Andrew Rosener's Amazing Ride From Historic New England to Domain Sales Nirvana

By Ron Jackson

Now that you have a general idea about what Rosener has done, the questions still to be answered are how he did it,  who he is and where he came from. In those decades before he began streaking across the domain aftermarket sky like a meteor, what path did he follow that led him to, of all places, the domain world? After hours of conversation with Andrew for this story, we were able to put together a more complete picture of one of the domain industry's biggest movers and shakers.

Family History

Normally when we tell someone's life story we start from the day they were born. In Andrew's case, the story starts before the United States was even born! "I am a native New Englander," Rosener began. "I'm from Rhode Island and a descendent of the Cole family that is as old as Rhode Island itself. The Coles and extensions of their family all are later generations of Roger Williams, who is the founder of Rhode Island from its beginning as Rhode Island Plantation ih 1636. I'm a 14th generation descendant directly from Roger Williams. The oldest residential building in the state of Rhode Island, built in 1731 (the year before George Washington was born), is the Cole Farm House, which is on the east side of Providence, near Brown University. The original Cole farm was the entire east side of Providence, so I guess I am as native a New Englander as it gets."

The historic Cole Farm House built in 1731
Photo courtesy of the Providence Preservation Society).

Despite that heritage from the maternal side of his family, Rosener hastens to add that he was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Over the generations the Cole land was split up and sold off. "Absolutely everything that that family had was lost in the last three generations and primarily in the last two before me," Andrew said. "The last relative with significant holdings sold off the remaining parcels of land in a fire sale. He sold off all of the antiques, all of the important memorabilia, everything. So we have very little of that heritage left, unfortunately."   

The paternal side or Rosener's family came from German roots with the owner of a company that made tools for clock maker, Benjamin Block, the first to migrate to the U.S. He settled in in New York City where he eventually became a stockbroker and a Board Member at the New York Stock Exchange. Block went on to own racehorses, including Morvich, a thoroughbred that won the 1922 Kentucky Derby dispute being a 50-1 long shot. 

Things took a turn for the worse in 1929 when the stock market crashed though. Rosener noted, "When the market collapsed Block was one of the very few NYSE board members that did not kill themselves. Lucky for me, or I wouldn't be here! But they did lose everything. Andrew's great grandfather married Block's daughter and they sired his grandfather Alfie who died when Andrew was just six months old. "Alfie, who worked for Kaiser Aluminum and had several patents under his name, fought in World War II and led troops that freed the prisoners at Dachau," Rosener noted. "All that knew him said he was the most gentle, sweet, well-mannered man. He would never speak about what he saw during the war and died of a massive heart attack at 60 years old."

Combining College with Commerce

"I did very well in school and I got accepted to the University of Pennsylvania on wait list and wanted to go there but wound up going University of Rhode Island because my parents said, look, we're going to give you your dad's car if you go to the URI. If you want to go to UPenn you can do that, but it's on you and  you're going to be in a whole bunch of debt. So I went to URI and in hindsight I think is fortunate that I did. if I had gone to UPenn, I can say beyond any doubt that I would have ended up as some Wall Street douche, a typical Wall Street banker, overworked, never satisfied, and a relatively boring life. And so I am extremely grateful to to my parents that they put that decision to me and that I chose what most people probably would have said would be the wrong decision. Because I didn't have the opportunities that are inherent to graduating from a school like UPenn, I was, I think, more creative, more thinking outside the box and willing to accept, let's say, non-standard options in my life."

Andrew with his a parents in Lisbon, Portugal where Andrew currently lives.

"My parents were very risk-averse and I wanted to do the opposite -  I was going to take risks, I was going to do whatever it was within my means to do to be successful, whatever that meant. I don't know that I had a very good definition of what that meant but at the time it was just make enough money that financial circumstances weren't going to dictate all of my life's decisions."

