Who’s Your Go Daddy? looks at Go Daddy CEO Bob Parsons:
When Parsons was doing the pre-IPO dance with Wall Street, he was repeatedly asked if his call center would “scale.”“I said, ‘What do you mean, scale?’” Parsons recalls. He disagreed with investment bankers’ suggestions that, among other things, he should keep headcount low even as he grows. “People think that because we’re an Internet company, we should be less people-intensive. I believe the exact opposite. When it comes to the Internet, people like dealing with people.”
Which is why Parsons has worked so hard to give Go Daddy a personality that, like it or not, sells. Parsons alone, for instance, decided to plaster the Go Daddy name on Michelle’s chest in the 2005 Super Bowl ad. And for the 2006 Super Bowl, he recut the commercial, featuring Michelle appealing to an arbiter of TV decency standards, 13 times before winning approval from ABC — each time taming it down, and each time watching business climb after news reports revealed that he was having to pull back to placate censors. Says Tucows’s Noss, “He played that thing like a maestro.”
For proof, consider this: There are now 860 ICANN-accredited domain-name registrars. Other than Go Daddy, how many can you name?