You can open up a terminal on your computer and type the following at the command prompt:
$ whois veen.com
Your terminal will fill with a few pages of mostly-redacted information. This command queries a database of publicly available domain registrations. Years ago, you’d see actual email addresses and phone numbers for the people who owned and managed domain names across the internet. But in today’s world, all of that is hidden.
Recently I had the privilege of being interviewed by Om Malik at his Roadmap Conference. We were talking about about design in general and Adobe in particular, and he asked me about the project I had completed earlier in the year, in which we redesigned the entire Adobe.com experience from the ground up. It was an almost absurd undertaking, and Om rightly pointed out what had been at stake. “How do you convince a big company like that to make such a big change? Isn’t design risky?”
There are lots of reasons to do a startup. Sometimes, there’s an idea you just can’t stop thinking about – a thing you absolutely want to exist in the world. Or sometimes you see a gap in how an industry is evolving, and with a small team of talented people you think you can fill that gap much faster than the big companies can.