Stahura is the man who founded one of the world's most successful domain registrars, eNom.com, in his garage back in 1997. eNom's low pricing, easy to use control panel, compatibility with drop catching scripts and reseller program that allowed anyone to offer 

registration services, made eNom the go to registrar for many early domain investors. There is a fascinating entrepreneurial story behind Stahura's long and winding road to eNom and an equally interesting one detailing his path from eNom (after selling the company in 2006) to his current position at the front of the new gTLD Army.  

Stahura was born in East Chicago, Indiana and grew up in Hammond, a highly industrial area in the northwest corner of the Hoosier state. The gritty determination and untiring drive that Stahura's friends see in him today can be traced back to his earliest roots.  Paul told us, "My dad worked his way up from nothing (such as no shoes) during the depression and without a high school diploma he joined the Marines and fought in the Pacific in World War II, got his GED afterward and then a two-year Industrial Management degree at Purdue on the GI Bill.  It took him 6 years to get the 2-year degree because he did it while working for Mobil Oil in a local oil refinery. Eventually he became the internal audit supervisor. It's also where he met my mother, who was a switchboard operator at the refinery."

Paul Stahura in southern Indiana with the prototype of a 
motor design he got his first patent on in 1994. 

While Paul was deciding to stay the course in his career pursuit, he met someone at that same time who would change his personal life in a very big way. "Just before I left for southern Indiana, I met my future wife, Flo, at Purdue where she was just finishing her master’s degree," Stahura said. "In southern Indiana, I had rented a room in a 1968 model single-wide mobile home (renting a room, because I could not afford the whole thing), but that was an improvement up from the farmhouse basement I was living in initially.  Flo, who is French, went back to France to do a Ph.D. in biochemistry and so we dated long distance for a number of years, and, I finally asked her to marry me.  She said she would, but insisted she wouldn’t live in that trailer.  I said “deal!”, and when she got a post-doctorate position at Notre Dame, we got an apartment there and I was back in northern Indiana."

Newlyweds Paul and Flo Stahura on their September 1995 honeymoon in Venice, Italy.

"Meanwhile, my friend Jim suggested we start a consulting company since we knew about technology and could continue learning new things.  We started with another three guys who knew about the consulting business, so us “five knuckleheads” (as we called ourselves) became partners doing client-server consulting.  I did some robotics consulting in Michigan for a while but after about a year, I ramped up on databases and enterprise class applications and joined my partners in that.  So after about 20 years I finally gave up the ghost on robotics and was into client-server enterprise class applications and sending floppy disks around to install the client software on PCs."

"Then guess what happened?," Stahura continued. "The web came along, and the newfangled universal client called “a browser” meant we didn’t need to distribute client software on floppies any longer.  I was worried I’d missed the revolution because I’d been stuck in robotics for so long, but in 1995 I registered my first domain name, Netscape had its IPO, and told my wife I’m not missing out on this Internet thing like I did with the PC revolution because I was mentally stuck in the robotics backwater due to a movie I saw when I was 11!  My wife was supportive but my partners were skeptical that the Internet would be, as I put it, “bigger than electricity.”  

Above: a pivotal moment in Paul Stahura's career. "This the exact moment I decided to not miss the Internet," Stahura told us.  "We were on our honeymoon in Venice and I bought this Wired magazine which was one of the only English language magazines I could find. This article in that issue said "IBM and Sony are reportedly planning new online offerings as well, while the existing players, ranging from CompuServe to Delphi, are redoubling efforts to take AOL down a peg. And the dark horse looming over everything is the Internet itself, which some say has the potential to doom not just AOL, but all the proprietary services, to the ash heap of online history." I totally agreed with that," Stahura noted.  "I thought these big incumbents (IBM and Sony) would get crushed in the new world and the Internet would dominate."

With this belief in mind flash forward a couple of years.  Stahura said, "By around 1997 we’d built up the consulting company to about 50 employees, but it wasn’t my kind of business—you could make only so much money per hour and our billable rates were maxed out, and you could only work so many hours in a day.  You couldn’t scale and make money while you were sleeping."

"What we did have were some good developers on the bench, waiting for work, who knew how to make great systems.  I thought we should have them work on provisioning a service we didn’t have to ship, something that had to do with the web.  All these folks in the popular technology press were talking about web browser war this and web server that, but I saw that there these things called name servers, which a bunch of geeks could set up and was something your website needed to work.  It just seemed like name server tech had more opportunity per person working on it than web server tech had.  The DNS was central to how the Internet worked, and I told my partners we should get into name server services because there was too much competition doing web stuff," Stahura said.

In 1992 (when this shot was taken) Stahura was still all about the hardware. Little did he know that five years later his focus would switch to software (For historic hardware fans Paul is working on a robot controller made out of a Macintosh II. Stahura noted, "You can also see my handy dandy HP 11-C (I still use that same one - its on my desk now!) and you can see the cool/innovative 6-degree-of-freedom “stewart platform" joystick just to my left which we used to control/move the robot with (I still have it too). its funny to see a drill, a tool box, a soldering iron and the volt meter in the picture, when nowadays we are so far removed from hardware and mechanical things."

