Fresh bread

Blovstrød is a small town north of Copenhagen. Small enough that everybody knows the way to school. Small enough that, back then, nobody brought fresh bread in the morning.

I was twelve, and back then my name was Thomas Frederiksen. I lived with my parents, Inge and John, and went to Blovstrød Skole like every other kid in town. A friend and I had noticed something. Every Sunday morning, every dad in Blovstrød got in the car and drove to the bakery in Allerød, the next town over. Surely, we thought, somebody should bring the bread to them.

So we did it properly. We did market research. We made paper sign-up forms and handed them out all over Blovstrød. Then we waited for the orders to roll in.

Not a single one did. Our bread business never delivered a single roll. It turns out most dads quite liked that Sunday drive. It was my first business, my first failure and my first lesson: an idea is only good if people actually want to change what they do. The habit stuck anyway. Find something that is harder than it needs to be, and try to make it easier.

Coffee came even earlier. I was eight when I started drinking it with my mother. It has been part of every day since.

One squeaking modem at a time

The internet arrived in Denmark one squeaking modem at a time. Mine came in 1995, when I was fifteen and my parents gave me a Power Macintosh 7100, a SupraFAXModem 288 and a connection to Cybercity. 28.8 kilobits per second. At the time, that felt fast.

Every session started with the same song: beeps, screeches and static, like two fax machines having an argument. Fair enough, since mine technically was one. While I was online, nobody could call the house. Every minute showed up on the phone bill. Pictures loaded one line at a time, from the top down, slowly enough to make a cup of coffee while you waited.

I didn't care. I built my first websites on a long address that started with vip.cybercity.dk/~ and that nobody could remember. I sent my first emails to people on the other side of the world, and the answers came back the same day. To a fifteen-year-old in Blovstrød, that felt like magic.

Then I discovered hosting. A company called Digiweb in the US would rent you space on their servers, and you could sell it on to others. Other people's websites, living on a computer thousands of kilometres away, with me in the middle. I didn't fully understand why it worked. I just knew it did, and that a lot of people were going to need it.

Cobweb

Most Danish companies still didn't have a website. I was seventeen, at business school in Hillerød, and decided I was the man to help them.

I had built a few websites for myself. I had never run a company. In my head, that meant I would definitely be able to do it. More on that way of thinking later.

So I started Cobweb and sold websites to anyone who would listen, and a few who wouldn't. Some of the customers were older than my parents. Most of them had never sent an email. That turned out to be the real job: not just building the website, but making the whole thing feel less scary.

Nine kroner

A business partner and I had a simple, slightly stubborn idea. Everybody should be able to have a website and email on their own domain.

Not just companies with an IT department. The baker. The plumber. The family down the road. It had to be easy, and it had to be cheap. We settled on a price that made accountants nervous: nine kroner a month.

We called the company B-one, and the first orders came in on 9 July 2002. Every one of them felt like a small miracle. A few years later it got a better name: One.com.

Looking back, that idea has followed me ever since. Technology is only worth something if normal people can actually use it - and if it makes a real difference in their day.

Out the door, and back in

In 2004 I did something founders aren't supposed to do. I left the company I had started.

There were too many other ideas waiting. Cobweb kept going and, in the middle of the 2000s, bought three other web companies - 2Kweb, Acomma and Interspace. Acomma, which hosted servers for small businesses, was sold in 2006. Later came NordicCall, which gave busy companies virtual assistants to take their calls and handle the small stuff, and a print-and-copy franchise that my father and I brought to Denmark together.

Some ideas grew. Some got sold. Some quietly closed. I have a longer list of companies that didn't work than of companies that did, and I'm not embarrassed by a single one of them. Every failure came with a lesson, and most of them were expensive enough that I only needed to learn them once.

Along the way I started teaching other founders, at Operation Startup and at the University of Copenhagen. Mostly about what not to do. I had plenty of material.