Rosener began taking steps in that direction by joining a classmate to start up his first business while still at URI. "I went for a degree in management information systems (MIS), which was sort of a hybrid of a business education and a computer science education," Rosener said. "This is the mid-90s and someone had told me this new MIS degree led to the highest paying job available at the time, so I said, all right, that's what I'm going to do! And then I got that education. And in my senior year, my friend Parker and I started what was Phase II software, building custom, very basic database software for blue collar businesses. We built some successful software and made a little bit of money, good money for our age and peer group, but really, the biggest takeaway was that this was not what I want to do with my life. Funny enough, Parker now has his own company doing this, but at a much larger scale and he's become quite successful with it."

The Phone Call That Changed His Life

So Rosener took the bait, put on a suit and tie, found a briefcase to put his resume in and showed up at Moehrke's Omega Seafood office on the Newport waterfront, right across from the Trinity Church. Andrew described what happened next with relish. "I go into the office and the secretary points his door and says "go in". So, I open the door and there is Peter Moehrke. He's got his feet up on his desk. He's got this Native American stitched shirt on, he's got long hair and a ponytail and he's got this funny beard. He is also literally blowing out a bong hit! I just couldn't even believe my eyes! So he looks at me, sort of looks me up and down, and he says, "If you ever come in my office in a suit again, it'll be the last time you ever come in my office!" And I thought, all right! You know, I could get along with this guy because I'm not fond of pomp and circumstance. I proceeded to spend the day with him and I found out this guy was brilliant. He was a Stanford guy. He was very smart, but he was an old hippie and he was telling the truth - this was an interesting little business!"

While thinking about the impact Moehrke made on his life and business, Rosener's thoughts turned to another mentor from earlier in his life who played a huge role in molding him into the person he is today. "That was my wrestling coach in high school, Wayne Griffin, who's now in the Rhode Island Wrestling Hall of Fame. "He's just an absolutely incredible, salt of the earth human being that has had a tremendous impact on an innumerable number of kids. He pushed us to the absolute limits of our ability and made us want to challenge ourselves. He taught us that pain is temporary, pride is forever. That has stuck with me that, in those moments of real suffering, pain, challenging environments, it's really about your pride. Without that, I there's zero chance I am who I am today. Zero. It was that discipline and belief in oneself that he really created for me. Whether it's a teacher or a guidance counselor or a coach, I think that's probably true for many people who have found a high degree of success in their life."

Sayonara Seafood! How Domains Reeled Rosener In

Armored with a determined mindset and the razor shop sales chops he developed in the seafood industry, Rosener was well prepared for the next chapter of his business life. With the wide range of directions he could have gone in, how, exactly, did domain names rise to the top of his deck of career options?

"That goes back to when I was in college," Rosener said. "I was there just as the consumer internet was emerging, so we were learning about it. I remember taking a very basic class in HTML and thinking you can put up a website and somebody, on the other side of the world can see what you've posted! I just thought, Wow!,  that is a powerful concept. A professor said something about how it starts with a domain name, you register a domain name, then you then build the website, get a hosting account, post it live, and Voila! But it all started with a domain name," Rosener said.

"I'm pretty hyperactive, so every time I have an idea, which is several hundred times a day, I would go get a domain name for that! It was incredible new technology and I wanted to learn how to utilize it. I'm not insinuating that I knew the domains themselves were going to be valuable and, frankly, the ones that I was registering at that time were not valuable, but I got the concept, so I started registering domains every time I had an idea."

names devoted to them and would really like to have some of the ham to eat. He laughed me off saying, forget about it kid, the next 11 containers are all sold. You know, there's a one year waiting list and, by the way, these were like $7,000 to $15,000 a leg! Still, the domain names I mentioned intrigued him and he said "how much do you want"? That was the first time that it ever crossed my mind that these domains had value and that they could be resold."

