Blake Irving on Inclusive Culture Transformation that Drives Business Success
I had the opportunity to host a fire-side chat with Blake Irving, a former colleague of mine from Microsoft and most recently the former CEO and Board Member at GoDaddy. The occasion was Madrona Venture Group’s annual CEO Summit.
For our CEO Summit we seek out voices of leaders who have done great and hard things. Blake joined GoDaddy in 2012 when it was known to the outside world as the company that did shocking (and often offensive) Super Bowl ads. What he did over the coming years was shift the culture in the company to the point that it was recognized as one of the most inclusive workplaces and he also took it public. Irving retired earlier this year.
Knowing Blake over the years, I was expecting a passionate, honest and straight-from-the-heart kind of conversation and that’s exactly what it was. There were several great stories and leadership insights that came through in that conversation. Below are excerpts of that conversation.
The GoDaddy brand in the tech world in which I’d grown up, wasn’t respected and was thought of as a provocative and off-color marketer that sold domains on the cheap. I admit I thought the same thing when queried about the CEO role. When the search firm first sent me the deck introducing the company, I was blown away to see that the company had nearly $1B in bookings, 80% brand recognition in the US, 85% customer retention, 10 million customers, and incredible cash flow. It seems that every time they had ran a provocative Super Bowl ad, they got a substantial increase in domains market share and bookings. The founder, Bob Parsons, had never taken a dime of outside capital and had grown an entrepreneurial culture that Jim Collin’s describes as “a genius with a thousand helpers”. That had produced that billion dollar outcome. KKR, Silverlake and TCV partnered and purchased the company and were now looking for a full time CEO. In reviewing that intro-deck and through conversations with investors, board members, and senior management, it became clear there was a very big play at GoDaddy. I believed there was a huge potential to put a sweeping vision and bold strategy around small businesses, coupled with operational discipline and brilliant people.
I accepted the role in November 2012. Upon announcing me as the new CEO role, I received a fair amount of “WTF” emails asking what I was thinking. Those emails gave me the perfect opportunity to tell those naysayers what I had found and what I believed could be a bold future for the company globally.
Fast forward to today, and GoDaddy has an operational and tech platform at scale focused on small businesses and anyone with “an idea” around the world. Our competitive levers are quality, speed, breadth of product offering, great marketing focused on our customer and our value proposition, and much less on pricing. Our first year after the IPO we continued with mid-teens growth on nearly $2b in bookings, and had expanded from a domestic-only business to many countries, and we continued to experience mid-teens growth consistently, and great customer growth. While that growth rate might not resonate — on that kind of base, it is substantial.
Seek to understand
When I first got to GoDaddy in Scottsdale, I went on a 100-day listening tour while simultaneously pitching my vision. I used what I call an “assail and disarm” strategy by assailing some cultural artifact or process that I know employees thought didn’t make sense. As soon as I started to point out things I thought were broken, everyone else felt comfortable doing the same. I started this with timecards. It seems that everyone in the company was filling them out, and I mean everyone. The CFO, CMO, head of Engineering. I didn’t understand why and I assailed them and said we weren’t going to do it for salaried employees anymore. Period. How could we hire folks from other companies like Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Ebay where no salaried employee signs a time card. They’re trusted to work their asses off and no one tracks it but their manager. I harangued on this for a week and simultaneously abolished time cards. This opened a floodgate of other cultural artifacts that we cleaned up. This established trust, and together we cleaned up a lot of processes that were getting in our way of being a great team.
One of the questions I asked employees was what they thought of our reputation in the market. While they were very proud of the jobs they did for our customers they also said they were embarrassed by the way we portrayed ourselves publicly. Our customer care employees told me that they often had to start customer services calls with an apology about a provocative ad — and it was embarrassing. I asked if they’d like to change that portrayal and those advertisements. There was a resounding yes.
During these very early days, it was essential that I make some great hires of like-minded individuals who could help achieve that bold vision, and I was able to do that. But I also started re-recruiting the employees who were already there, gaining alignment and engagement from those employees who wanted to grow the company.
At my first board meeting, we showed a video called “Manifesto to Kick-Axx”. Which was essentially GoDaddy employees looking into the camera and telling our customers what we do for them and how much we appreciate them. I told them, “this is what we’ll look like inside and outside” going forward. It’s all about proud employees serving happy customers what will benefit shareholders. In that order.
Hiring and promoting women is good for business
To turn the company’s reputation around from being a provocative advertiser at the expense of women, I knew it had to be an inside out change and it had to be dramatic. We changed our ads to show women business owners using our product. I set out to hire some of brightest women I had worked with in my history, letting them know how different this company was going to be going forward and how they could be part of that change, and what an impact we will collectively make, and honestly, how it would benefit them personally. I hired Elissa Murphy of Microsoft and Yahoo as our CTO, Karen Tilman from Cisco, as our CCO and Betsy Raphael as our first female board member. We were building a groundswell and more importantly were putting our money where our mouth was. Last year, 50% of our new grad developer hires were women. That dramatic shift took time, commitment and the entire organization building a belief system and a culture that was great for women and showed real appreciation.
There’s a study by Stanford’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research that tells us that men feel confident and willing to do a job if they are 30% prepared for a role. Yet, women who are 80% prepared will say “I need that 20% more, and I’ll be ready”. In line with that, Elissa Murphy said she, one day, wanted to be a CTO but she had some on the job learning to do. And I countered, why not learn that other 20% here in role? She agreed and did a great job (she’s a VP Engineering at Google now).
I guess that the point of all that story telling is that you have to be committed to a vision, and for change and really pour yourself into it changing the company from the inside out — and you have to do it simultaneously in every commitment you make and action you take.
