The outrageous success of GoDaddy (over 10 million users, and over 50 million domain registrations) hasn’t come without the ups, downs, product changes, pivots, controversial media attention, attacks, major site outages, and leadership changes. Most recently, GoDaddy announced on Tuesday of this week that Blake Irving, the former Microsoft and Yahoo! executive will be assuming the role of CEO come January 7, 2013. This will be GoDaddy’s third chief executive change in the last 18 months. After KKR, Silver Lake Partners, and Technology Crossover Ventures became the owners of GoDaddy in 2011 for a ticket price of $2.25 billion, things really have changed. Also, with Bob Parsons being more concerned about hunting, the NRA, and motorcycles, I think his priorities have shifted more towards ‘having fun’, then insuring the long-term success of GoDaddy (where he still remains as executive chairman).
With the new leadership and help of Blake Irving, GoDaddy is hoping to continue rolling out their new line of products and services. The company has been slowly transitioning to offer more service help to small and medium sized firms. They want to layer these products on top of their existing domain registration and hosting services, in an attempt to open up new revenue streams. It sounds like the checkout process will become even longer…so, it’s good that they added the ‘Express Buy’ feature to their site when you only want to secure an available domain name!
In the Press Release issued by GoDaddy on Tuesday, GoDaddy’s interim CEO, Scott Wagner, had this to say regarding Blake Irving’s new appointment:
“GoDaddy is fortunate to have Blake Irving join the team for the next chapter in his long time career as an innovator…I’m thrilled for Blake and I am thrilled for GoDaddy. We have good momentum on product and our international growth and having someone with Blake’s talent and character lead the company will only accelerate it.”
More About Blake Irving
– Former executive at Microsoft where he held many different positions over a 15-year timespan
(most predominant role: VP of Windows Live)
– Former Chief Product Officer at Yahoo!
(resigned in April 2012, before appointment of Marissa Mayer)
– He also currently serves on the board at GolfLogix
(another Scottsdale-based tech firm)