Hosting provider Go Daddy has named veteran executive Blake Irving as its Chief Executive Officer of Go Daddy, effective January 7. Irving, a former Microsoft executive and most recently Chief Product Officer of Yahoo, will also join the Go Daddy Board of Directors. He succeeds Scott Wagner of KKR, a GoDaddy investor, who has held the position of interim CEO since July.
"Blake Irving's deep technology experience and his history of developing new cutting-edge products and leading large global teams make him an enormously compelling choice to drive Go Daddy to the next level of its domestic and global growth,” said Executive Chairman and founder Bob Parsons in a release. “Go Daddy has made great strides with Scott Wagner as CEO, and we look forward to building on that in the future."
The new CEO reflects Go Daddy’s strategic shift, as the world's largest mass market hosting provider has been expanding its products and services beyond domains and hosting The Scottsdale, Ariz. company has nearly 11 million customers, a good majority of them small business customers. As part of its effort to expand into ancillary and complementary services for small businesses, Go Daddy recently acquired Outright.com, a cloud-based financial management application. The company also formed a partnership with DudaMobile to launch mobile Website Builder, a service that automates the integration of Web and mobile sites to save businesses time and expand their customer reach.
In addition to his role as Chief Product Officer at Yahoo, Irving was also corporate VP of Windows Live, Microsoft’s online services portfolio that includes Hotmail and MSN Messenger. There, he had a part in the creation and operation of Microsoft's global online services, launching several new products, including MSN Messenger and growing Hotmail from 7 million to 290 million users. As Chief Product Officer at Yahoo, he developed and rolled out the unified product vision and strategy.
So Irving is a product and services-type; Go Daddy is getting deeper into products and services, so this seems like a good fit. Irving left Yahoo in April 2012 when Marissa Meyer was coming in as CEO and there were a lot of lay-offs of product people.
“As a long time Go Daddy customer, I have seen firsthand an organization that is committed to its customers 24 hours a day and seven days a week and yet there still remains much more we can do to enhance the customer experience,” said Irving. “This is a fantastic opportunity, and I can't wait to hit the ground running in January."
