Give Paul Thomas credit for perseverance. Two years ago, when the Internet land grab was in full frenzy, Thomas, the finance director of Gresham Trust, a London-based MBO firm, read that a California company had paid $50 million to Tuvalu to control the tiny Pacific Island nation’s Internet suffix, .tv. Says Thomas, “We’d had a Web site address for ages, but I began looking for a suffix that meant something in terms of what we do.” His choice: .vc, an umbrella term in the U.K. for venture capital and other private equity activities.
Normally, it’s possible to register a domain name over the Internet in a matter of minutes. But .vc proved a little more time-consuming. The suffix had been assigned to St. Vincent and the Grenadines but never activated. The Caribbean nation had hired Canadian Internet services company Tucows to manage its Internet domain, but Tucows had put St. Vincent in its pending file as it set up domains with more lucrative suffixes - among them, .ca (for “Canada”) and .uk. Further delays ensued as Tucows spun off its registry division.
“I was getting a bit irritated,” says Thomas. “I wasn’t quite sure what was going on behind the scenes.” But finally, his firm’s new online address - www.gresham.vc - made its debut last month. Of course, both the Internet and VC have lost their sheen in the intervening years. Still, Thomas says the ordeal was worth it: “It starts a conversation: ,When did you get that? Where did you get it? What a clever idea.’ All those sorts of things.”
