Exploring NamesCon Behind the Scenes: Our Adventure with Soren Culminates | Saw.com

Join us on a journey as we dive into the life of Soren von Vashmin.From his noble lineage to his adventures in a lost castle in Northeast Poland. His story takes us from the halls of Frankfurt Airport Authority to his pioneering work in the Seychelles tour operator industry. Along the way, we witness his resilience and ingenuity, which later propelled him through the digital revolution, shaping the web hosting and domain industry.

Our conversation with Soren goes beyond his professional achievements. We explore his strategic moves during the internet boom, his experiences with Confix, and the company's significant transition under Parallels.

The challenges of the pandemic tested every business, and our discussion with Soren reveals the determination required to navigate such turbulent times. We also learn about his charitable foundation, which emerged during the crisis, showcasing the domain industry's community spirit.

Our adventure culminates in a behind-the-scenes look at CloudFest, a prestigious event held at Europa Park. We discuss strategic conference planning, the networking opportunities at NamesCon and MSP Global, and the benefits for small businesses attending these events.

Finally, we gaze into the future, considering the potential for innovation in an industry rich with history yet ripe for growth and diversification. We hope you enjoy the episode! 

About Jeffrey: 

Jeffrey M. Gabriel is the founder of Saw.com, a boutique brokerage that specializes in acquiring, selling, and appraising domains. With over 14 years of experience in the domain industry, Jeffrey has a proven track record of closing multimillion-dollar deals and delivering exceptional value to his clients.

Jeffrey's core competencies include remote team management, online marketing, and strategy. He is passionate about helping businesses and individuals achieve their online goals and dreams. He has been involved in some of the most notable domain sales in history, such as Ai.com, Sex.com, and Poker.org. He is also a Guinness World Record holder and a frequent speaker and writer on domain-related topics.

Follow us on social media:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sawcom/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/saw-com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/sawsells

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Today on the Uncomfortable Podcast, we have
Soren von Feinstein, who is thehead organizer of NamesCon,
cloudfest and MSP Global.
Cloudfest is his biggestconference with over 8,000
attendees.
But myself, namescon has been aconference I have been going to
for at least 10 years.
Soren tells us his story, hisentrepreneurial background, his
dedication to charity and whatit was like being in the

(00:22):
conference business during thepandemic to charity and what it
was like being in the conferencebusiness during the pandemic.
Namescon holds a special placein my heart and I told a friend
that even if I wasn't in thedomain business any longer, I
would probably pop in to seesome old friends and, being an
OG of NamesCon, I decided to askSoren some hard questions about
NamesCon air some gripes, talkabout the speaker lineup and

(00:43):
much more.
If you want to buy tickets toNamesCon, go to NamesConcom, use
the promo code COMFORTZONE orclick on the link in the
description for a 10% discountoff the advertised price and I
will give you a limited editionSawcom t-shirt, the very same
one that I wore in this episode.
Thanks for listening.

(01:04):
Can't wait to see you in Austin.
So today we have Mr Namescon,cloudfest.
Soren von Fashmin, how are youdoing today?

Speaker 2 (01:26):
That was a good one, thanks, and thank you for having
me at your podcast today, jeff.

Speaker 1 (01:32):
Yeah, no problem, and we were talking before we
started recording your last name.
It goes back thousands of years.
Yes, is it a royal last name?
Are you a count?

Speaker 2 (01:43):
Actually my ancestors .
They were knights and they weretouring what is now northeast
Poland, and so the historyreally goes back and it's
basically only my family whocarry that name.
There's a lot of Fajmins, butthere's only our family carrying

(02:06):
the name von Fajmin.
And yeah, the story isbasically there was a castle but
this doesn't exist anymore.
So my grand-grand-grandfatherkind of lost that castle during
the First World War and thecastle itself and got destroyed

(02:28):
during the communist era insoviet union.
So the place is still there.
I was like lucky to to see itlike six or seven years ago when
I was driving to kaliningrad inrussia, so I drove through and
I was able to see the estate,but but yeah, like I said, the
castle unfortunately don't existanymore.

(02:48):
But obviously I have vonFarschmin the domain in all
different TLDs to keep it alive.

Speaker 1 (03:00):
Hearing that you have family members going back as a
knight and they had a castle.
Do you have any artifacts orthings that have been passed
down through the family?
Unfortunately, not Generationto generation.

Speaker 2 (03:13):
No, everything got lost along the way.

Speaker 1 (03:18):
That's wild.
Yeah, I mean, our family camefrom Italy, and when they moved
to the United States, theypretty much had the shoes on
their feet and the clothes ontheir back and left everything
else there.
So there really isn't much fromthe old country in our family
either, except for our culture.
Yeah, and that's really all wehave.

Speaker 2 (03:36):
Yeah, we keep the culture, I even keep the name.
But both of us, we still haveto work.

Speaker 1 (03:42):
Yeah, unfortunately right.
Still have to work.
Yeah, unfortunately right.
So you know, you're definitelyan interesting guy to me because
I mean, we know, some of usknow the history of NamesCon.
That was started by Richard Lauand then it was sold to GoDaddy
and then you kind of appearedon the scene.
But getting up to that pointand getting into the conference
business because you also runtwo other conferences right,

(04:04):
it's RDS and CloudFest how didyou get into this?
Like what's your story to gethere, maybe not going back to
when grandpa was a knight, butlike what got you into this
business?

Speaker 2 (04:18):
Yeah, I basically I stopped going to school quite
early, when I was 16 already, soI don't have a high school
diploma.
But in Europe, especially inGermany, we have a thing called
apprenticeship, which is like agovernment-controlled or it's
basically a framework where inlike two and a half or three

(04:41):
years you get an education in acertain subject, and so it's 50%
education in a certain subject,and so it's 50% work in a
company and 50% university.
And I did that at Fraport, atthe Frankfurt Airport Authority.
So basically my profession isto.
I learned how to manage anairport.
That was what I learned.

(05:03):
I was quite young when Ifinished my apprenticeship, I
was only 18.
And so I was too young to startworking for a large corporation
and I wanted to see the world.
That's why I worked for Fraportin the first place during my
apprenticeship.
So I started my own business,and my own business was a tour

(05:23):
operator.
So Air Seychelles back then hada weekly flight starting in 93
or 94, like every Friday fromFrankfurt to Seychelles, and
there were not enough touroperators at that time to fill
the aircraft.
So that was the sweet spot.

(05:46):
So, yeah, it was a very goodtime, and I concentrated back
then on weddings, um orhoneymoons, as well as different
kind of tv productions or photoproductions and sales.
So that was before the internetera or during the time the
internet became more popular.

(06:06):
So I remember like in the firstdays I was sending faxes back
and forth with my colleagues inthe Seychelles which was quite
expensive, like two or threedollars per fax, and if that was
a mistake, oh yeah, the longdistance.

Speaker 1 (06:19):
Yeah, yeah, the long distance call, yeah, and then it
would take like 10 or 20minutes to fax the documents.
Yeah, oh yeah, exactly exactly.

Speaker 2 (06:28):
So in 94, I got my first email address.
I think in 95, 96, I registeredmy first domains, a lot of
generic domains, but they wentwith network solutions like
super expensive $70, $80 perdomain.
But I also registered basicallythe domain in 98, I think it

(06:52):
was gondwanatourscom, which wasthe name of my business.
So it was one of the first livewebsites, basically where two
operators were presenting theiroffers.
I sold the business in 2000,and this is when, by complete

(07:12):
instant, my story in this webhosting and domain industry got
started.
So I'm 24 years now in thishosting and domain industry.
We had this small control panelin Germany, this small startup
called Confix, completelygrassroots and our first company
back then who used that control.
It's similar to what is nowcPanel and Plesk.