"I didn't know what to ask for a domain name but I know what I want - one of those hams! So I that's what I asked for and he says done!  That's was too easy, so I quickly added "plus $5,000" and he immediately says done again! Not only that, he ended up sending me all this great wine, the holder for the ham and the kit of carving knives - the whole caboodle! So now I knew undersold those domain names, but it opened up my eyes that, if this guy in this small niche market wants these domains, domains are going to be really valuable in every market on earth. That's when I decided it's time to back up the truck and start filling it up with these things."

"Now, I was still working full-time for the seafood business and after work, spending maybe an hour or two a day trying to think of new domains to register - but I was too late for that. Even so, I wasted a lot of money hand registering a bunch of domain names, eventually accumulating over 1,000 of them. So, one weekend while I was driving to a friend's farm in upstate New York, I get a phone call from GoDaddy. It is Tess Diaz who was an executive accounts manager at the time. She called to tell me she was part of this division created to serve large portfolio holders and it was her job to contact customers who had more than 1,000 domains and find our who they are, what they are doing with their domains and if there was any way she could help them. So me being the curious guy that I am, I just started asking a million questions, keeping her on the phone for four or five hours - a great way to spend the time on my way to the farm!" 

Tess Diaz (right) schooled Andrew (center) on the ins and outs of the domain business when she worked for GoDaddy. Andrew later hired her to work on DomainSherpa. At left is Andrew's right hand man for the past decade, MediaOptions Head of Sales and Marketing Chris Zuiker, who Rosener credits for helping propel the company to heights few could have imagined when the new brokerage launched.

"So I'm just asking away and Tess is telling me all these stories and introducing me to all of the characters who I now know, and some that I call friends, that made up the domain industry at that point and it just blew my mind! I didn't even know that there was a domain industry. I didn't know that there was an aftermarket. I didn't know that there were auctions. I didn't know there was expiries. I didn't know that there was forums. I didn't know that there were blogs. I didn't know any of this!  And so she sent me links to DNJournal.com, DNForum.com and Andrew Allemann's blog (DomainNameWire.com) along with other resources I should check out, including, of course, GoDaddy Expired Auctions."

"That is when I went down the rabbit hole of, wow, look at this gold mine of expired domains! I probably bought another couple thousand domains. It was really only at that point and through working with Tess,  who was very patient  helpful with me, that I began to understand what actually made a domain valuable.  I realized I'd probably thrown $300,000 in the toilet and it was basically time to start all over again but with new standards and new tools. The thing is,  I don't regret that at all. You know, it was an education and I call it tuition to domain college, We've all paid it, but maybe not as much!," Rosener smiled.

"Still, I had essentially run out of money. I knew domain were a good business opportunity, but it was very cash intensive and I needed a way to create sufficient cash flow to support my comeback. So,  in 2007 I started brokering domain names kind of informally. Then in 2008, I quit my job at Omega Seafood and went full time into domain brokering. My wife, Anna, and I moved to Panama at the end of 2008 and spent 10 years there, had two children, and then, five years ago, moved to Portugal."

Andrew and Anna Rosener at their 2005 wedding.

Rosener added, "Most who read this will remember that at the end of 2008 the world seemed to be going to hell in a handbasket. Friends and relatives were losing jobs and you couldn't turn on the news without shedding a tear. It was just a mess and as an inherent optimist I had had enough. I got rid of my television and I've never owned one since. I stopped watching the news because I don't want this pessimism around me. Of course, everyone still thought I was insane for quitting my job in this environment. I was 28 years old and I was making $300,000- $400,000 a year at Omega, which in my peer group, was a lot of money, so, my parents were in tears. How could you possibly give up such a job and go and do something you have no idea if it's going to work?"

"Number one, the crisis made the downside risk seem less to me. Number two, I had gotten married in and my wife had given me a time limit on how long she wanted to live in America. Anna is German but she said I'm willing to do four years in the US and then it's time to go. Plus, it was an asymmetric opportunity and I think that if there is an underlying theme in my life that has led to my success in everything I've done, it can be attributed to the absolute certainty that I will take any asymmetric risk presented to me that has an asymmetric upside versus the downside. If I see a tremendous opportunity and my downside is to some degree limited, I will take that chance every single time purely on the probabilistic math."

