Women Who Shaped the Domain Industry: A 2026 Spotlight

Walk around any domain conference and you’ll meet women running brokerages, registries, legal practices and policy work. The group photos don’t always show it, but they’ve been here from the start.

I wanted to put some of them in one place for two reasons. The first is for younger women who have never heard of this industry. There are real careers here, in brokerage, marketing, law, engineering, policy and starting your own company, and most people find out about them by accident. The second is to say thank you to the women who did the hard work before the rest of us showed up.

The last big roundups I could find were DNJournal’s in 2018 and a five-part series on TLD Investors back in 2012, so an update felt overdue. I’ve linked each woman’s bio or profile so you can read more about her.

Brokers and investors

Tessa Holcomb, DomainAdvisors

I’ll start with Tessa, because DomainAdvisors is where I got my start. My first sale there was GrantsPassOregon.com for $5,000. Tessa founded the firm in 2010 and ran it as CEO, including the years it went by Igloo.com. Her NamesCon bio lists sales like IG.com, MO.com, HAY.com and Twitch.com, and she has been on the Internet Commerce Association board since 2018. She studied psychology at UCLA, which may explain why she reads people so well in a negotiation. Back in 2014 she went on the Domain Name Wire podcast to talk about Igloo’s six, seven and eight figure sales and its purchase of Aftermarket.com.

Amanda Waltz, WaltzDigital

I had the chance to work with Amanda twice, first at DomainAdvisors and later at Saw.com, so this one is personal for me. She was VP of Sales and Marketing at Igloo.com, which grew out of DomainAdvisors, and later Director of Business Development at BrandIT. At the end of 2019 she helped launch Saw.com, a brokerage that helps companies buy the right domain. In 2021 she went on the Domain Name Wire podcast to talk about buyers asking to pay in crypto, and why her team started spelling out the currency in every written offer. Today she runs WaltzDigital, a consultancy focused on IP and digital strategy, and she is a founding member of Chief, a network for women leaders.

Kate Buckley, Defining.com

Kate founded Buckley Media in 2013. In January 2024, branding and marketing expert Todd Henderson joined, bringing his 30 years of big agency experience, to create Defining.com, which Kate leads as Founder and CEO. Kate is known for closing six- and seven-figure sales for her clients. Just last month, Defining.com closed the sale of Tick.com for $600,000, representing the sellers. She also gives part of her proceeds to charities like Feeding America. She has been named to the Forbes Next 1000, and in an ICA member profile she said she would like to see clearer best practices and a code of ethics for our industry. I agree with her.

Jen Sale, Evergreen

Jen runs Evergreen.com, a domain agency that is also an ICANN-accredited registrar. She has spent more than 20 years buying, selling and valuing premium .com names for startups, brands and public figures, per her NamesCon bio. She got her start answering inquiries for a portfolio of more than 500,000 names. In 2014 her earlier firm, Domain Guardians, sold BTC.com for $1 million. I still use her “radio test,” which she explained on Marketplace: if you hear the name, can you spell it and find the business?

Margot Bushnaq, BrandBucket

Margot and Firas Bushnaq launched BrandBucket in 2007 to sell their own hand-picked names, then opened it to other sellers in 2009. It now lists over 100,000 brandable names, has handled more than $64 million in sales and made the Inc. 5000 in 2022. Before that, Margot built and sold several tech startups, including one to Google. She studied linguistics at Stanford, and you can see it in how BrandBucket picks names. She told DomainSherpa in 2014 that the marketplace started almost by accident, when Google indexed a list of about 100 names she and Firas kept for their own projects and strangers started asking to buy them.

Ilze Kaulins-Plaskacz, ExcellentDomains.ca

Ilze got into .ca early and built a portfolio of short, generic names. If you want to know what a .ca sold for, her company is usually where people look. Her bio notes she is the first and only person to receive the “Women in Domaining” award. When DNJournal put her on its cover in 2015, it called her the first female investor on the Canadian scene. She has been going to domain conferences for more than 26 years, and her son Gerrit now helps run sales, so ExcellentDomains.ca is a family business.

Tess Diaz, it.com

Tess has 19 years in the business, about ten of them at GoDaddy, and is now Director of Channel Development at it.com. You may know her as the executive producer of DomainSherpa, or from the stage at NamesCon, where she often emcees and moderates. She is also an advocate for mental health education.

