You spent more than a decade in web hosting before IPXO. What was the moment, and the reasoning, that made you turn to IP addresses?

I ran hosting businesses for over a decade, starting in 2008 with Host1Plus, which later became Heficed. The recurring bottleneck was always IPv4. Free pools were gone by the mid-2010s, and acquiring space meant brokers, escrow, and weeks of waiting at prices nobody could verify. At the same time, I kept meeting organizations sitting on huge unused allocations with no safe way to put them to work. Leasing existed, but as handshake deals with real reputational risk: if your lessee sends spam, it is your address space on the blocklists.

The moment was internal. At Heficed, we built tooling to manage and monetize our own IP resources; partners started asking to use it, and at some point the IP management system was more interesting than the hosting business sitting on top of it.

The reasoning was simple. IPv4 is a finite resource with structural scarcity, growing demand, and an allocation system designed in the 1980s. IPv6 adoption is real, but the commercial internet runs on IPv4 and will continue to do so for a long time. That is a market that needed infrastructure, not brokers. We spun IPXO out in 2021 to build it.

IPXO seems to be much larger in revenue than people realize. Walk us through the business model — and what's the size of the opportunity you see ahead?

IPXO is a two-sided marketplace with an infrastructure platform underneath it. Holders lease out address space they do not fully use, lessees pay a monthly per-IP rate, and IPXO earns a margin on every lease. The margin is earned under the hood: we are integrated with all five Regional Internet Registries and automate routing, RPKI, WHOIS and geolocation updates, abuse handling, and KYC on every lessee. A holder gets monetization without reputational risk. A lessee gets IPs in minutes instead of weeks. That is why client retention runs at 97% year over year. Today we manage over 15 million IPs, with revenue growing 58% year over year and supply up 85%.

On the opportunity: there are 4.3 billion IPv4 addresses in existence and no more are being made. In 2025, 58 million of them changed hands across the RIR transfer registries, and the market outside hyperscaler acquisitions grew 2.6x in a single year. Demand is large enough that buying and leasing are growing at the same time, and the next wave, autonomous agents and distributed AI workloads, needs clean, routable IPs on demand. Our long-term strategy is to be the full suite for IP resources and everything that surrounds them in network engineering. The marketplace is the entry point. The platform is the business.

This isn't the first company you've started. What are your biggest learnings so far around hiring, leading, and building culture?

The biggest one is that I moved myself out of the CEO seat. IPXO is run day to day by our CEO, Ramute, and I sit on product and strategy. Most founders treat that as losing. After three companies, I consider it a win. What I am good at is seeing where a market is going and building the machine for it. Running the machine once it works is a different skill, and pretending otherwise is expensive vanity. Ramute runs the company better than I would, and handing her that seat was the highest-leverage decision I have made.

The second lesson cost me real money over the years: never hire someone into a function you have not done yourself badly first. I used to hire leaders into areas I could not evaluate, and that failure mode is brutal because it is slow. You cannot tell a hard problem from a wrong person. So the discipline now is to prove a motion manually before hiring for it: write the playbook, show it converts, then hand it to someone who runs it better than I ever would. Slower at the start, much faster after.

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