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The Dot-Com Don: Meet the Domain Prospector Turning Stray URLs Into Real Businesses
Most entrepreneurs acquire domains to fit their businesses. Peter Askew does the opposite.
Inside the Switchyards, a buzzy Atlanta co-working space, local tech founders like to plaster the elevator with stickers for their companies.
There’s one for Soylent, the Space-Age nutri-gunk whose founder went to Georgia Tech; there’s one for MailChimp, the email behemoth that does almost half a billion dollars in annual business.
Then there’s VidaliaOnions.com. For between $35 and $95 a pop, the site will mail you box of Vidalia onions, a prized varietal known for its sweetness and grown exclusively in 20 counties in south Georgia. Shipping and handling are included, and every order is processed by the site’s founder, a twangy, rhapsodic guy named Peter Askew.
Askew loves Vidalia onions. Onions pay his bills. And they’ve propelled him to minor celebrity in his field — which is not onion farming, but domain investment.
In addition to VidaliaOnions.com, Askew runs sites devoted to farmworkers, dude ranches, and, perplexingly, the tiny North Carolina mountain town of Brevard. As we stood in the Switchyards elevator, the 6-foot-8-inch tall Askew debated…