Returning to the late 90s, Stahura said, "A couple of guys had set up a web-based interface to a mail server and called it “Hotmail” and after just 18 months sold it to Microsoft so I suggested we make a web-based interface to a name server.  Before that, there was no remote access—you had to call a geek at an ISP or somewhere who was sitting in front of the name server to type in magical stuff to get your name to work and point to your web server’s IP address.  I figured we could charge people for a simple “do-it-yourself” web interface that made names work for them (everyone got the actual names at NSI back then, because that was the only place to get names, but NSI didn't offer DNS)."

"We made the software and in thinking of a name for the service, we came up with eNom.  eName.com was already taken, and so was Name.com.  I had my wife translate “name” into French, which is “nom.”  I stuck an “e” in front like “eBay”, and I also liked the four-letter name and thought if it became big, it could be a stock symbol on NASDAQ.  eNom now owns name.com and is a public company on NASDAQ as part of Rightside, but trades under the symbol “NAME”, not “ENOM,” Paul noted.

(December 5, 2014) The Rightside team at the NASDAQ Exchange in New York City 
on the day the company's stock started trading under the NAME symbol. 

In eNom, Stahura was finally able to realize his dream of creating a scalable business that would  make money while he was sleeping. Even though it proved to be a great idea, Stahura still had a hard time getting his partners on board.  "We got into the domain name system. I pitched my partners with “it’ll be a bank machine on the web, but people will put money in instead of taking money out, and we don't have to ship anything, just make an entry in a database”. But that didn't get me very far, and my partners didn’t really go for it—they wanted to be in the consulting business, “this is the business we have chosen,” they’d say, quoting a line from the Godfather movie.  I finally convinced them by saying I would do it myself, so I put up 1/3 of the money, and they put in 2/3— the consulting company owned the majority of eNom."

"In 1997, CORE had started and announced that TLD contracts were running out at Network Solutions, then the only registry and registrar.  They wanted to create seven new TLDs, and said if you show up at a meeting in Tokyo with $10,000, you could be a member of CORE and participate in getting these new TLDs launched.  I scraped up the money and flew over, and met half the people in the industry at the time (Hal Lubsen, John Kane, Ken Stubbs, Amadeu Abril de Abril, and many others).  This is how I got into domain names."

"So 1997 is when I got hooked by “.web” – my second passion after robots – a domain name registry.  I tried to get into TLDs with CORE then but incumbents made it so that it didn’t happen.  What did happen was the TLD idea lodged in my head.  ICANN then began in 1998, and split the industry into registrars and registries.  eNom became accredited as a registrar, but we weren’t among the five companies in the original registrar “test bed”.  I had investors lined up to back eNom if it had been in the test bed, but they all backed out when they learned we weren’t.  We were all on a conference call where ICANN announced the test bed participants, and when eNom was not announced, my potential investors literally got up and walked out," Stahura recalled.

Below: A screenshot of the eNom Home Page in 1999
 from the Internet Archive Wayback Machine

Stahura still found a silver lining in the test bed disappointment. "The good news is that eNom, because it came out of the consulting business, was over-architected (in a good way) with a “tiered” architecture," he noted. "We registered our first name, which was “competitionworks.com” (because it does) using the API in 1999 (the whois recorded the exact day and time) and we decided we would open our API to anyone to use, and this became the basis of our reseller model. Our motto was “We Suck Less” (than NSI, the near-monopoly back then). We were provisioning name server services, and said, “let’s provision domain names too.”  Eventually we provisioned e-mail, an ID protection product for WhoIs (something John Kane – who later joined me at eNom and is now at Afilias —  and I dreamed up in the late 1990s) and other services.  We just kept adding to it," Stahura said.

"So I had successfully transitioned from robotics, via consulting, to the Internet.  It felt as though I’d emigrated from the U.S. into cyberspace—I was living in another world called the Internet."

There is one bit of eNom history that only long time industry observers may recall. We noted earlier that Stahura sold the company (to Demand Media) in 2006, but he had actually sold it once before and had to take on a major risk to get it back. Stahura explained how that happened.  "From 1997 to 2000, we built both the consulting company and eNom.  In 2000, we were approached to buy the consulting company.  In due diligence, it was learned the consulting company owned most of eNom and the acquiring company, Webvision, wanted to buy eNom too, so we sold both.  Within about a year Webvision blew through all the capital it had raised and went out of business.  Just before its final collapse Webvision ran a process to sell eNom, which included new.net (an Idea Lab company back then) as one of the bidders. Jim and I scraped together all the money we had, taking out second mortgages, and ended up with the winning bid in buying back eNom."

"We formed Demand Media and that same day in 2006 sold eNom to it, and I was President and COO of Demand, and as a large shareholder also a member of the board of directors.  The company acquired more and more media properties and some other registrars.  But I still had my heart set on climbing that last mountain—getting a new TLD.  I spent a lot of time at Demand working the policy process of advancing new TLDs.  After yet another delay in the TLD program, which made it look as though new TLDs were a long way out, I left Demand Media in late 2009."

