The New World Oil

A number of years ago I arranged to meet the principle of a venture capital firm in their San Francisco offices. Like a king on their throne, they tried to look as intimidating as possible as they positioned themselves opposite me across a huge boardroom table. Behind them was a wall covered in little plaques, representing the different companies that they had invested in. If ever there was a home court advantage, then this was the place.

I said, “All those businesses you‘ve invested in have one thing in common.”

“Don‘t be ridiculous, they are completely different from one another,” came the reply.

I wasn‘t bothered by his response as I continued, “They are all destinations looking for traffic. My company is one of the few that has traffic looking for destinations.”

Needless to say, the meeting finished quite quickly but it was at this point in my career that I first comprehended the true value of Internet traffic. It was like a light bulb lit up in my head. For those of you that don‘t know, I‘m the CEO of ParkLogic and we manage around 13 billion requests to our servers each and every day.

From that day onwards I made it a core mission to secure as much Internet traffic as possible. If you consider what Internet traffic is then you will start to get a glimpse into why I‘m so excited about volume that we effectively control. After you strip out all the bots, then you are left with humans doing real things. What depends on this? Everything!

Think about it for a second. If you want to book a flight from London to New York then what do you do? You go online. If you want to buy a bed for your dog? You go to paw.com. How about if you want to buy a book? Amazon is the first place you would go.

Back in the early nineties, there were hardly any websites and even few people going to what was there. The opposite is true today. The Internet is touching all of us, all of the time.