(07:34):
Basically, confix became Pleskor ended up in Plesk, and now
it's this company calledWebprose which owns both control
panels.
And now it's this companycalled Webprose which owns both
control panels.
And yeah, so that was the startof a ride, I would say.
We sold the company in 2002 or2003 to Parallels, which was a

(07:59):
big when you said we, how manypeople were there.
When you said we, how manypeople were there?
We were around back then in 2003, like maybe 100, 150 employees,
Maybe 20 shareholders mostlythe employees back then before

(08:26):
VC and PE.
Money came in later, at laterstages, yeah, and basically my
job was to build out theEuropean and Asian operations.
So in mid 2000s I moved toTokyo and to Singapore, lived
there a couple of years to openthe Parallels offices China,
Tokyo, Singapore, a couple ofother countries and then after
that I worked for VentureCapital as entrepreneur in

(08:48):
residence.
That was really interesting tosee the ecosystem and the

(09:10):
players.
And then shortly thereafter Iwas basically um, working for
cloudfest.
Yeah, so cloudfest exists since20 years.
There was no CEO for 10 years.
For the first 10 years, thecompany CloudFest before
Namescon, before MSP Global in2014, 10 years ago, when I

(09:35):
started, was, I think, less than$2 million in revenue.
So it was like good enough as abusiness to keep it going, but
someone had to put concentrationon it.
You know it was started byThomas Struer, who was very
famous in this web hosting spacewith his companies which he

(09:58):
founded, and he did it as ahobby.
So he needed to make a decisiondecision do we really do this
now or do we stop that?
You know so, and from 2014 tonow, I'm basically working with
cloudfest.
Six years ago we took overnamescon.
We were always owned by somekind of hosting company or cloud

(10:21):
service provider.
In the beginning it was intagina.
It was a very big hostingcompany or cloud service
provider.
In the beginning it wasIntergenia.
It was a very big hostingcompany, holding company in
Germany.
Intergenia got acquired byHostEurope.
Hosteurope got acquired byGoDaddy.
That's how we ended up inGoDaddy for a couple of years
and during the pandemic we nowsay including me a couple of

(10:47):
shareholders were able to buyout the business from GoDaddy
again.
And yeah, here we are, biggerand better than ever and became
really strong back after COVID.

Speaker 1 (10:58):
Got it All right so I got a couple of questions here.
So you were working at RunaCapital and then that company
had investments and it owned apiece of the company that owned
CloudFest right, and your jobwas to go and find no, that is

(11:22):
unrelated.

Speaker 2 (11:23):
That is completely unrelated.

Speaker 1 (11:26):
Runa Capital won't be far.

Speaker 2 (11:28):
But we have a couple of Runa.
Capital has a couple ofinvestments which are quite
famous in our ecosystem.
So maybe you heard about NGINX,the web server it's the most
used web server in the world andMariaDB, the database which is

(11:48):
the successor to MySQL.
Then we had a very goodinvestment, equit, which got
sold for 500 million.
It was with e-commerce widgetswhich you can integrate in any
kind of WordPress or any kind ofwebsite.
It was also integrated with alot of site builders, like, for

(12:09):
example, if you go to Wixcom.
So some of the e-commerce partsare basically based on Ecwid.
And then we had anothersuccessful company in that space
which I helped in the beginningcalled Shellastic, which was
platform as a service, and wesold it to Beto Ozone.
Yeah, so more like deep techrather than, let's say, service

(12:33):
providers.
Like my experience is alwayslike on the vendor side, like I
never really worked on theservice provider side of things
for registrar registry or cloudservice provider.
Like my knowledge is always onthe service provider side of
things for registrar registry orcloud service provider.
Like my knowledge is always onthe vendor side, like how to
sell um to that um, uh, to thataudience, to that ecosystem and

(12:56):
I think that's like really,really helpful for cloudfest and
namescon.
As an organizer, you know tounderstand, like the vendors,
the partners, the sponsors whoput the money in at the end for
that conference, to understandwhat they need and who do they
need to sell to, how do theyaddress that and so on.

Speaker 1 (13:16):
That's great.
I love that.
So my company.
So you.
Let me understand this.
So when you said you've ownedCloudFest and NamesCon for six
years, or you've owned CloudFestfor 10 years and NamesCon for
six, what was it?
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (13:31):
yeah, yeah, the latter.
So CloudFest is this year 20years old.

Speaker 1 (13:36):
I'm working there since 10 years, yeah, but you've
owned it for 10.
Yep.

Speaker 2 (13:40):
Yeah, and we acquired Namescon, I think six years ago
, six or seven, okay, Okay, so,similar to myself, I left
Uniregistry.

Speaker 1 (13:54):
I actually remember when you came in the office in
England to Uniregistry andyou're talking to Frank when he
was buying like all of your, youmust have loved him that year
when he bought like all of thesponsorships and and did the
club and like everything.

(14:14):
You really did it up.
But, um, I remember I launchedmy business in 2019 right in the
fall of 2019 sawcom andbusiness was getting going and
then, um, it was like mid-marchI I remember them canceling the
it's called March Madness, thecollege basketball tournament in
the United States.
They canceled it.
That would only happen if theworld crashed into the sun.

(14:35):
It's that big of a deal.
It's like canceling Carnival orOktoberfest in Germany
Oktoberfest, you know, inGermany, like it's just not
something, that's even adiscussion.
They canceled it.
I was like holy shit, this isn'tgoing to be good and I'd say,
less than a week later, mypipeline of deals and I had

(14:58):
people working for me evaporated.
The business just fell on itsface for a number of months and
then it took some serious hardwork and dedication just to get
Pulse and then get the businessgoing again.
So I can't imagine being in thetrade show business and I'm

(15:20):
sure you owed GoDaddy some moneyfrom purchasing the show from
them, right?
So they probably hadexpectations as to monthly,
quarterly, yearly payments or apercentage of the revenue or
guarantees.
And the world isn't even goingin the same room as each other,
let alone flying across theworld to meet in places.
So what the hell was that likewatching everything you worked

(15:45):
so hard for, kind of fall apartand trying to rethink it.
What?

Speaker 2 (15:49):
was that like for you ?
I mean, it was a really toughtime.
We had Namescon in the lastweek of January in 2020.
I was at it and everyone wasworried.
Yeah, everybody was afraid, yes, and I was worried, and already
a couple of people didn't come,our Chinese friends didn't come

(16:11):
and some others worried aboutthat.
I came back totally sick Uh,that was before the testing, so
I don't know, but I was sick fortwo weeks and, um, yeah, then
we had cloud.

Speaker 1 (16:24):
I usually get sick from names Con.

Speaker 2 (16:27):
What did?

Speaker 1 (16:27):
you say I'm sorry you had CloudFest after that.
I get so sick.

Speaker 2 (16:32):
I think I got it maybe quite early, I think,
before everything got official.
But anyway, we had our bigCloudFest conference in front of
us and I was already feelingthe whole of February, something
is going wrong, something isgoing really, really wrong,

(16:52):
until there was the officialannouncement in mid-March and
CloudFest was, I think, in thethird week of March.
That was the first one we hadto cancel.
That was the first one we hadto cancel.
But you know, we were owned byGoDaddy and we were treating
everything very respectfully.
So all our partners who alreadypaid, they got their money back

(17:18):
.
We canceled everything.
You know.
We found solutions with some ofour vendors, with most of our
vendors, but yeah, I mean wehave to pay a couple of
employees.
We are a rather small companywith 15 full-time employees
right now and also back then.
But I mean, yeah, they need toget paid as well.

(17:39):
So the virtual events didn'tcover that.
I mean I think we did them okay.
We also got some money in fromsponsors, but I mean a virtual
event is nothing like a physicalevent, especially for the team
to organize.

(18:02):
So it was really hard tomotivate and get through this
time, you know.
But also at that time it was agood decision to talk to GoDaddy
.
I was not part of his talksbecause I was actively involved
in the business, so but it was agood time to talk to GoDaddy

(18:24):
because, you know, we neverreally fit into GoDaddy.
We were just passed along, youknow, with a couple of
acquisitions.
So we ended up with GoDaddy.
But you know it was difficultfor GoDaddy as well because,
like small little things, likesmall little things, for example

(18:48):
, if you buy some painkillers,you know for a, for a speaker,
you know for the green room,because he has a headache and he
needs it before going to stage.
Like how do you put this intothe accounting system?
You know it's like it'simpossible, you know.
So, with all the friendship andhow we tried to deal doing
workarounds and things like that, it was slowing us down.
We were always a little bit inthe whole mood.

(19:09):
But on the other side, I mean,if this pandemic thing wouldn't
have happened, we wouldn't beable, you know, to buy out the
company and operate it as anindependent event organizer.

Speaker 1 (19:26):
Yeah, I mean, look, in the end, godaddy is not an
event organizing company, right,and I'm sure they went through
some serious challenges, likeany other company, mobilizing
their workforce home.
During that time and I'm surethey didn't want to be bothered
by you, you know they wereworried about how the hell we're

(19:49):
going to get 10 000 customerservice agents out of the
offices and into their homes sothey can keep working and we can
stay open and somehow wecontinue offering our 24-hour,
around the clock, worldwidecustomer service without any
interruption, right?
I mean that that, to me, wasimpressive on many levels, not
not just at GoDaddy, but everymajor company to move their
service people and workers andeverybody home.

