Go Daddy to Sell Itself to K.K.R. and Silver Lake | Hacker News Reader

Go Daddy to Sell Itself to K.K.R. and Silver Lake

dealbook.nytimes.com

32 pointsdavewiner19 comments

To answer questions about stock - most employees won't care. As far as I know - the last time they were planning to go public only the senior executives were issued any options/stock grants. There was no standard practice of issuing stock to 'regular' engineers.

Congrats to Bob Parsons, GoDaddy is pretty much the poster boy for bootstrapping (although Bob was already quite wealthy from a previous business). Apparently many people don't agree with how he ran the business and you are free to have your opinion, but I think most of the controversy at the end of the day was isolated to a few legally pressured decisions (regarding shutting down web sites, such as rate a cop) and a few bad apple executives (buying/selling domains at their own auctions). On the whole, I've been a happy Go Daddy customer for 10 years now and haven't had a single issue.

Ah yes, godaddy's few, small, and easy to overlook issues such as

* Unusable interface

* Overpriced domains (overpriced everything, actually)

* Questionable spam practices such as calling you at all hours of the day and spamming your email desperately trying to get you to buy more godaddy products

* More ads than content on shopping cart and product pages

* Pages with huge "CONTINUE (and add $29.99/mo email+superAWESOMETASTIC email hosting to cart)" and tiny "Continue without adding to cart" links

* Support that makes Comcast look fantastic.

* Low quality products overall. Find me one serious developer that would use godaddy's shared or VPS hosting services.

* Random censorship of it's customer's web sites hosted there

* Alleged theft of domains[0]

* Killing of elephants

Godaddy tricks people who don't know better into using their products, then makes an impossible maze of an interface to discourage leaving. Godaddy is like a shameless salesman that will do anything to get you to just buy one more $19.99 something or other. If you model your business after that, best of luck to you, but i won't be a customer any time soon.

[0] I'm not sure if there was ever conclusive proof of this, but it sure looked suspicious. Grain of salt.

The ads and interface have always been a pain, yes. But I wouldn't call their domains overpriced...I've used coupon codes from RetailMeNot and other sites for years and have gotten domains for 7.99/yr (at most). And that's renewals and new domains.

I'd say I'm not the typical GoDaddy customer, with about 8-10 annual domains from coupons...but I'm not dissatisfied.

Gandi.net domains are $15 and come with whois privacy and an SSL cert valid for a year. Name.com domains are $10 always, with frequent no-coupon-code sales at around $7. Namecheap domains are $10 and come with a one year valid SSL cert and whois privacy.

By comparison, without coupons, a godaddy domain is $12, and from looking at their site it appears to be an additional $12 for whois privacy, and i couldn't find their SSL certificates start at $50.

It's true that godaddy runs a ton of promotions that make their domains cheaper, but you're spending a lot of time to get the price down to their competitor's normal prices, and without the extra goodies you get with them.

I've always liked Moniker. Consistently cheap, though not as good as,the gandi combo deal.

I do not recommend name.com. They have really sleazy DNS practices. They setup parking pages for all of your domain names if they aren't overridden with your own records and wildcard subdomains as well.

I feel like there's some sort of universal karma at work. A merger of companies that deserve each other.

And strategic partnerships, too, with Facebook rolling out a Skype-based product next week ;)

>But the company’s most outspoken champion is its founder and chief executive, Robert Parsons. He will remain with the company...

I'm guessing this means the ad campaigns will continue as before? Damn. I was hoping (for a few seconds) that this might clean things up a bit.

Don't worry. I am sure he will suddenly have to leave the company the day before his stock options vest.

It won't help to wait until they do vest.

Congratulations to Bob Parsons. For those of you who don't know, he started as a relatively scrappy entrepreneur; glad to see what appears to be a great outcome for him here.

If you're the founder of a startup, this is worth a few minutes of your time to read:

http://www.bobparsons.me/bp_16_rules.php?ci=21428

That list was actually not a bad read. I did love that he was selling a print of it. That seems like something that is very Godaddyish.

Also, "We aren't here for a long time, but we are here for a good time" has been one of my favorite quotes for awhile. Always makes me laugh.

....annddd tomorrow GoDaddy will announce that 50% of its employees are leaving in fear of a Silver Lake employee option pool repeat

GoDaddy responds: "Well, looks like you won't be getting your options vested then!"

goes to show you don't have to make a product people like, think is "cool", or even one that your peers respect to be wildly successful. Just make it useful and sell sell sell.

I would pay a lot of money for an app that could easily export all my domains and their setting out of godaddy to another registrar/host.

You don't really need an app for that.

I transfered all our domains away from GD and it's actually pretty easy once you get the hang of it.

The settings (mostly just nameservers) transfered automatically.

I wonder if all the Go Daddy employees with stock are fully vested; or maybe this will be Skype vs. Silver Lake, Round II.

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