The Observer Magazine – The Young Rich

No. 2 Jason Drummond
Internet services provider
Age 29; valued at £24m

When he was a child Jason Drummond told his mother that he wanted to be a shopkeeper, but he never made it behind the counter – and he’s probably very grateful for that now. Instead, he is making his fortune in what is effectively a late twentieth century form of insurance for big companies doing business on the Internet. His company, Virtual Internet.net plc, has carved a market out of registering domain names on the Internet for businesses, protecting their copyright and brand names on the World Wide Web by registering as many variations of the name as possible-foiling rivals who may hijack a similar name to steal business, and ‘warehousers’ who might demand huge sums to hand over the rights to the domain. ‘Well-known companies that might be targets have to think about all the variations a user might key in when searching for them on the Web. If the name has more than one word, would someone key in the whole lot as one word, or use hyphens or full stops? A company might want to register all these different versions of its name,’ says Drummond. ‘Some clients are even registering misspellings.’ If a company gets it wrong, it could lose millions of pounds in potential earnings- and someone who can prevent that potential loss is valuable. The company opened an office in New York last month to add to its UK and French operations, which broke even last year on turnover of £1m. But since then Drummond has sold a 30 per cent stake in his company in a reverse takeover by Charriol worth £15m, netting him £1m in cash plus a continuing 70 per cent stake in the venture, which has a market capitalisation of £32.6m, valuing his stake at £23m. He earns a comparatively modest £64,000 annually although he stands to make a further £2m bonus if the company hits a turnover of £5m this year. He obviously believes that he’s likely to make his bonus this year. He started his first business, Micromax, at 15, buying games software from distributors, including bankrupt stock, and selling it through local newsagents. He invested his earnings in Amstrad shares. It proved to be a shrewd buy- they quadrupled in value by the time Drummond finished his A-levels, and he used the profits to start IDL Communications, distributing fax machines and mobile telephones. He does not regret not going to university, but says he does feel he missed out on the social life. He took a year out and travelled with his wife Jackie when he was 22, but unlike most backpackers he combined the trip with business, setting up communications product companies in Russia and South Africa. Now a father of two, Drummond balances long hours with family life by keeping weekends free. It’s a sign of how far entrepreneurship has come that yesterday’s would-be shopkeepers are doing their business on the Net.