"To be fair, there was also a change internally at my company. My mentor and to this day, very close friend, Peter Moehrke, had a son who had just graduated from college. He had come into the business and he was clearly not falling in the footsteps of his father. It also became apparent to me that Peter's ambition would ultimately be that his son would take over this business and that flew in the the face of my ambition, which was that I was going to take over this business or at least become a partner in it. So that was quite a big factor in shifting my perspective from building a lifetime career in that business. There was a fork in the road that became clear to me, probably a year before leaving, so that also helped to lubricate the decision making."

Making Waves With MediaOptions 

"I think that the next most important factor was I have always had a really strong curiosity and interest in the concept of value and price versus value. How do you establish value? Why is something worth what it's worth? Is it just just because people agree on it or are there inherent factors?  That was something glaring to me about domain names. I would speak to all these people, even the really smart ones, and it seemed like the pricing of their domains was totally arbitrary. It was like, I would like to have another beach house and that's going to cost me a million bucks, so the price for this domain is a million bucks. My wife wants a pink Cadillac, and that's going to cost me 60 grand. So this domain is 60 grand! I know it seems so silly, but I'm telling you this firsthand, this isn't made up!," Rosener said with exasperation. 

"That is how people were pricing domains so I wanted to better understand.  What were the actual inherent factors that were driving the value of domains? I spent a lot of time studying DNJournal's sales report and every single domain in it. I would go and analyze who bought it, try to understand why did they buy it, why did it sell for what it sold for, and what I very quickly understood was the names were selling for totally arbitrary prices. There were very few domains that were selling for an objective value. It  was really the buyer setting the price, not the seller. So, I really wanted to figure out a framework because if I'm going to proactively sell domain names, then I need to have a framework to to justify that value, otherwise I might as well be selling vacuum cleaners. When even the people in the industry don't know how to justify the value of a domain, how can I expect the business leaders who are making purchase decisions to understand what the value is? I needed to be able to translate that value into something that they understand. A way to break down what a domain name is, why they exist and what's the purpose of it at a at a fundamental level."

"It really all came down to basically the same way that anybody in the private equity business, venture capital business or M&A business values a company. It's what's the total addressable market? How much of that market can you realistically and probabilistically expect to capture and why, and what will it cost you to capture that portion of the market? That translates into domain names through what's the total adjustable market, how many people are searching for a given keyword phrase or acronym every month, how many people are searching for that in YouTube, how many people are using that keyword acronym phrase in a hashtag on social media. How many trademarks have been registered that are used in commerce. Then, use in culture is the social media aspect and it's how many social media handles and some of the less commercial things that you can search for.  Then what the cost per click is, what is it going to cost you to capture that market share?"

"You can then extrapolate that out using general business best practices, which is, what's the standard business multiple that an M&A guy is going to look at from private equity? He's going to pay 3 to 5 years. So using some of these really basic general business principles, but taking their domain name proxy was what ultimately allowed me to start formulating a really data-driven objective approach to valuation. I think that my early understanding of domain value and my absolute belief that domains are worth that objective value produces a value baseline that you can have an extraordinarily high degree of confidence in. Because I can justify it, I can tell any company on any domain name how this domain name is going to decrease their cost of customer acquisition or visitor acquisition or whatever it is their objective is. We can demonstrate that beyond any doubt," Rosener said, concluding "I think that was the biggest thing that set me apart while everybody else was still sort of licking their finger and putting their finger up in the wind to see which way the wind is blowing." 

Rosnener Buys and Reboots DomainSherpa 

With all of the balls Rosener has in the air, it is easy to forget that MediaOptions has not been his only enterprise. He has also tried his hand at domain development and that is a story with valuable lessons of its own, so we will save that for separate article down the line. He has also been very active in the cryptocurrency/NFT space and again, that merits a separate post of its own. However, Rosener's best known extra-curricular activity, DomainSherpa.com, is so intertwined with him and his passion for the domain industry that it has to be ipart of his personal story. 

