Over the years the domain industry has given us the opportunity to meet and become acquainted with exceptional entrepreneurs located around the world. In the U.S. many are based in areas that have become beehives of domain activity like the southeast coast of Florida (stretching from Miami to Palm Beach), Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco and  the Pacific Northwest.

Things are a little quieter in our neck of the woods, in Tampa on Florida's west coast, where seeing industry friends face to face usually involves a trip to the airport first. So, you can imagine how delighted we are to welcome not just one, but two highly respected industry veterans as new neighbors.

Kellie Peterson arrived in town first after being named President of DNC Holdings, the parent company of several Internet enterprises including the popular registrar Directnic.com. Kellie, who is well-known from her time with the Endurance International Group and Name.com,  then brought another long time friend into the fold, persuading Mike Robertson (who first gained fame with Fabulous.com) to move all the way from Australia to serve as DNC's Business Development Director. 

Kellie and Mike are now holding court at DNC's spacious office building just west of downtown Tampa (a few blocks south of Raymond James Stadium where the NFL's Tampa Bay Buccaneers play). I dropped by their new digs to catch up with them and see what they are 

Above: Tampa, Florida skyline (image from Bigstock)

Below: Kellie Peterson (left) and Mike Robertson 
in the conference room at DNC Holdings in Tampa. 

working on now. Turns out there is a lot going on in our backyard now that this dynamic duo has arrived in town.

Before we get into that, for those who don't know Kellie and Mike (and those who do but might not know some interesting things about their background) let's start with an introduction (or re-introduction, as the case may be).

Kellie, who relocated from chilly Denver to tropical Tampa to lead the DNC team, is actually a native of Chicago (born and raised on the north side of the Windy City and, naturally, a Cubs fan). "I grew up in the city’s Andersonville neighborhood and love my hometown!," Kellie told us. "I thought I would always live there but since leaving in 2000 I’ve relocated several times." 

Kellie split her college days between Western Illinois University and Northeastern Illinois and, just a couple of years ago while pursuing an interest in wine, she  added a sommelier certification and Sonoma State University’s Wine Business Certificate. "I’m a bit of a polymath and someone who is easily bored if something doesn’t interest me, but if something interests me, I tend to really dive into it and learn as much as I can about it," Kellie said.

Kellie at work in her office at DNC Holdings	Her diverse interests led her through a remarkable procession of occupations before finding her home in the domain industry. "Here's a quick run down," Kellie said, rattling off "Data entry clerk, Retail clerk, Gift wrapper at Sears (at Christmas nest tips, ever!), Record store assistant manager,  Video store manager (x2), Film distribution*, a nanny for four children ages 1.5 to 7, Cook in lesbian bars, House painter, Deposition clerk, Assistant to the Medical Director for a physicians group, Convention & Consulting Services technician (setting up remote, temporary networks for tradeshows) and tech support agent for three different Internet companies!" Whew! *I worked as a scheduler to maximize utilization of all of our 16mm and 35mm prints, including the only 35mm prints of Rocky Horror Picture Show available in the Midwest at the time. Awesome job, but this was before wide spread use of PCs and we were doing this all
on visible files like this - dozens of these heavy metal files all stacked one on top of the other on a reinforced table. Every day I would crack my knee on one of those dang supports. It’s no wonder I have such bad knees!

So after all of this, how did she find her way into the domain business? "Like a lot of folks, I fell into the domain name industry," Kellie recalled. "I got a position on a small support staff for a local ISP. My boss hated working with domain name updates. The whole process was handled by fax then and if you messed one thing up you had to start all over again. I made myself useful by taking on this responsibility. From there I just took as much responsibility as I could, including working on a roll-up plan for Midwestern ISPs."

"I was working as a technology manager at Kinko’s in Albuquerque for a while before I learned about this funky little web hosting company called Fatcow," Kellie continued. "They needed help managing the transfer process for their customers. They had someone handling it at the time, but business was booming and he couldn’t keep up. Before I even started the guy I was hired to help had quit and my boss changed. I had my trepidations, but everything turned out OK."

"At the start of 2010 I found myself being courted to return to Endurance International," Kellie recalled. "The time was right for them to start seriously pursuing the domain name space and they asked me to run that business unit, this time, from my home in Denver. We hit the ground running and I was on the move all the time. We quickly acquired ICANN accredited registrars Netfirms, followed by BlueHost’s FastDomain registrar, before tackling the 50+ ICANN accredited registrars owned by the Dotster group. All of these acquisitions happened within two years time. The 2.5 million domains quickly turned into more than 10 million under management."

Kellie & Mike at work in the DNC Holdings conference room

In addition to a new company Kellie had to adapt to a new climate after moving from Denver to Tampa. "We had just come from a long, cold, snowy Denver winter and arrived in the Tampa/St Petersburg area just as the temperatures and humidity soared. I felt like we were inside for almost a year!," Kellie said. "We live over in St Pete, which is great. I love seeing the revitalization happening all around us. After living all over the U.S. I’ve gotten a bit spoiled by world class foodie towns but now Tampa Bay is getting in on that too. The craft brew scene is out of control," she observed.

