquez, wished to sell NameDrive to a
different suitor instead (Key Systems out of Germany), who had come later to the
ball."
"What
had seemed to be an elegant solution to the
mounting differences in ideas for the
direction of the company, the exit, sadly
ended up becoming another dividing factor. We did not want to end back in the
confines of our previous experience as
employees with little say in the strategic
direction or operations of a company which we
put our all into, as we had significant
differences of opinions with Greg’s
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|
preferred buyers as to how many issues of
strategy and structure should be handled. We
already felt the trend of NameDrive was
heading in this direction with diverging goals
and wishes of the management team and Greg." |
"At the end, and another
lesson learned, the fact that Ed, Ash, the
other managing partners, and I had focused far
more on growing the business rather than
attending to the proper setup and paper
work,
meant that we did not have a clear cut claim
to ownership as we had thought we had. We were
not able to easily weigh in with our will,
though it was unanimous amongst all the other
partners, against Greg’s. After much soul
searching, we decided it would be easier to
settle the claims and differences with Greg
and the new buyers outside of court. This
granted us the freedom to start fresh and
bring our common vision of what a parking
provider should be to the market unencumbered
with the constraints of differing view in the
fold," Law said.
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CSO
Martin Andersson and CEO Ash
Rahimi
compare notes on the front steps at Rook
Media.
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So, Daniel, Ed, Ash,
Martin and Matthias (whom they met at
NameDrive), along with Simon Pupo, set up shop
in Zurich, Switzerland as Rook Media in
2011. "It was a chance to try to do the things right that we had not
been able to do at NameDrive - the third time
is the charm!," Law laughed.
This time things went
completely according to plan. "Leaving aside our
personal friendship, it is most certainly the
complementary skills sets that drives our
partnership. We really combine together well
to form a complete team that covers all
aspects of running not just a successful
company, but a great domain monetization
service. Whatever weakness we as individuals
have is more than made up for by the strengths
of others in the team and how we all
dynamically combine to function together as a
unified team."
"Ash has both great
strategic vision and is an amazing task
manager and executor, always pushing us to stay
on target and constantly improve our execution
as a team. Ed’s attention to detail and
passion for development are constantly moving
our products forward and ensuring they meet
the demands of our trying industry. Martin and
Matthias give us strengths in critical
non-English speaking markets (between the two of them we have
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| French, German, Czech, Spanish
and all the Scandinavian languages covered!),
and a great non Anglo-Saxon perspective on
both business and general operations."
"Simon
and Joe’s wonderful personable nature and
long years of experience as parking salesmen
keep our client base both growing and well
served with top-notch customer service. I
honestly could not call out one skill set or
need that is not met with this wonderful team
of partners and friends." |
"It was also a huge blessing in
disguise that we were forced to build an
entirely new platform from scratch two years
ago," Law said. " Monetization technology was just so
drastically different in 2005 (let alone
2003), and retrofitting older platforms with
new monetization technology is less than ideal
(and trust me, we know). We have a very clear
picture of where monetization is going in the
next 5 years, and we built a platform that reflects these
current and future realities. This industry really functions
best when populated by highly skilled lean and
motivated teams, and I think this if nothing
else best defines what Rook Media is."
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Rook Media CEO Ash Rahimi
(a Washington, D.C. native with an
International Law degree from Georgetown, a
Japanese Language degree from the University
of Tokyo and a Masters Degree in Political
Science from the University of Bonn in
Germany) started in this business in 2005 as a
broker at Sedo, then accompanied his friends
to NameDrive where he served as Chief Business
Development Officer. " After about a week of being exposed to
domains, I knew I would never be leaving the
industry!," Rahimi declared. "I consider myself very very lucky to
be in the right place at the right time."
