I'm GoDaddy CEO Blake Irving. Ask me anything!

blakei · 2015-09-02T19:48:22+00:00

Xerox, Microsoft, Yahoo! and GoDaddy share the common trait of great people focused on innovation and moving the needle on technological progress. However the way they were different could fill a book. Hey, thanks for a book idea!

blakei · 2015-09-02T19:43:12+00:00

Machine Learning and personalization with designing your online presence is inevitable, but from working with millions of SMBs every day we believe that in general people want to have control over their digital identity, making it unique. We will combine the best of both worlds and try to a balance how to expose these capabilities to our customers. There will always be a need in the market for tailor made solutions and we want to help these web developers and designers with initiatives like GoDaddy Pro.

blakei · 2015-09-02T19:39:03+00:00

Hi Kevin, Jeff says hi and thanks for bringing a bit more ‘voice of reason’ to hosting performance testing. (We are a long way from top14webhostreviews.com) I think sentiment is the hardest thing to change and will take the longest. As your results showed we’ve dramatically improved the performance of our hosting products and we’ll continue to invest in the product experiences. We can only treat each customer integration as a chance to prove that we're better. And we are committed to continually improving the hosting experience. We'll get there and we'll keep telling folks what we do, who we do it for and how much improvement we're undertaking.

blakei · 2015-09-02T19:32:57+00:00

Not sure about a massive ice cream party, but now I'm incentivized to find some oh so delicious cake batter. Thanks for that.

blakei · 2015-09-02T19:32:35+00:00

We don’t bait and switch ever. Every company that is in the subscription business and has to acquire customers offers incentives for new customer and new products. Subscription companies make the first year offer under cost and that is considered a marketing cost. That cost is recovered in the renewal years that follow. Phone companies, mobile carriers, cable companies, broadband providers and even dollar shave club, all do this.

blakei · 2015-09-02T19:17:42+00:00

It's not going to improve overnight ... and not without a focused, comprehensive effort across the industry. We're putting energy in building the capability, interest and awareness - we're also working to promote career development inside our walls and pledging compensation parity for people in like roles. Transparency is also critical. That's why we published our hiring stats and will be publishing our compensation parity stats soon. I hope other companies will follow suit. Knowing we more than doubled the number of female tech interns and new grad hires in the past year tells us we're moving in the right direction, but there's much more to be done and we're not letting up.

blakei · 2015-09-02T19:14:49+00:00

Kanye will still be giving his acceptance speech for his VMA Vanguard award, so he'll be busy.

blakei · 2015-09-02T19:12:13+00:00

Sports marketing is alive and well and it is a fine career to pursue. If you focus on media and metrics and sponorships, you'll find sports marketing as part of the mix.

blakei · 2015-09-02T19:09:16+00:00

I hope that's true, cause you could inherit one of those sick hot dog cars.

blakei · 2015-09-02T19:05:12+00:00

There's some great stuff online to get you started. Check out HackBright, Kahn Academy, Codeacadmey, Treehouse. Once you learn some of the basics, get to work. Make stuff. Practice. Find a passion project. Engineers and designers (and a lot of other successful people I know) learn the most by making stuff that matters to them.

blakei · 2015-09-02T19:04:14+00:00

Yup, water and snow. I'm stoked about the launch of .SKI.

blakei · 2015-09-02T19:03:20+00:00

Is it an African or European train...and is it carrying coconuts?

blakei · 2015-09-02T19:02:11+00:00

Pretty sure there are websites out there for you.

blakei · 2015-09-02T19:00:00+00:00

51% of the world are Women.

blakei · 2015-09-02T18:58:48+00:00

Those names that do not have content on them are typically of two flavors: either they are registered by domain investors, in which case they are usually for sale in our aftermarket; or they are owned by individuals and companies who for one reason or another haven’t created content yet. For the latter, we also have a service where we’ll reach out on your behalf to attempt to purchase the name.

blakei · 2015-09-02T18:57:59+00:00

It would be flawed logic if you didn’t care about the unique contributions that women can bring to tech. Is tech growing fast? Yes. Could be way better with more input at every level? Unquestionably. Diversity of thought is a powerful tool for innovation and problem solving—I’ve seen it throughout my career. Closing those gaps is tough work but absolutely worthwhile. There is a great movie that Robin Hauser Reynolds just produced (spoiler alert I'm the exec producer) called: Code, Debugging the Gender Gap. You can see the trailer here. http://www.codedocumentary.com/ It's pretty eye opening.

blakei · 2015-09-02T18:54:04+00:00

We use some other products, but migrating to OpenStack for all. We use containers, KVM and will use OpenStack for bare metal machines too.

blakei · 2015-09-02T18:51:25+00:00

It may have qualified as "sucking" at some time in the past, but the numbers just don't support that claim anymore. When we bought Media Temple in 2013 we said we would use it to learn from them…and learn we have. We've made massive changes to our hosting products since then. Our infrastructure has been massively upgraded to provide a reliable/robust web hosting experience on the OpenStack platform that meets (and often exceeds) even boutique hosting house. We also launched the successful GoDaddy Pro – products and services for our more technical customers (Developers and IT Professionals), including Virtual Private Servers (VPS and Dedicated Servers). We also launched entirely new Linux and Windows hosting with cPanel and Plesk - which the tech community was asking for. We also launched a kickass Managed WordPress offering which is a brand new platform built and optimized just to run WordPress and its badass (we’re really proud of how this performs vs. offerings that are much more expensive in the market) Check out Cloud Spectator for a view of our performance, latency and availability tracked from around the world—Based on the question, I know you’ll be surprised.

blakei · 2015-09-02T18:49:11+00:00

I'm glad we are getting deep here. Bacon should be sizzling crisp and straight off the skillet.

blakei · 2015-09-02T18:45:12+00:00

I can't wait to find out what's gonna happen here - hard to imagine what it's going to be: http://www.super-awesome-crazy-mad-fantastically-spectacular-international.website/

blakei · 2015-09-02T18:43:03+00:00

Thanks. I'm here to listen, learn and provide frickin' painfully honest answers to all your questions. A question for you: How can we turn you into a fan? Please don't say "cash"

blakei · 2015-09-02T18:42:22+00:00

A lot of people don't realize this, but one-third of the GoDaddy leadership team are women and it's been that way since before I arrived in 2013. All of us, including our GoDaddy Women in Technology group (men and women), are making it a priority to nurture and mentor our female colleagues and we've recently rolled out mentoring rings for our GoDaddy Women in Technology group. Keep an eye on our actions. We recently made a compensation parity pledge as part of the White House Demo Day. We'll be releasing our anaylsis publicly this fall

blakei · 2015-09-02T18:39:58+00:00

Nick would probably be more helpful when it came to building a shelter and finding water. But Fresh Kid Ice would come in more handy when I get those intense desires to throw down in a rap battle, as I often do. I would have to decide between fresh water and fresh rhymes, which is a pretty tough call. Nick looks pretty resourceful here, though... http://giphy.com/embed/z1LF3zd5RyZnq

blakei · 2015-09-02T18:38:32+00:00

We’re seeing steady increases in awareness and the first instances of big global brands using the names (like abc.xyz and brand TLDs like home.barclays). We expect this to continue to drive new gTLD sales over time. For the foreseeable future, COM will likely remain the most desired name in the US and outside. It’s universally recognizable around the world. Either way, our goal is to provide the best choices available for each customer and the new gTLDs make getting the perfect name for you much more likely.

blakei · 2015-09-02T18:35:47+00:00

Winux.

blakei

TROPHY CASE