"At 34, Domenic Carosa, CEO and founder of digital media company Destra Corp, is considered a veteran in the fast moving online industry, having seen his business through the dot.com boom bust and boom cycle."
Destra Rising: From Destra to Beyond
A new media publication entitled
B&T Digital Media has features an article on destra in its first 2008 Edition 4 publication as a Feature Profile on page 20:
Eleven years down the track and with Destra's market capitalisation at $85m, Carosa and his company is now reaping the benefits.
The term veteran however belies Carosa's passion and drive for the business which is equal now to what it was when he started selling computer games and software from his home in Melbourne, with sister Anna.
Indeed just before jetting off for a well-earned holiday in Thailand over Christmas-new year Carosa claimed he didn't know what downtime was. "I'm always doing the things that I love, so why would I need any downtime from that?" he says.
It's a drive that the extrepreneur of Italian descent says has existed since he was five, with his first profitable business venture seling postcards outside his home.
At age 18, computer games and the blurgeoning internet market were more interesting to Carosa than university he dropped out of after six weeks.
It was with a technology focus that the company then named Sprint that he ran with Anna (who now runs her own fashion retail and restaurant business), was built.
For the fledgling entrepreneur it was a time of rapid expansion as the dot.com boom took hold, and quickly turned into a desire to float the company.
Rebranded destra Corp, and including web hosting and music download business
mp3.com.au, Destra successfully listed on the ASX on May 2000, three weeks before the dot.com crash as an internet services and digital media company with a market capitalisation of $13m.
While Carosa says Destra was always intended to be a content company, the market wasn't ready for a pureplay digital content company until the mayhem of the dot.com boom and bust had settled down.
Always one with an eye on what is hot in the consumer market, Carosa also entered the music download business creating
mp3.com.au after noticing that "mp3" was one of the most searched term of the net in 1996.
MP3.com.au was the genesis of the content side of destra and still operates today.
The idea was to aggregate content from independent artists on a website, giving them access to users and potential customers, creating an online community of music lovers and Australia's first legal music download service.
Carosa says
mp3.com.au came "out of the notion of disintermediation and putting power back into control of the artist".
To read the full article, please visit B&T's DIGITAL MEDIA online publication here >>