Rahimi echoes what Law
noted about the importance of maintaining a
lean but highly motivated team, adding, "There was
something wrong with the domain monetization
space. Does a parking company really need 100
people? Do they need to host extravagant
parties every couple of months? Do you need an
account manager that probably just graduated
college and doesn't know nearly as much about
the industry as you do? Does this structure
benefit or bring value the parking company's
partners in any way?," Rahimi asked.
"Rook operates on a different
philosophy. We have a small
team of very experienced industry veterans who
on their own could run a parking company.
We're located in Switzerland, known for having
low taxes and a high value on
|
Rook
Media CEO Ash Rahimi |
| privacy. What
does this mean for our partners? It means
you'll never communicate with anyone that has
less than 5 years of experience in domain
monetization. It also means that because of
Rook's low cost structure, we can afford to
pass on the share of your parking earnings
that you deserve." |
As Rook Media's CEO
Rahimi has to be a "jack of all
trades" but that is a role he relishes.
"I
love learning new things and there isn’t one
part of the domain life cycle that doesn’t
interest me. I also believe that as a service
provider, you owe it to your customers to
really know what you are talking about. And
that means always learning something new if
you don’t know how to do it already."
"I started as a domain
broker, and that gave me a solid background in
both appraising and understanding the value of
a domain. Being able to work together with a
wide variety of domain investors was a great
way to get to know the industry, and spending
so much time negotiating domain sales with
non-industry end users gave me a lot of insight
into how important it is to evangelize the
domain space to the public."
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"It was during my time at
NameDrive that I slowly transitioned to
spending most of my time on the parking side
of things," Rahimi recalled. "In the parking world there’s
obviously a lot more emphasis on how much and
what kind of traffic your domain has, and
there was a bit of a learning curve I had to
deal with. Other parts of the business I’ve
learned mostly just to help our clients out.
That might cover domain development, SEO, or
SEM. I think it’s especially important to
understand how to it is be an advertiser,
because how can you really fully grasp parking
without being in the shoes of the person who
pays your bills?"
"I’m not alone on
our team - most of the partners at Rook Media
have done it all at some point in the last
six
years. I’m pretty comfortable saying that
you’d be hard pressed to find a team as
experienced in all of the elements of our
industry as ours. They live and breath
domains, and are
incredibly passionate about what we do. As a team we’ve been part of pretty much
every major parking company out there, and
we’ve assimilated the best of all worlds to
put together an evolutionary platform that’s
focused solely on performance."
"While our team
has experience in so many |
CEO
Ash Rahimi and CIO Ed Russell |
| other fields, the
focus at Rook is 100% on domain monetization. I’ve always
admired people that have a singular focus. The
chef that spends their entire life perfecting
just one dish. I think everyone at Rook feels
that same way - you can’t do something really
well unless that’s all you do. We just care
about making our customers more money. We
don’t make any other claims," Rahimi
declared. |
London, England native
Ed Russell (who holds a degree in German
and Spanish from the University of
Newcastle-Upon-Tyne) served as Sedo's
Director of UK Marketing before being named
President at NameDrive. He is the CIO at Rook
Media - an acronym that can stand for Chief
Innovation Officer or Chief Information
Officer, depending on the company. Russell said
the former would have applied to him a few
years ago, but at Rook he wears the latter
hat.
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"Back in 2005, there was a lot of flexibility
about what we can do on a parked page, but
advertising provider directives - in line with
the maturation of the industry - mean that parking companies are becoming
homogenized, leaving little room for
innovation on the parking page itself. In online business,
Information is king and that is no different
for a parking company. It is our use of
information and attention to detail, which I
believe sets us above our competitors,"
Russell said.
"My role
is to look at the millions of hits we get on a
daily basis and constantly analyze new trends
in order to make sure our domains are as
targeted as they can be to maximize revenue.
I also must constantly be vigilant and
ensure that all the traffic coming via our
publishers is of the highest quality and will
lead to conversion for the advertisers.
