Monetizing People Search: MyLife.com CEO Jeff Tinsley (Part 2)

SM: If you did not have the original idea, how did you wind up as the CEO and the largest shareholder?

JT: I got a little bit lucky. I had met the founders of that business because I was trying to work on putting real estate online. I contacted them because I saw an ad they had about real estate. I met with them and [one of the founders] said that he liked my ideas about the real estate space but that he had another project that he though my ideas would work really well with. It was in the domain name space, and we talked about what they were not doing right with their website. I rebuilt their website because at the time it was just two individuals who also had full-time jobs. They really could not afford to pay what we needed to do the development work, so I did it for a percentage of the business.

That deal was to be renegotiated after a couple of years. A couple of years in, the business had yet to pick up much traction. My mom happened to be a real estate agent, and there were many parallels between the domain name brokerage and the real estate world. I told the other founders that I thought that the business had real potential and that I wanted to focus on it full time. They still had full-time jobs so I ended up taking a larger percentage of the business and dedicating my developers and myself to that full time.

I raised $1 million for the business. A lot of things happened right in a row. We ended up handling a couple of very high profile domain name sales. One was drugs.com, and the auction for that received a lot of press attention. It really snowballed after that. The business was profitable from the beginning and had many revenue streams. The founders eventually left their full-time jobs, and they had very important jobs. One was a director of finance managing $1.3 billion. They were very conservative people. They had to get significant traction before they were comfortable leaving their businesses.

That was an amazing experience. I had watched my parents through their entrepreneurial ventures and never thought that I would have such a successful one so fast.

SM: Your parents were entrepreneurs as well?

JT: Yes, both of my parents were entrepreneurs growing up. I saw them succeed and fail with different businesses. They were always trying to build something. They always talked to me about starting a business and what it took. They always encouraged me to go that route.

SM: I also have an entrepreneur childhood. I think it is a methodology that is ingrained.

JT: I agree. I got to see the success and struggles of it. I saw my parents excited about ideas that worked and scared at times as well.

I was 17 when I started my first company. I was trying to help local construction companies market themselves. I skipped college because I had already started working. I could not continue at the local school. That ended up evolving into the Internet space where I ran into the opportunity at GreatDomains.com. It’s amazing how opportunities arise.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Monetizing People Search: MyLife.com CEO Jeff Tinsley
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