Technology

Master of his domain

By Matt McClellan

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Lawrence Ng
chairman and co-founder, Oversee.net

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When Lawrence Ng founded Oversee.net with Fred Hsu nine years ago, he was 21 years old and saw domain names on the Internet as virtual real estate — empty lots at prime locations.

Since then, Ng’s company has purchased more than 800,000 domain names, which he compares to properties in areas with little foot traffic.

“There are tremendous parallels,” Ng says. “If you have a piece of land in a great area and you do not want to develop it, you turn it into a parking lot or storage facility or so forth. But today, we decided to develop it into a full-fledged property.”

When Internet users bypass search engines and type what they want directly into their browser’s address bar, Oversee’s technology takes over. By driving search-based traffic to advertisers, Oversee has grown by leaps and bounds, posting 2007 revenue of $206.7 million — up from $124.6 million in 2006.

Smart Business spoke with Ng about how to make your company’s own domain a place employees want to be and how a foosball table can improve employee retention.

Delegate. The key to being a good entrepreneur is knowing when to delegate and when to hire the right people. The classic entrepreneurial trap is the ‘do everything yourself’ approach. You can’t do it all, and you don’t get any more credit for doing it all yourself.

My feeling has always been that there is a lot of stuff to do, and there is only so much a single person can tackle. Especially in our space, there really are a lot of different things that anyone in our space could be doing — and there is only so much one person can do.

Deciding what to keep and what to delegate — that is a combination between things I enjoy doing more and the things that are critical, for instance, maintaining relationships with some of our largest domain publishers. That is an area where it is critical to the business, and it is also something I enjoy.