Jay Westerdal

Senior Venture Partner
2020
Startup Haven has a GroundWork First Fund of $10M to invest in pre-seed US-based, capital efficient startups with disciplined founders and cogent plans. With 14 years of community involvement organizing Poker tournaments social gatherings for Startup Founders we are in a unique position to find, fund, and support portfolio companies. Our unfair advantage is access to our network and the resources we curate for Startup Haven.

2013

Board Member & Co-Founder
2013
Founded in 2013 & headquartered in Manhattan, Uptime.com is an industry leading website uptime & performance monitoring vendor with customers including Kraft, BNP Paribas, Newswire.com & Autodesk. Co-founded by seasoned B2B software entrepreneurs & IT ninjas, Uptime.com was ranked by TechRadar as a top 5 best website monitoring service.

2017

CEO
2017
The ".realty" domain extension tells consumers the website is all about Real Estate. We are live and selling. Purchase a great domain in .Realty today before it gets gobbled up.

2009

CEO & Founder
2009
Working on launching new Top Level Domains through ICANN. We will be the exclusive wholesaler to ICANN registrars for our TLDs. ICANN Registrars sell over 220 Million new/renewal domains per year.

2011

Advisor
2011
Media aggregation similar to icanhas.cheezburger.com meets Demand Media.

2002 - 2013

Participant
2002 - 2013
My first meeting was in Shanghai in 2002. Attending ICANN meetings has been extremely helpful in forming new relationships and fostering the growth of DomainTools.com. I have been an active participant in the process and served on a few supporting committees like the Registrar Group. My positions have sometimes conflicted directly with registrars as I am a huge advocate of transparency and no new barriers to entry. Everyone should be given equal ground to compete from. Information should be available to everyone reducing hurtles to getting that information is one of my goals.

2008 - 2009

Chief Product Officer
2008 - 2009
I oversee the General Managers of DomainTools, Spry, TrafficZ, and new products that are in the pipeline. There are a done of fun challenges building great products and I enjoy diving into them. When we release a new feature that blow people away that makes my day brighter. My core principles are openness and transparency and I try to bring those to my job. I have a vision of domain liquidity that allows people to sell domains like real estate. If I can make a dent at this vision I will be very happy.

2001 - 2008

Founder and CEO
2001 - 2008
In the beginning, the company was very lean and I made sure it was always in the black. When I had extra money I reinvested it back into more employees or servers. After having been laid off from a DotCom in the middle of the tech bust of 2001 I poured my heart into this new start up. I took some ideas and programs I had started in 1998 and transformed them into the best applications of their kind. I looked for competition and directed my efforts at beating them. I saw faults in their and my programs and always looked for ways I could improve. I never stopped looking at ways to improve and that is the core of why Name Intelligence did so well. I took every angle I could to market the company organically and the traffic on the tools kept doing triple digit growth every year until I sold the main assets of the company in May of 2008. Revenue was always an after thought and always surprised me that it did so well. Money followed my passion and not the other way around; this made me very happy.

2001 - 2008

Founder and CEO
2001 - 2008
It all started with a good domain name and a lot of Search Engine Optimization. I was able to build almost the entire company organically with no paid marketing. In 2003, Cameron Jones was brought in to be the President and he has done a wonderful job of leading the team.

2001 - 2008

Founder and CEO
2001 - 2008
Developed whois.sc and then renamed it DomainTools. Hired a few people and later sold DomainTools in 2008.

CEO at 800.com