Then, in 2007, the old company called. One.com had grown up while I was away, and it needed someone to run the operation. So I came back - this time as COO. It is a strange feeling to return to a company you founded. You know where everything is, and none of it is where you left it.

One and a half million

Nine kroner turned out to be a better idea than the accountants thought. One.com grew into one of the big hosting companies in Europe. My job was mainly to make sure somebody kept track of everything.

It took a lot of people. A support team of 150 in Copenhagen and Dubai, answering customers in more languages than I speak. Twenty developers who were a good deal cleverer than me. A team of product managers. We tested new ideas all the time - a VPS product, phone support, a team that won back customers who had left. Some worked. Some taught us something.

Somewhere along the way I also became the company's spokesperson. When journalists called, I picked up. When something went wrong, it was my job to explain it - to customers, to the press and occasionally to the neighbours.

And things did go wrong. Servers go down, a lot of people can't get to their email, and every single one of them would like to know why. Right now. I have never been much good at quiet days, but I'm oddly at home in that kind of chaos. Not because I'm braver than anyone else. Mostly because panicking has never fixed a single server. So you stay calm, you tell people what is going on, and you let the clever people do the fixing. Calm turns out to be contagious. So, luckily, is strong coffee.

We passed one and a half million customers. Hardly any of them knew my name, which is exactly how it should be with hosting.

At home, life got bigger too. In 2009 I married Tanya. The year after, we moved to a farm with cows and horses, and we have three children together. Weekdays were servers and spreadsheets. Weekends were hay, mud and a web guy learning which end of a horse to stay away from.

Swipe right

2013 was the year things came apart a little. Tanya and I divorced. There were three kids to look after, a farm full of animals, and a company with more than a million customers that doesn't stop for anybody's private life.

There is no clever trick for a year like that. The kids came first. But nothing else waited politely either. The cows still needed feeding, and a million customers still expected their email to work in the morning. So you do all of it at once, some days better than others, and you learn to say yes when people offer to help.

Then it was 2014. Tinder was new in Denmark, and still a bit embarrassing to admit you used. I opened the app anyway. I had, after all, spent my whole career telling people to try new technology.

Swipe. Swipe. Swipe. Then Stine. It was a match. Exactly why she swiped right is still unclear to me. I have decided not to ask.

We wrote. Then we met for cocktails. One became two, two became the rest of the menu, and somewhere near the bottom of the cocktail card we both knew this was more than a swipe. We haven't left each other's side since that evening. Twelve years later she still puts up with my side projects, which says a lot more about her than about me.

Your own part of the internet

Then came a bigger thought. What if you didn't just sell domains? What if you owned the ending?

Nobody on the team had ever launched a top-level domain. In my world, that is not a problem. That is a reason.

With One Registry we launched .one. We started with nothing. No resellers, no leads, no list. We built it one conversation at a time, many of them with people who had never heard of .one and weren't sure they wanted to. In the end, more than 70 registrars around the world sold .one, and more than 65,000 domains were registered.

It is a strange feeling to help build a new corner of the internet. Stranger still to spend the following years explaining to your own family what that actually means.

Cebu

The air was warm, the traffic was loud, and the Danish winter was very far away. I was living in Cebu in the Philippines. And I wasn't there alone. Stine travelled there with me.

The job was to build a sales team from scratch, in a country I had never worked in - hiring, training, sitting next to people on their first calls. Most of what I taught was how One.com works. Most of what I learned was how much a good team can do when you trust it. On the side there were partnerships with global tech companies and new sales channels for One.com's own products.

When the work week was over, Stine and I explored together. New country, new food, new routines, and a Dane slowly accepting that 32 degrees is not a heatwave. It is Tuesday. The coffee was a happy surprise. Filipino barako is strong enough to restart a server.

It was a long way from Blovstrød. The job was the same, though: take something that feels complicated and make it simple for the person on the other end.

Starting over, again

Back in Denmark, the restlessness kicked in. This time I had a co-founder at home. Stine and I started a party rental business together - everything you need to throw a proper party.