(20:11):
I mean for you, though, likefor me, to get any better
anytime soon.
You start thinking the worst,and so for me, when I left and

(20:37):
started Sawcom, I had othersthat I worked with who had good
paying jobs at Uniregistry andother places that joined us, and
there was no money coming in,and I remember saying to them
like look, nobody's buying rightnow, but there will come a day

(20:57):
when they start buying again.
You just got to give people achance to figure their lives out
and let these businesses figurethemselves out and once they do
, we need to be first in linefor who they send the money to
and we need to work our assesoff.
So when that day comes, we'refirst in line at 100 companies,
not one, and you need to stickwith it.

(21:19):
And it was tough saying that tothem for half of March, all of
April, all of May and then halfof June.
Right, and it's like for youyou do your first virtual
conference and I'm sure you,even though you sat on your ass
organizing it, you were probablytwice as tired after that than
you were and you didn't makemuch money at all and you're

(21:42):
writing checks to do it and thestress like how did you manage
it all, like what did you do,and what were the kind of the
darker hours, because when I wastelling people you got to stick
with it, I didn't really evenbelieve myself when I was saying
this stuff.
You know, it looked fuckingbleak to me on my side.
So what was it for you?

Speaker 2 (22:04):
It was really, really difficult.
Like I also had some personalproblems at that time.
So if I look back at that timeit's a little bit blurred, you
know, but like I have a verystrong survival mode and I think
that is kind of what kicked in.
You know to okay, we have to dosomething, you know.

(22:27):
And also, if you yourselfyou're feeling down, you have to
motivate other people.
You know that as well.
But to actually, to be honest,to motivate other people helps
to motivate myself as well.
And back then what I did is likewith my friends, you know, like
tom stroh and jochenberger, who, who basically started

(22:50):
cloudfest 20 years ago and theyown a couple of hosting
companies now, like contabohosting and a couple of other
ones.
Um, back then, like jochen, hewas always like doing his
grassroot thing, but he wasbuilding schools in India
because his wife is originallyfrom India.
And back then there was thedecision okay, let's make that a

(23:13):
little bit more professionaland let's not build two or three
schools per year, let's do thisas a real foundation.
We set up everything, we hiresome people to manage it and we
build 60 schools per year or 30schools per year.
I think that's more realistic20 schools per year and that

(23:33):
kind of started during thisprocess or during that time, you
know, in in mid 2020.
So I got very involved and Iwould call it a hobby.
You know I'm a little bit of afundraiser but it's very nice to
see, you know.
I mean obviously from aCloudFest audience and ecosystem

(23:55):
.
We have some of the largeplayers you know who donated
over the past.
Good Eddie has two or threeschools, for example, but
there's also a couple of domaininvestors and brokers.
Whenever they make a big deallike a seven-digit deal, I know,
okay, I can expect a checkright now for one of our schools

(24:16):
coming in.
So we have our five, sixdomainers and brokers in our
ecosystem here which aresupporting that as well, and I
mean, I still love doing that.
It's one of my favorite thingsand that helped me to keep sane
during that period.

Speaker 1 (24:34):
Specifically, when we're done with the podcast,
email me the details on that andI'll put it on this episode and
let others know about it.
Yeah, that would kept yoursanity.
I think watching Tiger Kingwith my wife and drinking a lot
of wine kind of kept me heldtogether and I think we all kind
of had some some mental andpersonal issues during that time

(24:57):
.
So you said after the you saidearlier so after COVID was over
and you put together your firstone back in Austin, covid was
over and you put together yourfirst one back in Austin.
Exactly, how did that one goand how has the conference
business been since.

Speaker 2 (25:14):
For you, the good thing was, or still, is that the
marketing budgets at least whatwe experience, you know seem to
be more open and bigger thanbefore COVID.
So I mean, like a lot of thelarge corporations you know,

(25:36):
they're happy to be back, happyto do physical conferences again
, happy to meet people in personand customers and so on.
So I would say, especially in2022, like there was more
budgets available than I canthink of any year before COVID.

(25:58):
So that was really helpful andit came naturally.
I mean, everyone wanted tospend money again on conferences
.
You know, haven't spentanything in two years.
And then what was a real gooddecision is that we added
CloudFest USA, our little outletlet's call, you know, to names

(26:19):
con.
There might be some overlap,but it's maybe less overlap when
you think, you know, but it'sat least complementary from the
subjects we are covering.
But you know, what is importantto understand is like when you
organize a conference, youalways have a bottom cost, you

(26:40):
know so you can't change that,you know.
You know so you can't changethat, you know.
So the economy of scale comesonly if you scale it in number
of people or number ofexhibitors, because the base
cost is always the same, youknow everywhere, and having two
conferences in one venue is abig, big advantage for us, you

(27:09):
know, to put more money into theproduction and the quality of
the event.

Speaker 1 (27:15):
So I didn't know this , I had no idea.
I didn't really even know whatCloudFest was until you combined
it with Namescon and those whoare in the domain business.
Can you explain?
Look at balloons.
Can you explain to everybodywhat cloud fest is in germany,
because it's a massiveconference?
And rob, who works for me, wentthere this year to sell
hostingcom and and he met a lotof great contacts there and and

(27:38):
hopefully we can get it sold toone of them because of going to
that conference and he sent me avideo of you guys doing like
the server toss and there seemedto be a massive party and
there's thousands and thousandsof guests.
I never realized it was thatbig.
So can you tell us a little bitabout that and then we can get
into more of the NamesCon andthat.

(27:59):
So that conference is held inMarch, right, and you've been
doing that at Right.
It's at a theme park in March,right, and you've been doing
that at a theme park in Germany,right?
So I'll let you explain it.

Speaker 2 (28:14):
You can go from there .
Yes, so Think Disneyland.
It's called Europa Park.
It's the largest theme park inEurope.
It's larger actually thanDisneyland Paris.
It's the largest theme park inEurope.
It's larger actually thanDisneyland Paris and we have the
complete theme park.
The theme park is closed topublic, so we have a complete

(28:35):
theme park including allsurrounding hotels in a circle
of 20 miles around the themepark, as well as the Europa Park
hotels themselves, completelyblocked for our audience.
So we have around uh 8 700visitors.
We had in this March attendees,200 exhibitors and um.

(28:58):
The attendees come from morethan 90 countries.
We are quite proud of that.
So you can think about that,the market we address.
Well, our main marketers arethe cloud service providers, the
companies such as DigitalOcean,vultr, godaddy, a2 Hosting,

(29:20):
dreamhost, yonos, hostinger,webcentral, just to name a few,
basically, who are selling email, domain, shared hosting,
dedicated hosting, websitebuilder, those kind of services.
And you can think about it thisway we have basically the

(29:42):
product managers and executivesfrom the market leaders in each
country, you know, from thegodaddies in each of the
countries.
Like a local web from brazil,they would come to to um to
germany, or latin cloud fromargentina or from indonesia.
You know they are the clearmarket leaders in their certain

(30:03):
segment and they come therebasically to meet their
exhibitors, their partners.
So the interesting thing isit's a theme park and we are
doing that now for, I think, 12or 13 years already in Europa
Park and we grow together withthem at that specific conference

(30:24):
, and also for the owner familyit's still like the highlight of
the year because it's the onlytime when there's no kids in the
theme park.
It's only drunken adults allover and I mean you can get very
playful and creative.
So this year we launched or wedid the world championships in
server throwing.

(30:45):
So you basically get a real 19rack server, you know, and then
when there's some videos online,I mean you can, you can watch
it.
It's quite funny.

Speaker 1 (30:55):
So who is the person who will go down in history that
won it?
What's his name or her name?
Do you know?
The world champion serverthrower.

Speaker 2 (31:04):
I have to look it up.

Speaker 1 (31:06):
Oh, no, you forgot.

Speaker 2 (31:08):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I forgot, but I have to look it up
, sorry.

Speaker 1 (31:14):
You should have a company sponsor the belt next
year.
They could win the.
It could be like the GoDaddyserver toss belt.
Right, that would be prettyfunny.
So let me ask you this how doyou even?
You were just sitting therewith your friends and you're
like why don't we rent thisplace for CloudFest next year?

(31:34):
And did you guys like laughabout it?
And you're like you know whatthe fuck?
I'll give them a call and seewhat they say.
And did one of you guys justcall them?
And when you call in, were youlike hi, I'd like to rent the
theme park for a weekend.
And they're like, oh, hold on aminute.

Speaker 2 (31:55):
And they just back to you.

Speaker 1 (31:57):
We've never thought about that before.