"When I have free time my partner, Jenn and I are often traveling, exploring wine or at auctions. I have an auction problem. I love auctions! I always learn something new and I love seeing what other people get jazzed about. It’s much better when it’s not just a bunch of dealers – but the deals are often better when it’s a dealer heavy auction."

Asked what separates her company's offerings from the competition Kellie said, "DNC, or more specifically, Directnic (and soon Dotology) are two of the few remaining ICANN accredited domain name registrars with more than 500,000 registrations run by individuals instead of corporations. That’s what sets us apart. We’re still human and we’re listening. Our two biggest teams are customer support and engineering. I think that says a lot about the kind of company we’ve become."

"Our support team has come leaps and bounds in the last two years. We have a lot of new talent on our support staff who bring a wonderful energy and willingness to learn. We’ve introduced chat support, which has been received very well by our customer base. Since we started tracking support metrics we’ve seen huge gains in productivity, customer satisfaction and retention as well as referability," Kellie added.   

DNC Holdings Engineering Team Leader Rob Alfonso

"Rob Alfonso, who heads up our engineering team, is incredibly talented. He and his team continue to impress me with their willingness to tackle any challenge I throw at them. Rob’s motto is “All reasonable requests will be accommodated.” What’s fantastic is he’ll consider unreasonable requests as challenges and I’m often amazed at the solutions his team delivers. In eighteen months Rob’s team has:  

• rewritten the Directnic platform so that we can sell new TLDs and other services; 

• redesigned Directnic’s website;  

• migrated a data center;  

• introduced over 150 new TLDs;  

• built out a full compliance suite for the 2013 RAA;  

• introduced two-factor authentication;  

• launched BitCoin and LiteCoin as payment options;  

• built a second registrar  

"...and that’s just the stuff I can tell you about!," Kellie smiled. "All while fighting fraud, DDoS attacks, hackers, maintaining DomainApps and fielding my incessant questions!"

"I’m excited about the future," Kellie concluded. "Our industry is changing every day and with that change comes new challenges and opportunities. I’m thrilled to be with a company that’s agile enough to pivot quickly and but with the foundation to work toward a longer-term goal. I feel like we’ve accomplished so much in the last 18 months, but there’s still a mountain of things we can do. It’s just a matter of figuring out what will deliver the most value to our customers. I think people will be impressed by what they see coming from us over the coming years."

Like Kellie, Mike had a diverse background before finding his destiny in the domain world. "From the age of about 15 I always had a part time job, to help pay my way through school," he recalled. "I had a paper run, refereed junior soccer matches, worked one night at a Chinese restaurant (I was told at the end of my shift that I wasn’t needed again) and various jobs at the local grocery store (deli, nightfill and dairy). When I first moved to Brisbane, I also took a volunteer position with the Queensland Cancer Council, helping them on their annual Daffodil Day event."

"I then started looking at and applying for jobs in other fields I had an interest in, Internet being one of those. Eventually I was offered a sales position with Roar.com (a Dark Blue Sea company/business), which I accepted. Initially I was still looking for other jobs, as at the time it wasn’t my true passion, I even interviewed for a few other companies. After a month or so everything kind of clicked and I understood the Dark Blue Sea business model and “got” the domain space and here I am 14 years later!," Mike smiled.

The impression Robertson has made over all those years has stretched beyond the domain industry with him being featured or mentioned in mainstream media outlets including the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and News.com.au.  

Mike has a lot of particularly fond memories from his days at Fabulous.com. Asked what some of his favorites he noted these:

• Being promoted  to Senior Business Development Manager and being responsible for managing the bigger domain clients and partners, for example Wrestling.com, Phones.com, Petrol.com, Kids.com, Villas.com and Massage.com to name a few. I also managed  the Google and Verisign relationships.  

• Helping move two portfolios of 200,000+ domains to the Fabulous registrar  

• Assisting in the preparation and running of a successful and much loved domain conference, Traffic Down Under  

• Attending and representing the company at 20+ domain conferences

When asked what it was about the DNC opportunity that prompted him to move half way around the world to take it on Mike said, "Three things:  

• I’ve always wanted to live and work overseas  

• The people; Kellie is someone I’ve known for many years. Not only has she become a friend but she’s someone I have a tremendous amount of respect for; for her achievements and wealth of industry experience and knowledge. I know I can learn a lot from her.  

• The role. I had talked to Kellie earlier in the year and she had mentioned some of the things DNC were working on, one of those being Dotology, a solution aimed at the small/micro-business market; offering them domain, hosting, web builder, email and other auxiliary services to help a business with their online presence.

"Aside from ourselves, there’s a solid team of programmers, coders and designers that make our job; selling and marketing the services so easy. It’s very rare that you see or hear about the people behind the scenes and they rarely get any credit, the DNC team have some incredibly smart and talented people, which I think is our biggest asset." 

Wheels or not, The Peterson/Robertson team is one you can bet will be moving full speed ahead in the months to come!