Network Solutions

Now, this was from 05, and so at this point, you are an associate director of on a number of accounts.

So I've got you down here on Disney Direct, Energizer, Craft Comida, Lantis, Lynn Waldock, Museum of Science and Industry, Nasacort AQ, of course, Network Solutions.

I can't believe you worked on anything other than NetSol because I'm sure that took up all your time.

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And then ultimately, to your point, we could report back on it.

And of course, we'd have to reconcile down to the impression, if make goods were needed, things like that.

And, you know, to go from that stage to then just a few short years later, you're running these accounts like Network Solutions that are popping ads across the web, doing, you know, these high impact units.

We're optimizing on the fly to KPIs.

So that also was part of my internet history is that the dot-com bubble was created and a lot of inaccurate valuations of companies ended up bringing down the telecom market almost entirely, which was a shock to us all.

And it was because of that, teleglobe actually went bankrupt as a result as many companies did telecom companies and i did some bankruptcy work while i was there some cleanup and then i had an opportunity to just take the next job which turned out to be network solutions as director of policy And Network Solutions, for those of you who don't know, back in the beginning of Internet time, way back when, there was only one company that sold domain names.

Its name was Network Solutions.

It was the single organization on the planet when the Internet started selling domain names in 1995 for a fee.

And so I ended up in Network Solutions, and I knew nothing about domain names.

But from that point on, I went on the most incredible journey professionally and around the globe, being part of the community that literally helped grow the internet globally and help bring people online through domain names and websites.

So it was really kind of fortuitous.

And you have standards bodies like the IETF out there that are still doing what's important in terms of creating the right standards.

And we're like, oh man, the service for that antivirus stopped running and there was a quick fix for that.

Are the machines being fully patched? They have their domain in GoDaddy or in Network Solutions or in Cloudflare.

Is auto-renew, is that on? The worst thing you would want to get is that all of a sudden that it expired, their domain expires, they reach out to you and say like, well, my emails are not working because DNS is not working.

You know, just having an ongoing rhythm of checking in the background, that's the first thing that I would ask.

Clarence co-founded and led two venture-backed startups to acquisitions by publicly traded companies, which I'm going to tell you guys is no small feat.

Image Cafe was acquired by Network Solutions and Progress League was acquired by Boxx.

Again, it's lightning striking twice.

To be able to sell one company to a publicly traded company is the startup founder's dream, if you will, to go public or sell to public.

And that was also a pivotal moment.

And we launched Image Cafe.

And 11 months later, we were bought for $23 million by Network Solutions.

And it was an overnight success story, 10 years in the making, because I had been grinding as an entrepreneur.

Yeah, well, what's, like, the timing? What kind of clothes do you have with you right now on your trip home? Because I would like for you to fly from – instead of going back to San Francisco, I'd like for you to fly to Reston.

um, into Dulles cause we've got this new client, uh, network solutions and we need people.

We've got a meeting on Tuesday and I was like, Oh shit.

So I guess I might do, is this happening? He's like, yeah, Rashad will make it happen.

Well, what do you guys do? You'll figure it out.

And that was kind of it.

And literally two days later, I think I was on a flight to go to go to Network Solutions and I was in IP before I even knew it.

It's crazy.

Nice.

Zuckerberg registered the domain name to Facebook via Network Solutions.

To the best of your knowledge, had he even begun-

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