GoDaddy

Bob Parsons, fresh from selling a personal-finance software company, founded Jomax Technologies in Arizona in 1997. It became Go Daddy in 1999 after a brainstorm in which "Big Daddy" turned out to be taken. The business was simple: cheap domains, relentless upselling at checkout, and later hosting, email and certificates. From 2005 it bought expensive Super Bowl airtime and filled it with deliberately provocative spots.

In 2011 GoDaddy backed the US SOPA bill. Reddit organised a moving day, customers started transferring their domains away, and the support was withdrawn within a week. Private equity bought the company that same year and it went public in 2015. It now manages more than 80 million domains and is many people's first encounter with DNS.