Speaker 2 (31:58):
Is that a common thing that they do?
Um, how does that?

Speaker 1 (31:59):
even happen.
I called, I was in your disneyworld, so you know and I called
disney and said I want to rentthe magic kingdom for a weekend.

Speaker 2 (32:08):
Yeah sorry, go ahead we built ourselves a good
reputation in that eventindustry.
I mean, especially in Europe.
It's considered by many, manypeople, you know, the best
business event in the world.
You know from like various.

(32:30):
For example, I was just theother day I was in the airplane
and in SAS Scandinavian Airlinesflying to Stockholm or whatever
, and I was reading the boardmagazine and then I stumbled
about CloudFest.
Like it was an article aboutthe coolest conferences in
Europe, like in ScandinavianAirline magazine, you know, in

(32:50):
the board magazine.
So I mean it's a little bitlike you say, you know we sit
there and we get a crazy ideaand then it's like okay, fuck,
let's make that happen.
You know, like how do, what dowe do to make this happen?
I can give you two or threeexamples.
I mean I'm still super proud ofit In 2015,.
We were the first conferenceCloudFFest who had Edward

(33:13):
Snowden speaking.

Speaker 1 (33:14):
So for me, you know like getting him back.

Speaker 2 (33:17):
You know it's called for uncomfortable podcast.
That was really uncomfortablefor me, to be honest.
Back then I had to fly toBerlin, I met some lawyers, I
had a lot of cash with me, youknow, and it was very weird, you
know, I didn't have any phone,I had to leave my phones in the
hotel and so on.

(33:37):
So that was a real adventure,you know.
But we made it happen.
Or this year in march, we madea session about social
engineering.
I always wanted to do that, youknow, and it's it's a very
interesting field.
So what we did is we had amentalist who was basically

(34:00):
explaining how easily theaudience can be manipulated,
either as a whole, as a crew orwith certain people on stage.
So he did this one fact to showhow easy it is to to get
passwords through socialengineering.
He did this thing where he wasbasically guessing the name of

(34:25):
the best friend of a person whowas standing next to him on
stage.
You know, it's no tricks, it'sjust mindset.
Mindset, you know, andknowledge and so on.
And after the session, you know,knowing how easy we all can be
manipulated.
We had this great panel and oneof our panelists was the head
of cybercrime from theequivalent of the German FBI,

(34:47):
and that is obviously something,you know, which the audience
really loves.
You know, it's not always thebig name, the big speaker, you
know it's, it's the story behindit yeah, I agree totally, and
it doesn't have to be the worldrenowned known person.

Speaker 1 (35:05):
It's just somebody with a really interesting story,
and some of the folks that I'vetalked to on here hearing their
story I find a lot moreintriguing than someone if I got
you know some famous actor,someone if I got you know some
famous actor or something likethat that you know, like who
cares, you know?
When I look at CloudFest,though, and you said you had
8,700 people show up this yearis that a good year

(35:26):
attendance-wise?
Is that the highest you've evergotten for the show, or is it
going down a little bit?
Really, I remember this was thebiggest that you've had, the
biggest highest attended showthat you've had at CloudFest in

(35:47):
Germany this year, right, isthat what you said?

Speaker 2 (35:51):
Yes, it was the biggest one, 8,700 people this
year.
I think last year we werearound 8,000 or so, so it was
slightly more.

Speaker 1 (36:02):
Cool.
I mean, I remember right whenEurope started to open up and we
could come as long as we hadour vaccination cards and you
would have to get your COVIDtest when you landed.
And I remember that I actuallywanted to go to CloudFest
because I'm an investor in linkand I was going to go and go

(36:22):
with Vaughn to the conference atthe yeah, and we were going to
go to the theme park togetherand I wanted to see it and learn
more about hosting and all that.
And I remember thinking tomyself I could land in Germany
and then get stuck in quarantinefor two weeks.

(36:42):
But not only that.
I could land in Germany.
I could get on the train fortwo hours, get to the theme park
and then test positive when Iget there and then get stuck in
the hotel there, maybequarantined in some random ass
place, for two weeks, or getsick on the way home.
And I was like you know what?
It's way too dicey.
I was more worried, not aboutmy own health, just about

(37:05):
getting trapped in a foreigncountry.
So I was like forget it.
But then this year Rob went andhe said it was an awesome show
and he said you guys did a greatjob with it and he said he
wants to go again next year.
So maybe we'll make that happen.
Now let's talk about so youhave this massive conference in
Germany, 8,700 people, but thenyou kind of have a satellite, or

(37:28):
you had a satellite CloudFestconference.
So you had its own CloudFest inthe United States, but it
hasn't grown as quickly or aspopular in the United States,
which I find surprising that itisn't at least a few thousand
people that went to it.
So how many years has thatlittle separate American one
been around for?

Speaker 2 (37:53):
I think it's.
Is it only it's?
This year is only the second orthe third year?
I think it's only the secondyear.
Okay, so it's always just been.

Speaker 1 (38:01):
Cloudfest was always with.
It was always.
Cloudfest in the United Stateswas always with NamesCon right.
Oh, I thought it was its ownseparate one.
But you just kind of addedCloudFest onto it Got it Okay,
correct, and so this year forNamescon and CloudFest.
How many attendees do youanticipate going to that?

Speaker 2 (38:25):
Yes, we are on track to get 1,200 attendees to the
event and it's really more orless 50-50 split between
Namescon and CloudFest Got it.

Speaker 1 (38:42):
And then, like for me , I can see for like a domain
broker or someone that owns likea domain marketplace, maybe
people from the hosting businessaren't really.
I mean, we're sellinghostingcom, and if we had other
hosting names to sell, meetingthose people makes sense, but as
a domain broker, hosting isn'treally that important to us.

(39:04):
But to a registrar, I'm surethere's a lot of overlap right,
and to someone that owns a GTLDor multiple GTLDs, they could
get the hosting companies,because a hosting company a lot
of times also has a registrar,you know.
So the gtld managers would wantto meet with them too, and some
other suppliers are offeringother technologies.
So I can certainly see how itmakes sense.

(39:27):
My question is, though have youconsidered making uh name badges
that are different colors?
Uh, like, if you're from domainfest, it'd be like pink, and if
you're from cloud fest, to beorange?
I find that last year, forexample, I was networking and
meeting people and you'retalking to someone.
They're like, you know, onceyou talk to them for a few

(39:47):
minutes and they're like, oh,I'm in hosting, it's just like,
yeah, like I gotta go, like Ionly have so much time to meet
people.
You know what I mean, you justknow that it's kind of like oil
and water in some cases, and Iheard that feedback from some
other folks that it was kind oftough for them because they
would be spending time with thewrong people.

(40:08):
Have you guys considered that?

Speaker 2 (40:12):
Jeff, I will check that and I will take this
recommendation home.
I will talk to the team aboutthat.
That's a good one, definitely.

Speaker 1 (40:20):
Okay, all right, and then I have some other questions
, though.
Is this the last year it'sgoing to be in Austin, or are
you going to do it again there?

Speaker 2 (40:32):
Justin, are you going to do it again there?
That's a good one, you don'thave to answer if you don't know
yet.
Yeah, I mean, no, I'm very openand transparent we don't know
it yet.
It's difficult to make everyonehappy.
Yes, we get some complaints,but on the other side is, we

(40:54):
clearly don't want to go back tolas vegas because we think the
event is too small.
The uh, the whole ecosystem istoo small.
You know you, you will feellost.
Topicana doesn't exist anymore,anyway, luckily, um, but um, I
mean we will.
But I mean what I can tell youis, after the show, we will take

(41:18):
a new approach, a new lookwhere it's going to be in 2025.
We don't know it at this pointyeah, I think like I really
liked.