"We have this nascent industry of not more than a few hundred real full-time active successful people in this industry that can say I've built a career here, this is what I do with my life. I think we've covered most of those people. They've had a voice on DomainSherpa. They've told their story on DomainSherpa. They've talked about their tips and tricks. They've talked about their approach to the domain market, how they make money in domains.. I think that knowledge base is what allows new people to come into the industry and not have to take the lumps. I think that if we're going to grow as an industry, which is my ambition, you have to grow the pie. The way I'm going to become extremely successful in this business, beyond anything I've done yet, is by growing the pie." 

Andrew added, "I think that domain names in my lifetime, in the next 20 years, hopefully sooner, will be recognized as the commercial real estate of the digital economy. In the last 150 years we were in a physical economy that was governed by proximity, real estate and that idiom of location, location, location, meant everything. And in a world where nothing is proximate and everything is accessible, your domain name is that proximity. So I think domain names are that commercial real estate 2.0. It's not just an analogy. I think it's fundamentally a truth. I think that you will in the future see internet real estate investment trusts, you'll see large funds owning portfolios of domain names that generate income through leases, lending, and all different sorts of stuff that these types of entities do in the commercial real estate market. And that's my hope is to help us get there and then benefit from that level of adoption and the price appreciation that will come with that. That's my hope. And I think DomainSherpa is the way that I can express that and do my part in achieving it."

Domain Sales: Publicize or Privatize? 

"So I think it's important for the domain industry to recognize that we are sitting on incredibly powerful and valuable assets and that we shouldn't be underselling ourselves and that we shouldn't be getting overly excited about a lot of the sales that get published. I see this in the people that hire us to go acquire a domain for them when they say, look, this, guy was excited about a $100,000 sale, he'll take 100 grand, right? Even if these guys were willing to pay a million. Anybody that needs to sell, I don't discourage that at all. But if you don't need to sell, I would encourage you to really think deeply about what your domains are worth, both to you and to the perfect end user, and then take a long-term time horizon as opposed to a short term time horizon and just feel confident." 

Misconceptions & Wise Words

I'm going close with a final question I had that stemmed from an offhand comment Andrew made when I first started talking with him about doing this story. He mentioned that it might clear up some misconceptions people had about him. Having known him since he entered the business, I wasn't sure what he thought those might be, so no better time to find out than now!

"Sometimes the advice I give is callous, sometimes it's cold and direct and I might just fire off an email to somebody that sends me a list of domains and I say, this is crap. There's nothing here of value, try again. Go watch DomainSherpa. I mean that constructively. It is the kind of feedback that I got that helped me to build my business - immediate, tough feedback that allowed me to build the thick skin that is absolutely required if you want to have any degree of success in almost anything. It seems to me that everybody kind of portrays me as being a real tough guy asshole and I don't think that's who I am."

"In any case, I think people should really focus on learning, hard work, and trying to emulate what others are doing - people that they relate to. Not everybody's going to relate to me. I don't consider anybody competition because there are more domains to be sold than there will ever be domain brokers or hours in the day for all of the domain brokers to sell them. Yes, I'm an extraordinarily competitive person, but this is a big market and it's only going to get bigger. There's not enough tools or enough people to fulfill the opportunity that the domain industry has over the coming decade. So, don't waste too much time on forums. Don't waste too much time on Twitter. Don't worry about what other people say. Just ignore it. Ignore the noise. Focus on what has value. Focus on the people who have proven track records, who have demonstrated success - and above all - don't believe that the opportunities are gone or that the only ones having great success in this business started 20, 30 years ago.  That's not true at all and I think that we have yet to see the biggest successes in this industry - we probably don't even know their names yet!