How Did I Get Here?

Blake Irving

Chief executive officer, GoDaddy
from
  • Education
  • Newbury Park High School, Newbury Park, Calif., class of 1977
  • San Diego State University, class of 1983
  • Graziadio School of Business and Management, Pepperdine University, Los Angeles, class of 1988
  • Work Experience
  • 1981–88
    Digital typographer, manager of font support centers, Xerox
  • 1989–92
    Product manager, Compaq
  • 1992–98
    Product manager, Microsoft
  • 1999–2007
    Corporate vice president for global cloud platforms, Microsoft
  • 2007–08
    World traveler
  • 2009–10
    Professor of business, Pepperdine
  • 2010–12
    Executive VP and chief product officer, Yahoo!
  • 2013–Present
    CEO, GoDaddy
  • Life Lessons
  • “Always be a wonderful person to work with.”
    Tweet this
  • “Lead from the front, but be in the mosh pit, not on the stage.”
    Tweet this
  • “Get ahead of the day by working late or getting up early. I wake up at 5 a.m.”
    Tweet this
  •  
    Age 10
  • “I threw myself into things that I loved, and class work wasn’t one of them. Jazz, drumming, art, golf, the beach.”
  • “I got in a shouting match with Steve Ballmer, because we only bundled Windows on half of our product.”
  • With colleagues at Compaq, 1992
  • “The philosophy was to make MSN Messenger as simple as possible in as many languages as possible. We rose to a market share of around 90 percent globally.”
  • “My wife and I traveled with our kids and skateboarded at every place we visited. We did ‘burst’ modes—all of China in 35 days—and then hung out in one place for a month.”
  • “I was only there 20 months. Carol Bartz left [as CEO], and I exited shortly thereafter.”
  • At Yahoo, 2012
  • GoDaddy is a cloud platform for small businesses and also the world’s largest domain registrar
  • San Diego, 1980
  • “I worked on the first technology to automatically scale fonts.”
  • “It’s always hard to find folks who can do reasonable market assessments, so I wrote a curriculum for product planning.”
  • Backstage with Snoop Dogg at GoDaddy’s annual holiday party, 2013
  • “GoDaddy is now in 14 markets in Asia, with more than 14 million customers worldwide, who speak 29 languages and deal in 44 currencies.”