Speaker 1 (41:29):
I think, if I had to choose between the two venues,
if they're just hotels next toeach other, as a conference of
venue itself, I think the Tropic, to choose between the two
venues if they're just hotelsnext to each other as a con, a
conference of venue itself, Ithink the Tropicana was pretty
good because there was onlyreally three places where people
would gather and so it alwaysseemed busy.
And being in Las Vegas, theother thing I liked about the
Tropicana, the hotel obviouslywasn't the best, but like if you

(41:53):
forget your badge in your hotelroom at the venetian, that's
about a 45 minute walk back toyour room, you know.
And if you're at the venetianor you're at the win or you're
at mgm, right, these places arefucking massive and so it's like
, or you just want to go up toyour room and send some emails
for 20 minutes.
You know that is an hour and ahalf commitment to walk back 20

(42:17):
minutes of emails and walk backto the show.
That I don't like.
You know, and I think it'sgreat in Austin that you want to
go up to your room right inthat hotel, zoom right up, do
what you got to do, come rightback down.
I think it's good.
I think the thing with Austin isthat I don't like and I know
there's no perfect place, butthe thing that I don't like as

(42:41):
much about Austin is thateveryone seems to gravitate in
that coffee shop and it's packed, and then right kind of out
front of it a bit and then a lotof the people that have the
booths to the right don't getthe traffic as much as they
should and then you have a lotof people up.
You have to walk up the stairsto go to those, to where the

(43:04):
speakers are, and it seems likethere isn't as many people as
they really are where.
When we were in Las Vegas, thebooths were in that one big room
and then the speaking doorswere open and people would
finish Someone's finishedtalking, the people would empty
into where the tables were, thebooths were, and then people
hung out in there, which gave itthe appearance that there was

(43:28):
always a lot of people and itand it kind of even it would
probably was less people than athousand people than you just
said, or 1200 people.
It gave that appearance thatthere was more going on.
Um, I personally think and Iknow nothing about the trade
business and I've actually askedum the people that organize I
can conferences this question.
So don't think I'm picking juston you.

(43:49):
Why not?
Why not pick a place in theUnited States that has the most
direct flights to it from allover the world, like Atlanta or
Washington, dallas or Chicago,and make that the place?
Don't you think?
I'm sure there's like 20% areEuropean or 30% are European

(44:13):
that come to Namescon in theUnited States.
So I mean, to be able to get adirect flight is more important,
necessarily, than the city.
Do you disagree with that?

Speaker 2 (44:28):
No, I don't disagree.
I think you're totally rightand I mean we kind of have a
similar approach and whenlooking in austin, um, I think
it was like only one place worththan las vegas for um, for
incoming flights.
Yes, so a lot of people don'tknow that actually, but it's,

(44:50):
it's in the list.
It's like las vegas is number11 and austin is 12, something
like that.
You know, so, um I was alsosurprised.
Also, I heard the complaintsyeah, it's very difficult to get
to austin.
I said no, it has as manyflights as las vegas, it's
almost you know, but uh, so it'snot true.
Yeah, but I get your argumentand you're right.

(45:11):
It it's like but on the otherside is you need to find a
location you know where you canproduce it, also for the cost.
You know which caters basicallythe number of attendees and the
money coming in from thepartners.
So we were looking into these?

(45:31):
Yeah, we were looking.
I mean Washington, washington,dallas, I think.
Back then I did a conference in2005 for Parallels in Reston.
We have to look.
I mean we will take a newapproach.

Speaker 1 (45:44):
But I got your argument, totally makes sense
yeah, I mean I, and I said thesame to ICANN, and ICANN is
going to have one of theirconferences this year.
I think is in, not Somalia, butit's you know.
There's one in Africa, there'sgoing to be one in Turkey,
there's Rwanda, you know, andthat's a challenge to get to.

(46:10):
So, you know, I ask, and theysay, well, we're one world, one
internet and we're supposed tohave an ICANN at all these
different places.
But it's like, well, one world,one internet, we're supposed to
have ICANN at all these places.
But wouldn't it be a moresuccessful show if it's in a
much more accessible place?
And they said, well, peoplefrom Rwanda would never be able
to attend an ICANN.

(46:30):
If you think that way, and Isaid it would probably be better
if, if someone from rwandawanted to go to the conference,
that you just flew them whereverit was than having a whole
conference there to appease, youknow, to say we did it and
check that box like why wouldn'tyou pick five or ten major
airports around the globe thatmany more people can get a

(46:53):
direct flight to?
Like imagine, like ship hold inamsterdam?
You know, I've done a lot offlights in frankfurt and germany
as a connecting flight manytimes.
London heathrow, I mean, thoseare three major airports that
anyone in europe can get adirect flight to.
Right, uh, you have hong kong,toky, somewhere in Australia,
I'm sure, and then you go LA,chicago, atlanta, dc, you know,

(47:20):
I'm not even saying Tampa, youknow where I live, I'm not even
bringing up Miami, I'm beingquiet.
You know it would be nice, butyou know I don't.
Again, it's not an easy airport.
There's not as many flights,you know.
So I'm just, you know, justsaying that.
Anyways.
Now my other question is I waslooking at your RDS conference.

(47:44):
That you do is in October, sothat's similar to CloudFest.
I think it looks like there'ssome parallel to RDS and
CloudFest.
Is that right?

Speaker 2 (47:52):
Yeah, it's actually MSP.
Msp Global is the name of theconference and MSP stands for
Managed Service Providers.

Speaker 1 (48:02):
I don't know why I called it RDS.
I'm sorry.

Speaker 2 (48:07):
No worries.
Msp Global Managed ServiceProviders the idea came over the
last year.
So, um, you know, if you lookat our original or let's say the
og audience which we have fromcloud service providers are the
cloud, yeah, cloud serviceprovider ecosystem is what was

(48:28):
called web hosting.
So, um, at cloud cloud fest wehave other cloud service
providers.
But over the you know likethere was so much consolidation
because either GoDaddy orNewfold or anyone else bought
everyone, you know.
So if you have consolidation,you know, and if you have a lot
of private equity in the game,you have less and less people.

(48:50):
It's good in the beginning whenprivate equity hurts, hits a
certain industry, but if youcome in the laggard phase, you
know you have less and lesspeople coming from your original
audience because there's lessand less companies.
You know, at the end phase ofconsolidation, but still, our
fortress was growing every yearand we were wondering where do

(49:10):
we get all these new people from?
So so this is two things.
So we got them.
Either these are internal ITdepartments like CTO, cio from
Fortune 1000s, or managedservice providers, and managed
service providers is anon-consolidated industry.
It's kind of.

(49:32):
There is consolidation in the US.
In Europe it's just startingright now.
So UK and Netherlands are theforerunners in the consolidation
of MSPs, but beside of that,it's still extremely fragmented,
and fragmented markets are verygood for conferences because
more people are coming, and thisis why we said, okay, I mean

(49:55):
there's so much potential,because I think only in Germany
there's 30,000 MSPs.
I think in the US it's like200,000 or something like that.
It's like an incredible number.
You know, the market is 10, 15times bigger than our CloudFest
industry and it's at least 100times bigger than the Namescon
industry.

(50:15):
So MSP Global is a good newthing for us, because also there
are a couple of MSP events andconferences but no real good
ones.
So we come here in with ourconcept what we have at
CloudFest and do that with MSPGlobal as a standalone event.

(50:36):
This event is going to happenalso in a theme park nearby
Barcelona, 40 minutes fromBarcelona, in October, second
week of October.

Speaker 1 (50:50):
So because it's at the end of the second week of
October, is that why you doNamesCon towards the end of June
, to kind of spread out thethree shows based on bandwidth
and just timing and everythingDoes that.
Is that really the main reason?
Within the May, june?
Yeah, yeah, well, that makessense.
Sense, um, because I think,like in the united states, I've

(51:15):
said to some folks too, talkingabout the conference in general,
and I mean, you're only, you'rea human is that the end of june
, in the middle of may, untilthe end the middle of june, is
tough, because in the unitedstates that's when all, like the
kids are graduating, highschool school is ending and it's
just a really busy time, uh,during the year.
You know, and that's why Ialways like, I always liked it

(51:37):
when you had the conference injanuary or february, because, um
, well, two reasons is januaryfor me isn't it's a busy month,
but it's not.
It's busy for business month,it's not busy for family month,
and um, and then also what likeabout it, which was important to
me in January, february, is, ifI spoke to a registrar or a

(52:02):
company, not like an individualdomainer but a company, I still
have a chance to get in there,that year's roadmap, like if I
spoke to someone in January, Istill can potentially or
hopefully get into 2024, andmaybe even in the first quarter,
because they haven't decidedwhat they want to do yet.
But by the time I talked tosomebody at the end of June or

(52:24):
beginning of June, then thatguy's going to go on vacation,
possibly for two or three weeks,and then that excitement or the
fire of it is gone.
Or he's like, yeah, let's do it.
Oh, but my developers are gonein July.
You know I'm going on vacationin August and then by the time
they talk about it it's likeOctober, but 20 new things came
up and then you have to havethat.
You know, it's like you're kindof it kind of loses that a

(52:48):
little bit and I think that youknow that's why I like
conferences in January.
But that makes sense for you inthe roadmap.
And I mean, cloudfest is thebread and butter, that's the
biggie.
So you don't want to changethat and people probably have it
marked on their calendars everyyear.
So I'm sure you don't changethe dates of that at all, right.
And then this MSP one is arelatively new conference, right

(53:10):
.
How many years old is.
That is a relatively newconference right.

