Exit follows Stahura’s role change.
Half of new top level domain name company Donuts’ founding team is no longer in their original day-to-day roles.
The company announced that Richard Tindal, COO and one of four co-founders of the company, has “retired” from Donuts.
Earlier this year, co-founder and CEO Paul Stahura switched roles with Bruce Jaffe. Jaffe was Executive Chairman of the company’s board. Stahura is now a full-time Executive Chairman.
When Jaffe replaced Stahura, the company also hired John Pollard as Chief Revenue Officer. At the time, Pollard told Domain Name Wire that despite some overlaps between his role and that of the other Donuts’ co-founders, the founders would all remain with the company.
“I wouldn’t have taken this job if any of the founders were leaving,” Pollard said in January.
The other two co-founders are Dan Schindler (currently Executive Vice President, Business Development) and Jon Nevett (currently Executive Vice President, Corporate Affairs).
With so much money injected into donuts at its inception, one would have to wonder if there were parachute clauses in their executive’s contracts. I have to give them credit for wholly going into the new extensions with a master plan, resolved that the future was not-com. Sometimes it’s the simple things that expose the bigger flaws, but seeing that donuts.com is still sitting on the sidelines unused, in my opinion, reflects flawed thinking. That’s a leap of faith but also an all-or-nothing strategy.
None of this was unforeseeable. There never was a public demand for these names. Never. Ever. Ever. Period. The public couldn’t care less and never did. The people who made money with the legacy TLDs never tried to set the market. They saw the existing market and capitalized upon it. Telling the herd what to do never works. Giving the herd what it wants, does.Too bad their investors couldn’t see the difference.