Frank Schilling and the great .com bubble burst of 1999 – 2001

Recording history serves the primary function of avoiding the mistakes of the past.

The final part of the last millennium was tremendous, as the Internet knocked down borders and brought us email, ecommerce and euphoria.

Corporations went public having very little to offer as a product or service; IPOs were measured by the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Riding past the Y2k nightmare wasn’t easy, but it was managed successfully.

And then, the unexpected happened.

What wasn’t as easy to predict or control, was the stock market crash that led to the collapse of numerous start-ups, venture capitalist funds and entrepreneurial synergies.

It didn’t happen overnight, but it happened fast: the way a row of dominoes fall onto each other in full surrender.

The domino effect took down companies and their assets were soon liquidated; people lost their jobs while those with a ‘golden parachute’ jumped off before the planes crashed.

At the peak of the financial and corporate collapse, FuckedCompany.com was *the* resource to peruse. Disgruntled employees given the pink slip were breaking the news on its forum, about how they were being part of an unexplained bias by their respective HR departments.

At that time, the movie ‘Office Space‘ was made, a shockingly accurate depiction of cubicle life, that I personally experienced.

Inevitably, part of the collapse took down the domain names – .com, .net, .org – that were in use by the companies which were phased out. Domains were sold for peanuts at Chapter 11 auctions, and many others were left to expire en masse.

To top it off, September 11th, 2001 came, taking down more than just the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.

Entrepreneurship was stifled, but through the ashes rose a new era and a new group of savvy investors quietly planned ahead.

One of them, Frank Schilling, spent countless hours daily testing processes that would soon become his biggest asset in domain investing: perseverance.

When others abandoned hope, Frank carried on, eventually leading to the unquestionable success of today.

If there is someone in the domain industry who witnessed the collapse, destruction – both physical and digital – of an era, that’s probably Frank.

During the great .com bubble burst of the turn of the century, many of today’s ideas were born: the expansion of the domain name space, the definition and advancement of brandable domains, the careful analysis of data related to user navigation and click habits.

This is the primary reason, other than his personal ethos, that I follow Frank Schilling’s activity in the domain name space and industry.

His company, Uniregistry, is built on a solid foundation of knowledge, experience and technocratic braveness. In the future, if it were to go public, it would do so with a full plan and strategy, as the gTLD era rises.