Ensuring a positive and satisfactory
experience for all participants in the
advertising cycle (user searching, advertiser
and affiliate provider, and publisher and
parking platform) is the best way to work
towards a sustainable and value added product,
and help the reputation and longevity of our industry."
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Rook
Media CIO Ed Russell speaking
at the 2006 T.R.A.F.F.I.C. West
conference |
"Overall, I would say
information is a form of innovation in
itself - in our industry innovation and use of
information go hand in hand," Russell
added.
Regarding the frequently
repeated mantra that "parking is
dead" heard so often in recent years,
Russell said, "having been on the inside
for the past eight years, parking never really
went away as much as the public perception
believes it did. In 2007 and 2008, the two
major advertising providers did a lot of house
cleaning which cut out methods of monetizing
traffic which were against their policies. For
customers using parking companies where these
practices were rife, there was obviously a
downturn, but for companies like ours which
had always been running clean, performance was
comparatively stable.'
"I see the downturn more
as a realignment of people’s expectations in
line with the realities in the market rather
than the beginning of the end as it was
heralded at the time. Obviously, the world
economy has suffered recently and parking
revenues along with it to a lesser extent, but
the current rebound has not only been one in
financial terms as much as one in the
public’s perception of our industry,"
Russell said.
| "Domain owners had become
disillusioned with the established parking
companies taking larger margins to pay for
their high overheads and to appease
investors.
As this happened at the same time as the
realignment of parking revenues, it lead to
people generally looking down on domain
parking as a dying service. As domain
parking’s image hit rock bottom, new
companies such as Rook Media came along with a
fresh new approach which was far more suited
to the domain owners’ way of doing business:
lean, low cost and efficient companies run by
domain owners replaced the bloated companies
of old, breathing new life into the market."
"At
the same time as improving the perception of
parking companies, our lean structure meant we
could offer higher rev shares for our
partners, meaning revenues increased for
portfolio owners. This led to a double effect
of improving confidence in the space as well
as higher revenues and so the rebound was
complete," Russell said." |
Cost-cutting
image from Bigstock |
If parking is back, the
logical follow-up question is, "does
it have legs or is it likely to go into a
tailspin again?" Russell replied, "I remember my first
Traffic show at Delray Beach in 2005 where the
buzzword was “mini sites”. Everyone was
going to build mini sites and domain parking
would die (the first of many deaths). Eight
years on and I would wager that the proportion
of mini sites to parked pages has barely
increased, if at all. The fact is that domain
parking is an extremely robust model and
remains by far the most sustainable and
profitable way for owners of large portfolios
to monetize traffic while focusing on other
aspects of their business. While domain
development is a perfect fit for a small
number of domains, it is time consuming to get
right. For everything else, there’s domain
parking."
"As to whether it can get
to where it was pre-recession, 2013 has
started far more strongly for us than 2012, so
things are certainly looking good. We have
some new changes coming in the next few weeks
which will boost revenue yet further, so the
future is bright."
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Martin
Andersson
Rook Media CSO |
Rook
Media's Chief Strategy Officer Martin
Andersson has been a domain investor
himself since 2005. Anderson, who speaks
three languages and holds Masters
Degrees in both Business Administration
(from the Stockholm School of
Economics) and International Management
(from Universität St. Gallen in
Switzerland), ran Sedo's Scandinavian
operations before moving to NameDrive in
2007 to serve as Director of Global
Operations. At Rook Media he is in
charge of both global marketing and
European operations and he has also run
his own consulting company in Sweden
since 2010.
Andersson says his
personal experience as a domain investor
has been a big plus in his role at Rook.
"Being a domain
investor definitely allows me, us rather, a
deeper understanding of our clients’ needs
and the challenges they face. You can certainly learn about domains
climbing the ranks as an account manager. But that can limit you to seeing things
only through the lens of the parking company. When you walk in the shoes of a
domainer and know what it feels like to have a
UDRP filed against you, see revenue abnormally
dip on a random Wednesday or feel frustrated
because certain tools or reports don’t exist
within your provider’s UI, only then can you
fully appreciate your client’s needs and
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| have more empathy.