Tiffany Mark, Hilco Digital Assets

Tiffany joined the domain industry in 2024 and has quickly become a force in it. She is the Associate Director of Domain Services at Hilco Digital Assets, part of Hilco Global, where she has helped grow the business and establish HDA as a leading domain advisory and brokerage practice. She also wears a second hat as membership coordinator at the Internet Commerce Association, a role she took on in 2023, where she works to strengthen and build the domain community.

Building the registries and registrars

Cybele Negris, Webnames

Cybele co-founded Webnames.ca, Canada’s original .ca registrar, and is its President and CEO. That includes Webnames Corporate, its enterprise arm. She has been named one of Canada’s Top 100 Most Powerful Women four times and is in its Hall of Fame. Webnames is also a certified women-owned and minority-owned business. Her reach goes well past domains. She is Vice-Chair of the board of the Royal Canadian Mint, and since 2022 on the board of AGF, a Canadian investment firm. She also made the PROFIT W100 list of top female entrepreneurs nine years running.

Lori Anne Wardi, .CO co-founder

Lori Anne co-founded .CO Internet in 2009 and helped launch .CO in July 2010. Neustar bought .CO for $109 million in 2014, and she went on to lead registry marketing and PR at Neustar and then GoDaddy Registry. She started out as a lawyer at Proskauer and later worked at Goldman Sachs, then joined the .CO team in 2008, before it had even won the bid to run the extension. She has written openly about burning out as a lawyer and finding a career she loved.

Neha Naik, Radix

Neha is Vice President of Channel Partnerships at Radix, the registry behind .online, .store and other extensions. A 2023 interview mentioned her 17 years with Directi Group, Radix’s parent company, and her seat on the i2Coalition board. She joined Directi in 2005, right out of college with a mass media degree, and moved to Radix in 2014. If you have ever seen .store or .online offered at GoDaddy, Namecheap or IONOS, that is partly her team’s work.

Christa Taylor, TLDz and Future.Domains

Christa has been advising on new extensions for years. Her practice worked on more than 50 applications in the 2012 round, and she was CMO of MMX, the registry whose extensions GoDaddy bought in 2021. She co-founded TLDz, a TLD strategy firm, in 2023. In June she co-founded Future.Domains, a marketplace where people can reserve names in new extensions before they launch. With the 2026 round underway, she is a good person to know. Her NamesCon bio puts her at more than 75 applications across the 2012 and 2026 rounds, and she volunteers as a mentor in ICANN’s Applicant Support Program, which helps groups that need financial help to apply. Before all this she ran Poker.com, and she is a CPA, so she knows the numbers as well as the marketing.

Kathy Nielsen, D3

Kathy came over from online advertising and joined Sedo in 2008, where she worked her way up to VP of business development and worked on the .CO launch, as Sully’s Blog covered. After that she helped launch the .green registry and ran premium name sales and channel partnerships at Neustar. She stayed on when GoDaddy Registry acquired Neustar’s registry in 2020. Since May she has been Director of Business Development at D3, the company behind the Doma Protocol, which puts traditional domains onchain. She was talking about new extensions before most people had heard of them. In 2014, while still at Sedo, she wrote in WIRED that most small businesses had no idea new domains were coming. Later that year she left Sedo for DotGreen, and in 2025 she spent time as VP of Business Development at WebUnited, which brings traditional domains into Web3, before joining D3.

Wei Wei, AYO Technologies

Wei spent six years at Team Internet AG in Munich, most recently as senior account manager for ParkingCrew, its parking platform that helps domain owners earn from their traffic. In April she moved to AYO Technologies GmbH as Strategic Business Development Manager.

Nena Hajikhani, Identity Digital

Nena was at Sedo for 17 years. As a senior sales and brokerage consultant she closed six- and seven-figure sales for startups and big companies alike. In June she joined Identity Digital, the registry behind .info, .live and many others, as Director of Business Development for North America. In 2013 she became the first woman to win Broker of the Year at the T.R.A.F.F.I.C. conference. She was born in Iran, grew up in Germany, studied in China and speaks four languages, and she once negotiated a Chinese domain sale entirely in Mandarin.

Shaping the rules

Tripti Sinha, ICANN Board Chair

Tripti has been on the ICANN Board since 2018 and has chaired it since 2022. The board re-elected her as chair this October. In October 2025 she became President and CEO of Internet2, after more than ten years at the University of Maryland, where she was assistant vice president and chief technology officer and oversaw the university’s global root DNS service, one of the servers the whole internet relies on. She is only the second woman to chair ICANN’s board, after Esther Dyson in 1998. Before joining the board she co-chaired the committee that advises ICANN on the root servers, from 2015 to 2018.