Speaker 2 (53:14):
How many?

Speaker 1 (53:15):
years old, is that we only started?

Speaker 2 (53:16):
last year.
We had our inaugural event lastyear in November, so this is
only our second edition thisyear.

Speaker 1 (53:24):
Oh wow, that's good.
And what made you think, hell,let's add on another conference?
You're like, I got the recipefor it, so you're like, what the
hell, let's do it.

Speaker 2 (53:36):
Yes, I mean it was a good time.
We came back strong from afterCOVID.
You know, after the pandemic weare all grassroots, you know
there's no investment in thecompany, but we kind of
structured, some deals, you know, with partners, and you know we
were able to get it out, youknow, to make an amazing first

(53:58):
MSP Global we had.
It was immediately two timesbigger or three times bigger
than Namescon, you know, with 60or 80 exhibitors we had 1,500
people.
So it was immediately big, youknow from day one.
However, I mean, NamesCon isvery important for us, you know,

(54:20):
not misunderstanding that, andI like your feedback, what
you're giving regarding themonth of June, it's not an
excuse.
I just want to give somehistory to that.
So, after COVID, when we cameback and then we were able to do
the first physical Namesconevent again, we were looking at
the timetable with the OmniHotel.

(54:42):
You know when can we do that?
Basically, when can this happen?
And, like, early June or end ofMay was the best they had, you
know, because, like once afterpandemic, everyone came back,
all the big event companies whowanted to organize events.
You weren't able to bookanything, or to astronomy prices

(55:03):
, you know.
And so this is how it happened,but it changed from January to
June.
But I'm completely on your side, you know.
I think the event would bebetter in the last week of
January again.

Speaker 1 (55:20):
Yeah, and then?
So let me ask you this questionas a business owner.
Right, I own a small business.
You're similar sizes as mineand when I'm looking at
obviously, attending NamesCon,I've always felt like I've
gotten a great value from it.
I've never left saying I had abad NamesCon.
I've always left happy.

(55:41):
I've always learned somethingnew, I've met new people, I have
new opportunities to make moneyAlways.
And for those who don't know me,I met Soren when I was at
Uniregistry and Frank's strategyand his attitude was very hard
and heavy on advertising and sohe paid Soren.

(56:04):
I have no idea, I wasn't part ofthese conversations, but he
paid Soren a lot of money andlike to the point that the
Uniregistry logo was like withlights on the walls in Vegas and
they had like big letters thatsaid Uniregistry and it was just
Uniregistry, everything, whichwas great and you guys did a
great job with it.
But as a small business ownerlike myself, where I'm trying to

(56:27):
determine should I just comethis year, should I bring
somebody?
I just come this year, should Ibring somebody?
So if I bring somebody, youknow I get to pay for the ticket
, uh, flight, food, hotel.
It's a few thousand dollarinvestment to bring somebody to
the show, then myself, again afew thousand dollar investment,
so let's say it's five, sixgrand all in.

(56:49):
When it's done, um do and Idebate this do you think it
makes sense and the kind ofreturn that I would get as a
small business owner if I wereto pay to have sawcom on the
wall when I walk in and I see mylogo there?

(57:09):
Do you think that that's goinglike the extra $2,000 or $5,000
or whatever it is Like?
How would I get that money back?
What do you think that thatwould do for me as a small
business owner and why should Ibuy?

Speaker 2 (57:25):
Okay, I mean, first of all, when I compare the
audience of CloudFest toNamescon, at CloudFest we have
only corporates, you know,mostly large corporations and
basically the employees.
So basically I mean, everyoneloves CloudFest, you know, but

(57:50):
the employee gets paid by hiscompany to go there.
The difference is at Namescon,you know, but it's um, the
employee get paid by his companyto go there.
The difference is that namescon, you know, it's guys like you
who have a small team with twoor three people and you need to
decide or think about beside ofme who else should go from my
team.
It's a tough decision becauseyou're a small business which

(58:10):
you fund yourself, but for us,as organizers, we see that, you
know.
I would like just to make thatclear.
We see that that the effort forsomeone coming to namescon is
much, much higher than coming tocloudfest, because we talk
about personal money.
But why you should do that isthe following where do you live
right now?
Temper, you said how manydomainers do you have in Tampa

(58:34):
area beside of Ron Jackson?

Speaker 1 (58:40):
I would say I do business with three right now in
Tampa, not including RonJackson.
There's three in the area.

Speaker 2 (58:49):
So you can meet them for lunch, you can meet them for
coffee, you know, if you like,but it's a very limited group
and you all work from home orfrom WeWork or whatever.
You know WeWork doesn't existanymore, but you're working from
home, most of you guys areworking from home and Namescon
it costs you money, but it's theonly time of the year, beside

(59:13):
of maybe an ICANN meeting whichis reachable from where you live
, that you meet your peers.
And you know, I think,especially for someone working
from home and being basicallyalone more or less through the
whole business here, you knowthis is one of a few
possibilities where you can meetyour peers.

(59:36):
And this only works for thephysical conference.
You know, when people ask mewhy don't you publish any
recordings of the sessions, youknow thereafter I say no, we
don't do this.
We want people to comephysically to the events.
You know they will be morehappy, they can socialize you
know, will be more happy they.
They can, uh, socialize.
You know, they learn, it'seducational.

(59:57):
They can go to the sessions ifthey want, but definitely they
come home with business.

Speaker 1 (01:00:02):
So I, I encourage everyone you know to make this
decision and come I agree and II do say it's a good show, like
I I said before.
But what I was I guess I shouldhave reworded it was for a
smaller business.
Like how can I realize biggerreturns from the show if I were
to pay you for a sponsorship?
Like, how does that work out?

(01:00:22):
And how do your current peoplepaying for sponsorships like
that I see?
Like I guess what I'm trying tosay is I see the same companies
sponsoring NamesCon every year,right, a similar one, some drop
out, but usually there's a corenumber of companies that are
always advertising, whetherthey're large, and there's some
that are smaller, like a domainbroker or some of these bigger
places or whatever, but theymust be getting a good return.

(01:00:45):
You know what kind of return orwhat is the value that they are
getting from that sponsorship.
And me, as a small businessowner, if I was interested in
paying for that that's what'sgoing through my mind, not if
I'm going to go or not.
If I was going to pay thatlittle extra to get more
exposure or booth or something,what would it be?

Speaker 2 (01:01:06):
Yeah, yeah.
I think for a registrar,registry or marketplace, it
makes definitely 100% sense toexhibit.
Okay, registrar and domainersare my focus.
Registry let's take IdentityDigital as an example.

(01:01:29):
You know they have twointerests.
They have the interest to talkto the registrars which are on
site and educate the domainersabout the premium domains in
their portfolio and in additionto that, they sell to the
CloudFest USA audience.
So that is maybe the bestexample right now, like a

(01:01:50):
company like that.
But if your marketplaceregistry registrar makes sense
to exhibit, if you are a broker,to be honest, I'm not sure if
it makes sense unless you have acertain mission.
You know that you, um, that youhave, I don't know, want to

(01:02:10):
hire people or I don't know you.
You need to have a certainmission.
But other than that, I thinkfor domain brokers, I'd rather
see you as the attendees, not asthe exhibitors.

Speaker 1 (01:02:22):
Got it.
Yeah, I mean, see, what I thinkis is that if I was going to
give you like I'm just I don'tknow what the prices are I was
going to give you 3000 bucks toget a booth in my logo on the
website and on on the piece ofpapers and whatever.
I could give you 3000 bucks toget a booth in my logo on the
website and on on the piece ofpapers and whatever I could give
you that.
Or I could pay that three grandand have another person who
works for me come and we can go,shake hands and kiss babies you

(01:02:43):
know twice as many and I wouldbe able, with a thousand people,
be able to cover that place 10times in the four or five days
that I'm here with that person.
And I think that that in and ofitself would be more valuable
to me.
But maybe I'm not seeing it,maybe that's why I was.
I was asking, but yeah, I thinkthat answer makes makes perfect

(01:03:04):
sense.
So here's one more screwball.

Speaker 2 (01:03:07):
I'm going to throw at you.
Go ahead.
Yeah, one thing you know wehave.
Do you know Jack from Chinadncom?
Yeah, absolutely so.
He just sent me an email fiveminutes before we started the
recording and he will try out abooth this year, so, but I think
it's one of the first times youknow that we have specifically

(01:03:29):
a domain broker.

