The place Eric Gullichsen calls home is a charmingly rustic, century-old ferryboat, the Vallejo, now out of service and moored just off Sausalito, Calif., in San Francisco Bay. But his real home is the virtual world of the Net, an insight he achieved while hunched over a laptop in a hotel bathroom in Bhurban, Pakistan (the john being the only place where he could plug in his modem). He was logged onto the Web, fiddling with a line of code for one of his company's main computers, when the epiphany came: "This works! The Internet has happened! I'm placeless now."
And placeless is where Gullichsen has always wanted to be. At 38, the wiry, snaggle-haired programmer has achieved what for many entrepreneurs would be the ultimate American Dream: a frictionless, self-propagating moneymaking scheme--in his case, selling a variant of the "domain names" that organize the Web's millions of addresses. "The great thing about my company," he says cheerfully, "is that it doesn't really exist."
It has, however, left some tracks--primarily on Tonga, a Pacific island kingdom where Gullichsen washed ashore a few years back after wandering the globe on profits from the sale of his first two companies: the virtual-reality venture Sense8 and the "virtual TV" start-up Warp. Tonga is a tiny place (pop. 100,000), and Gullichsen soon made a powerful friend, the island's Crown Prince Tupouto'a, who appointed him technology adviser to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Defense, responsible for everything from Tonga's air-surveillance network to its e-mail system.
It was the e-mail project that got Gullichsen and his longtime business partner, Eric Lyons, thinking. The ever growing Web now has hundreds of millions of sites, most organized into three so-called top-level domains: com net and org The demand for com names has advanced to the point where speculators who snap up the most valuable ones can resell them for thousands and even hundreds of thousands of dollars. (Three Star Wars sites--EPISODEI.com and its two sequels--were recently sold for $1 million on eBay.) Given that the number of websites is doubling every year, the demand for new com names must someday outstrip the supply.
The two Erics decided the best way to beat the com system (and make some easy money in the process) was to circumvent it. There's nothing magical about the letters com they reasoned; why not just use, say, .to for Tonga?
So in 1997, with the Crown Prince's permission, Gullichsen and Lyons started Tonic Corp. and began selling Tonga domain names on a first-come, first-served basis. Bummed that the cool website name you thought of is already taken? Visit www.tonic.to with a valid credit card, and they'll sell you the same name in the .to domain. Price: $100 for the first two years. You can still host your site from your PC in Topeka, Kans.; the name will just be registered by a company based on an island you probably can't find on a map.