The Future of Business in the Internet World
Transcription of interview with Warren Adelman on September 5, 2011
Douglas Goldstein, CFPÆ, Financial Planner & Investment Advisor
Warren Adelman is the president and chief operating officer of GoDaddy.com, which is
the worldís largest domain name register.
GoDaddy has about 45 million domain names and recently crossed a new domain name milestone
of 49 million.
Formerly, Warren was an officer in the Israel Defense Forces and he spent several years
to the Israel Embassy in Washington D.C. as the chief of public affairs.
Douglas Goldstein, financial planner & investment advisor, interviewed Adelman on Arutz Sheva
Radio.
Douglas Goldstein: What do you think the financial connection with the internet is going to be
in another 5, 10 or 20 years?
Warren Adelman: We usually overestimate two and underestimate 10 in terms of a pace of
change and how things are affected, but I think that things continue to move more and
more away from the physical and into the internet-enabled world.
In addition, it moves more and more away from the traditional desktop environment to activity,
transpiring through mobile devices or other connected non-desktop types of environment.
From financial perspective, I think youíve already seen many of the changes.
Investment decisions are happening in real time from smart phones.
A lot of the traditional roles in the financial world have been dis-intermediated to some
extent by this.
I think you probably see some acceleration as more of this is available on the mobile
phone.
Just given the pace of change that is being driven by social connectiveness, you may even
see the tie between the financial world and the social world, meaning how your social
network or your social connectivity is impacted as you go on a financial level, whether itís
about investment decisions or budgeting decisions or other decisions you make of a financial
nature.
I think it will be different than what we expected, but weíre definitely seeing the
movement towards so much more happening on handheld devices.
Douglas Goldstein: If everything is moving so much to the internet and handheld devices,
is that going to be at the expense of the personal relationships that people might have
been used to having with their bankers and brokers?
Warren Adelman: I guess the question is how much do you have that relationship with your
banker and your broker?
I think weíve already seen so much change upfront.
I think it goes without saying that we donít spend as much time going in the bank to deposit
or withdraw money.
We do that through ATMs.
I can remember when I was a young man growing up in Canada, having to run to the bank on
a Friday afternoon before it closed at 3 oíclock so that I would have money for the weekend.
Thank goodness, we now have ATMs and youíre not tied to the time of the bankís closing.
I think the fact that so much information is at our fingertips today and so much can
be done in a click of a button really means that the relationship we have with bankers,
brokers and financial advisors is going to change and weíre going to have to find ways
to interact through that new medium.
It may be that you will have some form of network that really is your financial information
network and that your broker or your advisor participates in that way.
Youíll get alerts from them by your phone.
I donít know exactly, but Iím sure it is going to continue to evolve and the financial
sector will do its best to evolve with it by enabling these tools and being participatory
in the tools because they donít want to disappear from the game - and nor am I suggesting that
they should.
People always need expert advice or the advice of others.
The question is how itís delivered.
Iím in a web-hosting, domain name, site security, small business presence environment.
Iím not a financial expert, so Iím quite possibly getting into an area thatís not
my domain expertise.
Douglas Goldstein: Would you give any practical advice for someone starting out who wants
to use the web as the core of his business?
Warren Adelman: From our perspective, the domain name is really 21st century real estate.
Itís a piece of property, so to speak, that you can register and that transcends traditional
world boundaries.
The way we look at it is that you have to go where the eyeballs are, and the eyeballs,
whether itís for entertainment, for communications, for real estate, for finance, or for sales,
are increasingly moving to the internet.
Our business today has about 9.5 million customers, and the majority of them are small businesses.
What they found with us is that for about $140 to $150 a year, you can have your domain
name, your website, your marketing tools, your email, website security, all under one
roof for very low cost.
We always joke that for the price of a small amount of Starbucks Frapuccino, you will be
able to enable your business online.