Speaker 1 (01:03:30):
You know getting a booth, yeah he must get out of
my head.
You know he's thinking exactlywhat I'm thinking and it, you
know it doesn't.
It doesn't hurt to try, youknow, especially if you do
something different thaneverybody else.
So, going back before, you kindof came on the scene and I

(01:03:51):
don't remember which conferenceswere which and milling it all
together, but from conferencesthat I remember it all together,
but from conferences that Iremember we've had Don King, the
boxing promoter, speak.
We've had Biz from Twitter.
We've had Kim Kardashian.
You mentioned it before that youhad the cybersecurity

(01:04:12):
professional.
We were actually at Uniregistry.
We didn't end up hiring her,but we were this close to paying
her.
We were going to bring in thiswoman who is a professional
negotiator.
She's negotiated like hostagesituations with terrorists, the
PLO, just teaching the basics ofyou know negotiating, whether

(01:04:32):
it's in person, email, phone.
You talked about the mastermanipulator.
You know, when I look at andincluding myself, because I'm on
a panel this year, so thisisn't to knock anybody in any
way I just see a lot of the samefaces this year speaking than I
have in previous years and Ithink that a lot of the subjects

(01:04:55):
are going to be similar.
So would you consider and Iknow like an Edward Snowden
would be really expensive.
But would you consider gettingsomebody of an interesting, you
know background?
That is different than what thenormal thing is, and I know
like Andrew Miller is a greatnegotiator.
You know he's going to talkabout his massive sale and he

(01:05:18):
deserves to have a panel andpeople want to hear him talk and
that's totally fine.
But I'd also like to hear orhave somebody guess my password
to my email in front of the well, maybe not my email, but my
password to something or dosomething.
That is something reallyinteresting to me and us as a

(01:05:39):
community, and there's a handfulof things I think would be.
Cyber security is one like youalready mentioned.
You know negotiating, I thinkyou know, especially if there's
like a written section of that,and I don't think like a really
good negotiator would be superexpensive.
You know, um, maybe someone whoworks at chat, gpt, but it's
not not Elon Musk, maybe it'sjust somebody who knows a lot

(01:06:01):
about AI.
I think everyone who's going tothat show is interested in that
or whatever.
What are your thoughts abouthaving like more of a speaker
like that?
I think it would attract moreattendees because it seems to me
that I know a lot more peoplethat go to the show to network
and they say I don't even go tothe sessions, you know.

(01:06:22):
And so what do you think aboutthat?

Speaker 2 (01:06:27):
If you look at the demographics of Namescon, it's
kind of 50-50.
It's 50% newcomers who come forthe first time and 50%
repeating for the first time and50% repeating.
Then a question to you, jeff,something I asked once in a
while like how many people doyou think are in the world who

(01:06:53):
do domaining full-time, eitheras a broker or a domainer, as
their main?

Speaker 1 (01:06:59):
core business, yeah, their bread and butter their
livelihood.
Who can live from it?
I would say it is less than5000.
Okay, maybe 8000 peopleprobably what I would say that
can live off of it.

(01:07:20):
Yeah, I'd probably go with thatIf you told me how many brokers
and quotes that GoDaddy has.
That would help me with mynumber, but yeah, Okay.

Speaker 2 (01:07:34):
No but I was actually thinking it's less people, so
my estimation was a little less.
But in any way, you know whatI'm trying to say is, when you
look at the demographics, how doyou make a program from the
agenda which is catering bothaudiences the new kids on the
block, the new ones and who aredoing that as a side hustle,

(01:07:56):
which is the majority of peopleof attendees we have, and then
the ones who are doing it as afull-time living in one way or
another.
If you look at the ones who aredoing it full-time, you know we
have we have a lot of orgs like, I think, more than in the last
years, we have some of them whohaven't came to conferences

(01:08:19):
since 2019, before COVID, likeDrew Rosner, for example, after
six years, now five years.
So I think, from thatperspective, it is.
If you look at the program whichwe're going to reveal next week
, the agenda there's a lot ofcontent, obviously for this 80%,
for these newcomers you knowwho the 101s, you know they,

(01:08:44):
they need to learn and they arehappy to see you on a panel or
other people like drayden andamar, people you had in your
podcast before.
Um, yeah, so that is one thing.
The other thing is how to getthe superstars without paying
too much money on them, you know, and kind of make it part of

(01:09:06):
your calculation.
That's the difficult part.
So for this year, since we putdevelopment of domains a little
bit higher on the list on thepriority, we have Matt
Mullenbeck from uh, the inventorof WordPress, who actually
lives in Austin.

Speaker 1 (01:09:26):
So that's a very good , very impressive when it comes
to developing it.

Speaker 2 (01:09:30):
Yeah, then, one thing which we are announcing, um uh,
also this week is Vint Cerf,who is considered the godfather
of the internet.
He's the one who invented theTCP, ip protocol.
So, along with Steve Crocker,you know, who made the ARPANET

(01:09:51):
transition to the internet.
He's considered the main personin inventing the internet, in
inventing the internet.
So, and then we have one moreguest on Friday the inventor of
DNS, paul Mokapetris.
So this year it's 40 years DNSand I think you know, like these

(01:10:19):
internet heroes, you know theones who wrote protocols or
invented things which we use asa nowadays space is something of
what we learned as organizersis very important for our
attendees.
So our attendees love it morethan any kind of celebrities we
put on stage when we do surveysafter the show, when we do
surveys after the show.
So, paul Mokapetris, you know40 years DNS.

(01:10:42):
He's the guy why we all have ajob or why we can sell domains.
You know this will be aninteresting conversation.
It's a celebrity in our field,but it's not a celebrity from TV
or social media or whatever.

Speaker 1 (01:10:57):
And I prefer that, and I didn't realize you're
having this.
These are the exact kind ofpeople that I'm going to go and
listen to talk, right, and I canlearn something from them, you
know, and I find them extremelyinteresting, you know, and
that's good and I'm happy thatyou're doing that, because it
just seemed to me in the lastcouple of years I think it was
it just seemed like a lot of thesame stuff.

(01:11:18):
But it's true, if you have alot of rookies there, you have
to have a lot of the same stuff,you know, and it makes sense,
and I actually also said tosomebody else that it doesn't
seem like when I got in thebusiness 14 years ago, a lot of
the domain investors I met whichhave grown into bigger, more

(01:11:42):
successful domain investors likeone being Daniel Nogari, you
know, and he owns xyz now and hehas a massive domain portfolio
you know, he was probably in hismid 20s, you know.
And then Yanni, who's one ofthe other people on the show,
again early 20s, you know.
And then Yanni, who's one ofthe other people on the show
again, early 20s Merlin, early20s.

(01:12:03):
There were a lot of these.
A lot of these domain investorswere in their early 20s, mid
20s and and they're stillhanging around, they're still
part of the industry.
But I don't see many young facesin the domain business these
days and I see a lot more peoplelike me with white hair.
You're a little whiter in thewhiskers there my friend too,

(01:12:26):
from the last time I saw you andit seems like the average age
is creeping at NamesCon and Ibelieve the week before or a few
days before is the cryptoconference in Austin as well,
and I find it interesting.
I'd find it interesting if yougot a lot of people from the

(01:12:46):
crypto conference to come toyour conference for a couple of
days, if they want to do both.
Like I know, grant Shellhammeris going to go to the crypto
conference and he's going to goto your show, but I'm wondering
if that's going to help attractpeople, like the Consumer
Electronic Show and whatever itwas.
In Vegas there was the AffiliateSummit.
It used to be that same time,but anyways, getting back to it,

(01:13:09):
it just seems like the Namesconcrew.
We're getting old and I don'tsee a lot of new young blood in
it.
So the rookies that are coming,do you think they're there in
their 20s?

Speaker 2 (01:13:25):
Let me answer this question a little bit
differently.
The inventor of DNS, paulMokapetras.
He became a good friend overthe last years, so he invented
that 40 years ago and he'ssaying that the changes to
original code that he wrote areso marginal you know that it's
more or less it can beconsidered as something which

(01:13:48):
was written 40 years ago,nothing changed.
So what can you expect from anindustry where the standard you
know which we are using is notevolving, um where basically the
scheme how domains are sold isalso 25 years old, you know,

(01:14:09):
from registry to registrar, tomaybe a reseller in between to
end customer?
so you have all these schemeswhich hasn't changed since
decades?
How do you expect coming youngpeople into this legacy world,
you know, which is for them,very boring, like what?
What is basically the latestcool stuff we heard in the

(01:14:30):
domain industry?
We talk a little bit about web3since three or four years.
We have now fractionalownership, but beside of that,
nothing really happened.
We're still doing the samething like 25 years ago.
That is my personal opinion onthat, but uh, it's.
It's difficult, you know, um toto bring crazy new innovation

(01:14:55):
stuff to something which is solegacy.
You know, that is obviouslysomething which we have to deal
with.
As an organizer, we try to givenew impulses, but we can't
change the way the industry isset up.
We can just give a neutralplatform to discuss it and

(01:15:16):
hopefully there will be somechanges at one point.
But yeah, that's how I see it.