Then, in early 2020, Covid-19 hit the fan. Overnight, nobody was throwing parties. As business timing goes, it is hard to beat. So we did what entrepreneurs do when the plan falls apart: we made a new one. Neither of us had ever run a secondhand clothing business, which, as you know by now, only made it more tempting.

The idea was bigger than the timing. The world produces far more clothes than anybody needs, and a lot of them are hardly worn before they end up at the back of a wardrobe. That is a real climate problem. And the usual answer - take the photos, write the ads, answer the messages, go to the post office - only works if you have a lot of spare time. Most people don't.

So we built a secondhand webshop that did the hard part for them. You hand over the clothes, we take care of the rest. As CTO I built the platform behind it, using technology to keep track of all those clothes, from the moment they came in to the moment they found a new owner. Good for the planet, easy for the busy person. That combination is exactly what I care about.

It turns out Stine and I work really well together. Which is lucky, since we also share a kitchen, a calendar and four kids. Most board meetings are held at the dinner table, over coffee.

After that came three years as COO at Nicky, a crypto payments company. Crypto is about as far from easy as technology gets, which is exactly why it needs people who care about making it simple. Most of the job was getting product, tech and sales to agree on the same thing at the same time. On good days, they did.

Life grew too. In 2019 Stine and I had a son, and in 2024 we got married. That is also when Thomas Frederiksen became Thomas Medard. Home is now Skovlunde, just outside Copenhagen. Four kids, a lot of noise and very few quiet evenings. I wouldn't swap it for anything. Not even a really short .com.

Like 2000 again

I have watched the domain and hosting business change many times. The dotcom boom. The price wars. The cloud. I have been wrong about plenty of it. But in 2026 I have a feeling I haven't had since the year 2000.

AI is changing who buys a domain. Soon it won't only be people. It will be the AI tools working for them. That opens doors in our industry that nobody has seen in 25 years, and somebody should build the registrar for it. So I am, together with a small team. With AiVikings.ai you just ask ChatGPT or Claude for a good name, and your AI finds it, buys it and sets it up. No control panels. No jargon.

If you look back over this story, almost everything I have built has the same idea underneath. Nine kroner hosting. Support that picks up the phone. A domain you get just by asking. I'm not that interested in technology for its own sake. I'm interested in what it does for people - and in making it easy enough that they actually get the value.

Teaching never really left me either. With ContentLift I run one-day AI workshops for marketing teams. We work on their own campaigns and content until ChatGPT is actually useful to them - not just impressive. It is the same old idea in a new outfit: technology is only worth it when people get real value out of it.

In the evenings, when the kids are asleep, I make one more coffee that I definitely don't need and build small things for fun. A world clock. A turntable that plays in every room. A dinosaur game with my youngest son, who is very clearly the boss on that one.

Sometimes I build for family. My bonus mother Tina - my father's wife - coaches people on careers and leadership, so of course she needed a website. Then she and my father started a publishing house, Forlaget Christel, in what they call their third career, and published a book of poems. They needed a website too. Third careers, it turns out, run in the family. So does building websites for each other.

If I have one rule I live by, it comes from Pippi Longstocking:

"I have never tried that before, so I think I should definitely be able to do that."

I really do live by it, in everything I do. It got me online at fifteen, into websites at seventeen, into hosting, into running a top-level domain, to Cebu, through a pandemic and into AI. It even got me through a cocktail menu.

There is just one small problem. Pippi never said it. It isn't in any of Astrid Lindgren's books. It is an internet myth that has been passed around on fridge magnets and LinkedIn posts for years. I live by it anyway. For a quote that doesn't exist, it has done remarkably well by me.

The other half is simpler: keep a positive and trusting mindset with everyone around you. I don't always manage. I keep trying.

So here I am, almost thirty years after Cobweb, building something I have never tried before. According to Pippi, that means I should definitely be able to do it. We'll see. I'll keep you posted.