Ray King, a life long technology nut and a prominent Portland entrepreneur is venturing out on his latest startup.
King is the founder, and still a board member for AboutUs. When the site launched it was an editable encyclopedia of websites across the world, somewhat similar to Wikipedia. With a great domain name and a successful entrepreneur at the helm AboutUs was able to raise $5.1 million dollars from backers including Voyager Capital.
Despite putting his best effort forth, and getting funding, King wasn’t able to find the sweet spot for a scalable AboutUs to become a sustainable business. It pivoted several times and now AboutUs is a service that helps businesses evaluate their online marketing strategies.
“We were never able to get the formula right,” King said to OregonLive.com. “I was not able to get it to break out in the way that I had hoped.” King continued, “I was gradually getting into a more conservative mindset,” and added, “and maybe not the right guy to bring it forward.”
King’s latest venture is a new company called Top Level Design. He is hoping to ultimately become a domain registrar for the new top level domains that are waiting for approval. King has applied for .blog, .gay, .photography and .wiki. Based on the success of these top level domains, we will probably see King’s company apply for even more.
“It’s going to change the complexion of the Internet,” he said, “at least the naming complexion of the Internet, quite a bit.”
Source: OregonLive