Speaker 1 (01:15:25):
I think my opinion on that, though, is I feel like
even if I was 20 years younger,looking at domains, and what the
best part about domains is isthat if you own a thousand
domains, each of those is, inessence, a different company

(01:15:46):
about a different subject, andyou get to learn something new.
And talking to buyers, talkingto sellers, researching these
names doesn't get old, and Ithink, like you're a pretty
resourceful guy, you're sellingtours to Mauritius when you were
young, so you pick toursbecause you saw an opportunity.

(01:16:06):
If I can go into a GoDaddyauction and I can invest in some
inventory for you know,hundreds of dollars and turn
that into thousands, I can'timagine that any resourceful
young guy wouldn't want to givethat a shot and be able to do it
on their own time Right, and beable to do other things with

(01:16:29):
those domains while you'rewaiting to sell them, and it
allows you to do differentthings.
Now, comparing myself and whatI do on a daily basis and who I
get to talk to as a domainbroker and the circles of people
that this business has openedme up to, I can see trends in

(01:16:51):
technology.
I can learn about new businessideas that are coming out.
I learn about new service ideasthat are coming out.
I learned about new serviceideas.
I was telling my friends andexplaining what ChatGPT was to
them ages ago and half of themstill don't even know what it is
.
These are pretty savvy people.
It's allowed me to stay on theforefront.

(01:17:14):
I got into crypto very earlybut I wouldn't have known that
if I wasn't in this business.
And then usually those that arein the domain business have
their fingers in new things.
You know what I mean.
It just seems like it's.
It just keeps going, and sothat that's why I'm saying is
like.
It seems like I guess I wouldcall domaining is almost like a

(01:17:36):
gateway drug.
You know, everyone saysmarijuana is a gateway drug and
it opens you up to, you know,get more drugs and do different
things.
Well, I think with domaining itdoes.
You know, wholeheartedly, and Ifind it to be really
interesting.
But the person who used to doSEO for me told me it's a very

(01:17:56):
boring subject and you'reprobably the only one who really
likes it, you, um.
So you know, I guess it's allin all in what you like.
Some people sell watches, youknow.
Other sell domains, um, otherpeople rake leaves, you know,
but anyways.

Speaker 2 (01:18:12):
So do you have anything to uh anything else to
tell us about Go ahead, I justwanted to say I like the word
gateway truck.
I experienced it.
Similar, actually, I learned alot from domainers, like things
outside of the domain industry.
Yeah, definitely, I agree withyou with this here.

(01:18:35):
And I would like to add onemore point regarding the new
kids on the plot, or the youngerplot to get to the conference.
So this year I'm working very,very closely with Dennis from
Domain Smoke on the agenda forthis year's Namescon, and Dennis

(01:18:55):
is one of the younger persons,I think, in this domain industry
for sure, and also one of theones who just only entered a
couple of years ago but is very,very active with his newsletter
of expired domain auctions and,I think, a very well reputation

(01:19:17):
inside our small ecosystem andindustry.
And like specifically withdennis, like on each panel we
set up currently, we askourselves how we can we bring
more diversity to this, to thispanel.
So, first of all, diversity inmatter of male and female, but
also diversity in matter of oh,I saw Jeff already on 20 panels

(01:19:42):
before versus bringing a new oneon yeah.
So this is something we reallytry, you know, and we try to get
the best out of it, but youknow, at the end we can only
give a neutral platform to makethings better inside the
industry.
You know we can't changeboringness, you know, of, let's

(01:20:06):
say, technology stack, you know,or how things are sold because
it's done 25 years already.
Like this, we can give impulsesand we can give a neutral
platform, you know.
But using it as a gateway trackto learn, I also totally agree
with you.
I mean, this crowd we havethere is amazing and after this

(01:20:29):
conference I have so many ideasin my head.
I want to start like threecompanies right away.
You know, until you come down alittle bit, but it's true, it's
a lot of intelligent people wehave in our small industry and
each one.
You know, in order to be asuccessful broker or domain

(01:20:50):
investor, you need to lookbeyond and you can clearly see
that and that's also one moreargument to come.
You know you meet peers whichare looking beyond.
They're not in their littlecave, in their little cave, in
their whatever job they aredoing, which might be boring.

(01:21:11):
So it's amazing people and youlearn from them a lot.
That's what I really like aboutthat.
I learn more at Namescom thanat CloudFest.

Speaker 1 (01:21:23):
Well, you're too busy on the rides, you know.
But I think the thing is, Ithink what I also love about the
domain industry as well, is youtalk about diversity.
I personally don't care whenpeople talk about diversity.
I personally don't care if whenpeople talk about diversity.
The best thing that everhappened to me, or one of the

(01:21:44):
best things that ever happenedto me, was living abroad, in the
Cayman Islands, and when welive there and building a sales
team there.
There was one point where we hadsomebody from Africa, we had
someone from China, we hadpeople from the Cayman Islands,
we had people from England, wehad people from, obviously, the
United States, somebody fromMexico, we had somebody from New

(01:22:12):
Zealand, somebody fromAustralia, we had all these
Jamaica people from Jamaica aswell.
I mean India.
We had someone from Goa, indiathat worked for us, and then
another part of India and to me,in the domain industry, it's
like there's a lot of Germansbut there's also others from
China and wherever else, andthat's the diversity I like, and

(01:22:35):
hearing their points of viewand their culture and their
stories and the way they thinkis always a little different,
you know, than us as Americansthink.
You know, and to me.
You're right.
I mean, there's diversity ofthe individuals, but the
diversity of culture and the waythat they are is really
important.
And before I entered thisindustry I never did business

(01:22:55):
with a German, you know, I neverdid business with somebody from
South Africa and I love it andI think that's great.
And I think someday when Iretire, I'll probably do like a
trip around the world and govisit all my friends from the
domain industry, because I knowI'll have a place to sleep in
pretty much almost every countryaround, at least a flight away
from each other.
I can do a puddle hop to eachplace.

(01:23:16):
So, you know, and I thinkthat's pretty cool too.
But yeah, it's been good.
And do you have anything elsethat you want to tell our
listeners before we wrap this up, soren?

Speaker 2 (01:23:36):
Come to Namescon June 5th to 8th.

Speaker 1 (01:23:40):
June 5th to 8th in Austin, Texas.
All right, Well Soren, how canpeople get a hold of you if they
have any questions about theshow?
How would they get a hold ofyou?

Speaker 2 (01:23:54):
Yeah, sure, please feel free to drop me an email at
Soren, which is S-O-E-R-E-N atnamesconcom.
Soren, s-o-e-r-e-n atnamesconcom.
All right, and if you send me,an email.
I will give you a yeah, okay,thank you.

(01:24:19):
Thanks a lot, jeff.
Sorry, I had some problems thewhole time because your audio is
like three or four secondsdelayed so I was never sure when
you were finished with yoursentence or not.

Speaker 1 (01:24:32):
So I hope it's working out it'll be fine.
It's okay, it's not a big deal,um, but what we can do is, if
you want, I can, um, you'regoing to do a promo code or
something like that, um, or ifyou email them, I can put in the
description.
It doesn't matter to me.
I mean, hopefully you can getsome tickets out of it or not.
I can just put the link towhere you can buy tickets in the

(01:24:54):
description.
Works too.
So when we're off, when we'rewhen we're done, send me an
email with the school info andthen any info for NamesCon that
I can put in there CloudFest, sopeople can sign up and
hopefully you can make somemoney.

Speaker 2 (01:25:13):
Thanks a lot.
It would be great to sell sometickets, but it's looking not so
bad right now.
It will be full.

Speaker 1 (01:25:20):
Good, awesome.
Oh man, what time is it?
By you, it looks bright out6.30.
6.30 pm.
2 in the afternoon Nice.

Speaker 2 (01:25:37):
It's Barcelona.
We never have bad weather, sosame as you there you go.

Speaker 1 (01:25:44):
All right.
Well, thank you, soren.
I hope you have a good day andI can't wait to see you in Texas
.
All right,