            "Due to the mutual respect all of us at Donuts have for one another, we are not afraid of conflict among the team because we know we’ll use reason and logic to get to the right answers and make the best decisions.  Tren Griffin quoted Ben Horowitz who quoted Marc Andreessen who quoted Lenin who was quoting Karl Marx who said “sharpen the contradictions”.  We, too, believe that works.  Nothing is perfect.  Surfacing the differences and reasoning them out, getting to the truth, and resolving them is best, not plastering over and hiding conflicts," Stahura said.

            The founders all have great credentials but raising hundreds of millions of dollars is still an impressive feat. To get it done, Stahura did something he had done before to get eNom off the ground. "The first element of raising the capital was that I put up my own money as a testament of my faith in the opportunity," Stahura said. "I figured it's a risk only if you don't know what you are doing, and I was pretty sure we knew what we were doing.  The second was that we had a very believable reason why we could acquire TLDs in an economical way, and further, why other companies wouldn’t make as big a play as we were proposing.  As Warren Buffett says, “if its raining gold, put out a bucket”, and I figured they’d put out a thimble.  Once I invested, TL Ventures and Austin Ventures joined, and the other investors came along seemingly fairly easily."

"Donuts is the first company for which I raised money – eNom had no outside investors before I sold it to Demand Media but I had learned a lot from the management team at Demand Media, which had the motto “go big or go home,” and raised over $200 million.  I wanted many new TLDs, and obtaining many new TLDs is a capital intensive venture, so I had to assemble a great team and raise a lot for Donuts. I had the wherewithal to lead the way and that started the ball rolling, and also large venture capital and private equity funds need to deploy capital in big chunks (but only to entrepreneurs with valid, believable reasons why a large amount is needed and how they’ll certainly make money for their investors).  It’s probably harder to raise a small amount of capital with the same amount of good reasoning," Stahura opined.  

Donuts recently celebrated the 1st anniversary of its first TLDs going live. We asked Paul how, at this early stage, his strategy has played out compared to the vision he had for the company going in. "It’s going almost exactly as we thought it would, but for one thing," Stahura said. "For example, we thought we’d have 150 uncontested TLDs; it turned out to be 149.  We thought we’d end up with about 200 TLDs in total, and that’s just about the number we’ll end up with.  The exception is that it happened nowhere near as fast as we thought it would.  The process took much longer than it should have.  It took too long to get these assets in the hands of the public, open the name-space, bring innovation, and create real competition and lower prices.  But I believe in Warren Buffett’s maxim that it’s better to have the “what will happen” right versus the “when it will happen," Stahura said.

Despite the seemingly endless delays, Stahura said one thing remained the same - a determination to innovate. "We innovated pricing tiers at Donuts—this wasn’t easy, as we had to do that while staying compatible with standard EPP so registrar integration would be easy.  Now other registries are doing it.  We innovated the Early Access Program (EAP), and now other registries are doing that.  We innovated the Domains Protected Marks List (DPML), and registries are doing that as well.  We innovated private auctions to resolve contention among TLD applicants, which was initially rejected but is now wholly embraced.  We have a few patents in the pipe, and we’re innovating other things we have yet to launch.  The Donuts DNA is infused with “Innovation is the key to wealth creation”, Stahura said.

While Stahura is confident that big things are ahead for new gTLDs, others, especially those in the domain investor camp, think it's unlikely new extensions will ever be able to escape .com's long shadow. Stahura explained why he thinks his vision of the future is the one that will play out. "New York City was big in the 1700s and is big now—it will be the biggest city in America probably forever," Stahura noted. "However, and this is important, its population is becoming less and less of the total population pie.  Las Vegas, San Francisco, LA and Chicago didn’t exist when New York was founded, but they’re significant today and are now thriving cities.  The same is true of TLDs.  All these new cities had great new real estate for various reasons – next to the lake, on a river, near a port, on a hilltop — just as new TLDs do."

"We’re still at the very beginning. There will be no other globally unique naming system – the DNS is too embedded into our Internet, our laws, our communications, and our world. The Internet will be around for more than 100 years (like the phone system has been), and these names will be too. New domainers and some old timers recognize this new opportunity and are moving west.  Some old timers are mentally stuck back on Plymouth Rock.  Some slumlord probably said back then “Don't go west young man, there be lawless savages out there!  Rent my tenement in Brooklyn instead,”  Stahura said. 

"But its not just some domainers leading the way to new TLDs," Stahura noted. "Brands are moving west too. Domainers are accompanied by trend setters such as Lady Gaga with bornthisway.foundation, Lionsgate with thehungergames.movie, Kanye West with yeezy.supply, GM with GeneralMotors.green, McDonalds with bigmac.rocks, and many others now and many more to come. It's not a coincidence that companies like Google and Amazon got into both the domain name registry and registrar game right when new TLDs were launched.  I’m sure its not because they think it wouldn’t last or be huge."

Stahura added, "The NSI registrar had about 100% worldwide market share when I started eNom in my garage on near zero capital.  Look what happened.  The Verisign registry had about 50% worldwide market share when I started Donuts with over $100 million in capital.  We’ll see what’ll happen."