As a matter of fact, some additional
reporting tools exist in our recently released
UI as a result of frustrations I encountered
when renewing domains in our owned &
operated portfolio." |
Like other domain
investors, Andersson saw his PPC earnings fall
and now that Rook Media is reversing that
trend he is in a good position to know what
changed the equation. "Some legacy providers
were created when it was not clear how parking
would evolve while others are just one of many
business divisions within a larger company. We have all seen this lead to
over-staffing, job redundancy and generally
way more overhead than is usually necessary. We are a domain monetization company
and we know it.
We have found that you don’t need a
huge staff to provide a first-class service
for our clients. More can be done with a smaller,
dedicated, and highly experienced team."
"In addition to being able to provide a
more personal touch, the lower overhead
results in higher rev-shares to our
publishers.
I feel we’ve done a great job proving
this concept as we were able to win the
lion’s share of domains managed by Above.com
in 2012, our first complete calendar year in
business."
Members
of the Rook Media team in Zurich -
(left to right) Joe Higgins, Ash
Rahimi, Martin Andersson, Dona
Dorn-Cabahug (Administration and
Accounting), Simon Pupo, Ed Russell
and Matthias Muller.
Andersson added the
unique talents of the Rook Media team
members have also been instrumental in
improved results. "Because
of our history together, we knew each
other’s strengths long before starting Rook
together. In addition to the sales
experience we all have, each also brings a
unique skill set to the table. We have a
healthy amount of trust in what each
partner’s specialized area is, and we give
the others plenty of room to work and
create."
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After
working in the finance sector in Australia,
Rook Media Sales VP Simon Pupo entered
the domain business in 2006 when he joined
NameDrive and was soon elevated to Vice
President of Sales. Pupo (who holds degrees in
Marketing and Finance from the
University of Technology, Sydney) told us why
he moved from from Australia to Europe and how
he ended up in the domain business.
"I kind of just
randomly fell into the domain industry when I started working with NameDrive in
Cologne," Pupo recalled. "Previous
to the move I was living and working in Sydney
and at the time I was a little bored and
unmotivated by the Finance industry, so I was
keen for a fresh change. My girlfriend who is
from Cologne, had to move back to
complete her studies after living in Australia
for 12 months so I also decided to make a move
and started looking for possible
options in Cologne"
"It took me around 4-6
months but I finally found a job with this online ad company called
NameDrive. I didn’t
really know anything about domain parking at
the time, but I sent off my application anyway
to Ed. I had to send it around seven times before
he replied, but the persistence definitely
paid off in the end. Just before the end of
2006 I packed up and moved to Germany with
everything I needed in one suitcase,"
Pupo said.
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Simon
Pupo
Rook Media VP of Sales |
It wasn't long before Pupo also found
himself personally bitten by the domain big.
"It is hard
for anyone not to get addicted I
think," Pupo laughed. "The
general vibe and the energy alone that fills
the industry makes it hard not to get hooked.
I think the flexible lifestyle it offers also
makes it very attractive. In regards to my own
personal domain portfolio, I started off slow,
but being in the middle of such a strong team
for over seven years I picked up my fair share of
tricks along the way."
"The
domain industry is definitely a little more
unorthodox than others and that’s one of the
reason’s why I really enjoy being apart of
it," Pupo added. "The industry is still relatively young and
full of motivated individuals. Most of our
partners are individual investors or small to
medium sized companies and each partner really
has their own flair. I would say that most of
our larger partners are innovators and have an
entrepreneurial mind set, so working with such
an eclectic group of people is really inspiring. The
reach of the industry also demands a certain
level of flexibility, the domain industry
truly is international and our partners cover
all continents. In short we help and advise
our partners with online investment
strategies, domain sales, portfolio management
and domain monetization."
