A new interesting cover story on dnjournal

There are certain names that everyone in this industry knows, names that newcomers normally encounter within hours of entering the domain business. Names like Rick Schwartz, Kevin Ham, Frank Schilling, the Castello Brothers and others from a small band of pioneers who have reached the top of a mountain that thousands of others continue to climb. Most in that group became wealthy because they were visionaries who foresaw how valuable domain names would become long before they appeared on anyone else’s radar.

Rob Grant may not be as widely known as some of his pioneering peers, but few in the industry can match the foresight, financial commitment and unwavering faith in the future of domains that Grant has shown over the past 12 years. During that time the personable real estate broker from upstate New York assembled the world’s best collection of real estate related domain names (as well as some gems in other categories).

With the explosion in domain values in recent years Grant has been well rewarded for his prescience. So much so that he has begun giving back through a series of generous domain donations (totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars) to grateful educational institutions in the U.S., including his alma mater, Arizona’s Prescott College. There were times in Grant’s life when the kind of philanthropy he practices today would have seemed like the wildest kind of pipe dream. He had walked away from a dream job on Madison Avenue so he could move to New York’s Adirondack Mountains, even though there was no job waiting for him there. After the move, the company he started wound up folding but like all great entrepreneurs, Grant bounced back and bounced back big.

Some of that resiliency may have come from growing up with two rambunctious brothers. The three boys were born in a five year span starting in 1953 when Rob was the first to arrive. The family lived in Evanston, Illinois (suburban Chicago) at the time but soon moved to Memphis then on to Providence, Rhode Island as Rob’s dad climbed the corporate ladder, becoming a VP at one of the first business conglomerates, Textron…