I think the key is to be able to find the right partners so that you could focus on
whatís really important for small business, which is running the sales, running the marketing,
running the people, dealing with your customers, and letting folks like GoDaddy be your IT
partner on the backend.
Douglas Goldstein: One of the areas that small companies often want to get is a good real
estate, and the dot com suffix at the end of a website always seems to feel like the
serious website, while all the other ones are a little less serious.
Is that true, and do you think thatís true going forward?
Warren Adelman: Dot com is still king, simply because thatís where things in many ways
started.
Whatís amazing is that on a daily basis, I still see great dot com names registered.
There are still so many brand new dot coms to be registered.
I really think itís not specific to that.
We see great work being done with dot orgs where people are building sort of organizations,
nonprofits and social organizations around the dot org, or people are using dot me, which
GoDaddy is involved in to do various social activities.
I think itís more about how you operate your business or how you market your business than
the specific domain name.
Dot com is where it started, and itís still obviously the most successful top level of
domain, and thereís going to be a lot more coming.
Recently, the body that oversees the domain name system approved an eventual roll out
of literally hundreds of new generic top level domains.
At some point in 2013 and beyond, weíll probably see the proliferation of a lot of new domain
names that people will be able to use.
We hope that weíll see a lot of entrepreneurship and innovation.
Iím sure some will succeed and some will fail, but the good news is that if youíre
starting a business, thereís always a good name thatís available.
Douglas Goldstein: As a former officer in the IDF, what practical lessons did you bring
from the army to what youíre doing today?
Warren Adelman: There are probably three things.
One is to lead by example.
When I was in basic training, and then later when I was an officer, I always had people
who were leading by example.
If they were making you do something difficult, they were doing it as well, and Iíve always
tried to carry out with me.
So if our guys here are working late and down in the trenches, I try to be there for support
as well and that leading by example is really something important that came through to me
in the IDF.
The other thing that I learned, and it actually transpired when I was in the IDF, was there
were a question at that time about sprawl within the IDF and the extension of the ranks
with non-critical personnel.
The chief of staff at the time said, ìListen, it either shoots or helps you, or weíre going
to look to make sure itís not part of the IDF because we want to make sure the resources
are going in the right direction.î We always try to think here about, ìHey!
It either shoots or helps you.î Thatís why thereís really only one admin in this whole
company.
This is not a company of administrative assistants, secretaries or anything like that, thereís
one in the company of 3200 because we like to either shoot or help you.
The other thing is it always helps me put things in perspective.
You can have difficult days in any kind of business work environment, but generally speaking
youíre not talking about life and death.
So when things look hard, you really have to step back and try to put it in perspective
about how to prepare for the really hard things that people are doing in the military, whether
itís in the IDF or the U..S Army, and when theyíre in harmís
way.
You got to have perspective on what youíre doing at any given day in your work day.
Douglas Goldstein: Would you suggest a good way for people to keep track of whatís going
on in the company?
Warren Adelman: The best thing is to look in our press section at GoDaddy.com, where
those folks do a pretty good job of updating on whatís happening.
The other thing is to follow us on Twitter at GoDaddy, which
is our Twitter handle, and they produce information pretty regularly.
I myself tweet at the social contract, and from time to time, weíll release information
or tidbits about whatís transpiring at the company or how Iím looking at the things
that are transpiring in the technology industry.
Douglas Goldstein, CFPÆ, is the director of Profile Investment Services and the host
of the Goldstein on Gelt radio show (Monday nights at 7:00 PM on www.israelnationalradio.com.
He is a licensed financial professional both
in the U.S. and Israel.
Securities offered through Portfolio Resources Group, Inc., Member FINRA, SIPC, MSRB, NFA,
SIFMA.
Accounts carried by National Financial Services LLC.
Member NYSE/SIPC, a Fidelity Investments company.
His book Building Wealth in Israel is available in bookstores, on the web, or can be ordered
at: www.profile-financial.com (02) 624-2788 or (03) 524-0942.
Disclaimer: This document is a transcription and/or an educational article.
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