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Matthias
Muller
Rook Media Director and Co-Founder |
The sixth co-founder at Rook Media,
Director Matthias Muller, coordinates worldwide
B2B partnerships and oversee recruitment for
the company. Muller is the lone co-founder who
did not get his start at either Sedo or
NameDrive, however he did briefly do some
consulting work for NameDrive that gave him a taste for
domains as an investment vehicle that never
left him.
Muller was born
and raised in Germany and he studied
linguistics and history at universities in
Germany, Portugal and France. He is also a graduate
of Sorbonne University in Paris, where he
earned a Masters Degree in International
Marketing in 2002. |
All of the Rook Media founders agree that
the addition of Joe Higgins to the team as
Senior Sales & Strategy Consultant in 2011
had an exceptionally positive impact on the
company. Daniel Law
noted, "In addition to his phenomenal work
ethic and determination to get the job done,
Joe brought us an exposure to many client
groups and types that we had never been able
to make timely inroads into in the past with
our previous parking company experiences"
"As
you know this is a very relationship based
industry and it can sometimes be the one the
most tasking challenges to try and reach out
to a whole new subset of clients that you have
had little to no experience working with to
date. It can literally be a labor of years
(and this in such a fast paced industry!) to
gain the trust and respect of publishers
enough that they will decide to start testing
a new platform."
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"Joe’s reputation and
painstakingly built up network of contacts let
us short cut that whole process
significantly," Law said. "When paired with our top notch technology and
customer service, it led to convincing
performance results that greatly helped our
own efforts and led us to become the number 2
parking provider on the market."
Higgins spent 6 years with
DomainSponsor managing the relationships and
portfolios of their top clients. In 2009, he
relocated to Europe and was part of the team
charged with expanding their reach into that
market. Higgins, who has also spent time
as a professional drummer, told us how he
wound up connecting with the Rook Media team.
"I knew a couple of the
founders through our paths crossing at various
conferences over the years and when I
initially heard chatter about the new platform
and company the guys were creating, I
considered then how great it would be to work
with that group. Around March 2011, I
started seeing |
Joe
Higgins
Rook Media Senior Sales & Strategy
Consultant |
| some of my clients testing the
new Rook platform, which was in BETA at that
point. It so happened that my
domestic-supervisor, Jessica Besseling, was
going to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro to raise money
for The Water School, and I knew Rook
co-founder Ed Russell would also be on that
climb. Two things were on Jessy’s mind
when she boarded the plane to Nairobi, make it
to the top of the mountain and convey to Ed my
interest in speaking with the team. It
took them 3 months to contact me, and I’m
unsure if it was due to Jessy’s sales skills
or some background check on me!" said
with a wink. |
Higgins signed on with the task of helping grow Rook’s
client-base. "I also work with
portfolio owners of all sizes making sure
their needs and best interests are represented
to my team and manage the day-to-day backend
details of portfolio monetization,"
Higgins said. "Also,
I research potential partners I feel we could
team with in order to expand our
service-offering and customer base.
Finally, at the top of this year, I began
working with Martin managing Rook’s
marketing efforts."
After two years on the job Higgins knows he
made the right choice. "Because of their history
together, the founders have an incredible bond
that goes way beyond domains. Consider
that they all relocated to Zurich, a place
only one of them was familiar with at the
time. To make that move, each person had
to have an immense amount of faith in the idea
of Rook Media as a company, as well as each
other as partners and friends," Higgins
said.
Rook
Media's picturesque home town - Zurich,
Switzerland
Higgins added, "This is a
group who truly care about the well-being of
each other outside the company walls, and that
is something not seen often enough. I
have brought this up to them on a couple of
occasions, and I feel very happy to be a part
of this team and that camaraderie."
Given Rook Media's remarkable growth, it's
becoming clear that their clients are feeling
the love too.
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