14 years of easyDNS and Four Core Values

easyDNS is 14 years old today! What a ride it’s been.

We started the day on July 31st, 1998 as 3 founders, with no dependents and 0 customers. By the end of the day we had one dependent (co-founder John Schmidt’s son was born during the day), and 0 customers. And by the end of the week we had….0 customers and 1 termsheet with a VC – that was never implemented as the VC later passed on investing in us.

Today we have 16 full-time employees here, a 17th in India, more kids and families than I can count (with a pair of twins on the way in this fall), 67,000 active customers in over 100 countries and about 130,000 domains under management.

While it may be true that we’ve never really hit the “big time” like, say Zynga or Groupon, all things considered, we’re pretty happy with what we’ve accomplished. Especially since we did it without any external funding at all.

And in many ways, we’re just getting started. While we may be “old” in internet years, in terms of “Built To Last” companies, we’re still in the early stages. It took Sam Walton nearly 20 years to open his second store and lately I’ve been listening to a lot of Jason Jennings audiobooks: many of the companies he studies don’t get interesting until around 20 or 30 years in.

So despite the fact that we are in the near terminally boring and unglamorous DNS space (and the almost universally reviled domain registrar space), the fact remains that nothing on the internet happens until a DNS lookup has successfully occurred and we think that our most interesting years are ahead of us.

You may notice as of today we rolled out our new logo and new slogan Power & Freedom. Power and Freedom are the first 2 of what I think are the 4 core values of easyDNS. To expand on this further:

The Four Core Values of easyDNS

Power:

Our job is to power your presence on the internet. It starts with a domain name and DNS but it goes far beyond that. We are endeavouring to eliminate lock-in in all it’s forms: both intentional and inadvertent. We want to eliminate all SPOFs (Single-Points-of-Failure) in our customers’ IT infrastructure, including ourselves. Ultimately we will get things to a point where if the easyDNS offices were hit by an asteroid, our customers wouldn’t notice.

Freedom:

We support freedom of speech online. For us that means dissent, whistle blowing and what we like to call “egregious truth telling” are all self-evident rights. We will adhere to the law of our land with respect to your domains, but we will not throw you under a bus for the sake of expediency.

Openness:

We are not a one-stop-shop, and we never will be. But we will continue to build integrations like easyRoute53 and bridges to as many third-party systems and platforms as possible. And (with our API soon to be released) we will be open for integrations ourselves.

Revolution/Renewal/Rebooting

We believe that there is a growing undercurrent throughout the entire world toward ethical enterprise, “conscious capitalism”, call it what you want. It encapsulates initiatives as diverse as ecological repair, transitioning to clean energy, fair trade and sustainable economics. Such businesses conduct themselves ethically in dealings with customers, consumers and even competitors.

The ultimate democratic expression of this zeitgeist occurs through ordinary people, aggregated into progressive businesses, co-ops and other groupings; ultimately culminating in market forces. We want to be one of those businesses swimming with that tide, not against it.

While I was recently derided by somebody that “being ethical is old, anybody can ‘do ethical'”, my response is that is entirely the point. Everybody should be “doing ethical”.

We aren’t doing it this way to differentiate, we’re doing it this way because it is the right thing to do.

We look forward to serving you, our members and customers for a good many years to come.