11/02/2011: 5 Questions with DomainPower GM Paolo DiVincenzo

Paolo DiVincenzo is a smart guy. He and his office mate Cory Lamay are responsible for the math that drives the monetziation of your portfolios on the DomainPower platform. Their office is part math lab, part hypothesis and all business. For those with names on the platform, you'll be happy to know that Paolo and Co. are the first ones in -- and the last ones out.

Why were you hired? In a sense, what are your ambitions for the platform and what drew you to taking on the role of General Manager of DomainPower?

I was hired to take DomainPower to scale. My ambition is to offer customers unrivaled value and to make DomainPower the go-to monetization engine in the domain industry.

Since you arrived a few short months ago, the platform seems to be shifting in a sense (for the better). While the domain management features allow the platform to be as hands on as you'd want as a domainer, it almost seems like you are aggressively trying to create a hands-off monetization engine. Can you explain that a little bit more?

My focus is determined by what customers want in a monetization solution. What customers are telling me they want is for DomainPower to maximize their earnings. The best way for me to do that is to build a robust set of optimization tools and advertiser relationships, and to use those resources to make monetization decisions that benefit customers.

Where do you see the platform in a year?

I see DomainPower offering customers guaranteed payments for their domain traffic. I would like to remove risk from the domain monetization decision.

How about three years?

I see DomainPower becoming the ubiquitous monetization solution – working both directly and behind the scenes in "white label" fashion, as partners in the domain industry recognize our ability to monetize traffic.

You are a big fan of the A/B test – is there ever a point where you feel something is "set in stone" so to speak?

Visitor behavior is a moving target, so the landscape is shifting while you're adapting to it. In other words, the work to make a page convert better never stops. If I've optimized a page to the point where incremental gains from doing so start to dwindle, I'll take a step back, rethink some old assumptions, and bring in a brand new challenger from far left field. Oftentimes that will reset the baseline, and the optimization begins all over again.

Where do you come from? How has your past experience helped steer the ship with DomainPower?

Resume highlights – executive management in Internet ventures big and small since the late 90's, MBA University of Chicago, U. Virginia undergrad. Prior to Domain Holdings, I founded and managed a company that purchased underperforming e-commerce assets and turned them around with operational streamlining and performance-based marketing. If there's a theme to my background, it's fact-based decision making using quantitative analytics. This has come in handy managing DomainPower.