Kathy Kleiman, internet policy pioneer

Back in 1999, Kathy was on ICANN’s final drafting team for the UDRP, the process still used to settle most domain disputes. She helped found ICANN’s Noncommercial Users Constituency and the Domain Name Rights Coalition. Today she teaches at American University Washington College of Law, where she is also a senior fellow, and since 2023 she has served on the board of Public Interest Registry, the nonprofit behind .org. Her 2022 book, Proving Ground, tells the story of the six women who programmed ENIAC, the first modern computer. She also spent four years co-chairing the ICANN working group that reviewed the trademark rules for new extensions, which wrapped up in 2021. Her documentary about the ENIAC programmers, The Computers, won best documentary short at UNAFF in 2016.

Andee Hill, ICANN

Andee spent 14 years at Escrow.com, starting in 1999. In 2013 she launched EscrowHill.com as CEO and sold it in 2015. After two years in business development at Donuts, she joined ICANN in 2017, working first with registrars and then running gTLD accounts. Since July 2025 she has been Senior Director of GDD Accounts. Andee was one of Escrow.com’s first employees, so a lot of early domain deals went through her hands. Donuts hired her in 2015 to be its liaison to domain investors. Today her team at ICANN works with the registries, registrars and dispute providers the rest of us rely on.

Kamila Sekiewicz, Internet Commerce Association

Kamila has run the Internet Commerce Association, the trade group that speaks up for domain owners, since 2017, as Domain Name Wire noted. Before that she spent years at Sedo in account management and business development. She started at ICA as operations manager before taking the top job, and in June she was on the Domain Name Wire podcast with ICA’s new president, Nat Cohen. She is also the person behind ICA’s yearly member meeting in Las Vegas and its awards for people who move the industry forward.

Karen Bernstein, Bernstein IP

Karen is managing partner of Bernstein IP in New York and has practiced law since 2001. She has been US counsel for the .ME registry since 2011. Since 2024 she has also decided domain disputes as a panelist for both FORUM and the CIIDRC, two of the providers that rule on whether a contested domain should be transferred. She has been looking out for domain owners for a long time. In 2009 she wrote a column for Domain Name Wire warning investors about a .me dispute ruling, and at NamesCon 2021 she argued the domain owner’s side in a mock UDRP hearing hosted by ICA.

Building the community

For years, Women in Domaining at NamesCon was where many women in the business got to know each other. In 2018 it drew about 120 people, a record at the time, according to DNJournal. Today a lot of us meet as Women of the Web, which Lori Anne Wardi co-hosts. That group started small. DNJournal says Jen Sale invited a few women to meet in her hotel room, and it grew from there. None of these get-togethers happen on their own, so I want to thank the women who kept them going.

Lisa Box, Women in Domaining

DNJournal credits Lisa with a lead role in getting the Women in Domaining dinner started, and she hosted it for years. One year she challenged every woman there to bring one more woman into the business, which is pretty much the point of this post. Her own career runs from Oversee.net and Moniker to Senior Director of Domains at Endurance in 2013, then to WP Engine, where she became SVP of Corporate Development in 2020. She later led strategic alliances at Identity Digital and has been named a CRN Channel Chief several times.

Susan Lawrence, Women in Domaining

Susan worked alongside Lisa to keep the dinner going. DNJournal thanked them both for “another outstanding event” at NamesCon Global 2020. Susan spent years on the parking and registry side of the business, at DomainSponsor and Oversee.net, then Above.com and Nami Media, and in 2014 she joined Minds + Machines to run affiliate marketing. Today she is at D3, the company behind the Doma Protocol, alongside Kathy Nielsen.

I know it’s a lot, but here’s why it matters

I’ve been brokering domains since 2011, first at DomainAdvisors, then Uniregistry (DomainNameSales) and Saw.com, and this year I started ProBroker. The women on this list made that road easier for me. Some did it by closing big deals in public, some by running companies, and some by writing the rules that keep every transfer safe. If you’re a woman thinking about this industry, there’s more room for you here than you’d guess.

A lot of these women will be at NamesCon in Miami on November 11 and 12. I’ll be there too, so please come say hi.

This is nowhere near everyone, and it’s in no particular order. Who should be added? Tell me about her. Also, with this many women, dates and job titles, I wanted every detail to be right, so I used AI to help me research and fact-check this post. Each fact links back to where it came from. If I still got something wrong, let me know and I’ll fix it.

Brooke Hernandez, founder of ProBroker