How the 20-year-old GoDaddy went global in less than 5 years

Photo credit: Burst.

This article is part of Tech in Asia’s partnership with The Jay Kim Show where we publish the revised transcripts from the show’s podcast interviews with top entrepreneurs. This is heavily revised from the original show transcripts. For the full interview, go here.

James Carroll is the head of global platform development at GoDaddy. He’s been leading the company’s platform and globalization efforts since 2013.

Twenty-year-old GoDaddy is a household name and has survived the ups and downs of the market. This is because the company can adapt to change. Carroll talked about this and how they expanded globally in just a few years.

How did your tech career start?

I started out probably about 26 or 27 years ago at Microsoft in Ireland. I was working on internationalization and localization. I think my first product was DOS email. I couldn’t speak a word of Swedish, but that’s the product I was working on for about a year.

Then, I moved on to work for Claris, a software subsidiary of Apple. I worked on a full suite of Apple and Claris products on Mac and Windows. Being there for about five years, I also ran a large part of their international and localization efforts.

After that, I moved back to Microsoft in the Bay Area. I held a variety of different roles, from managing the international MSN team to running engineering teams in China, Japan, and Europe. Then, I moved to Redmond for about 14 years, where I ran the Windows international team, which included about 200 different products and rolling them out to maybe 200 different countries around the world. Quite a big effort.

After that, I joined Yahoo. I ran its R&D centers in India, China, and the Middle East and its content and social platforms.

I joined GoDaddy about four and a half years ago and basically came in to help the company go global. In my first three and a half years, I was running all aspects of international—from internationalization to localization, building care centers around the world, and working across every function inside the company.

Now, I’m running the global platform team for GoDaddy.

What was GoDaddy’s expansion strategy?

The company came to realize that if it wanted to get to the next phase, it had to do something different. That’s when Blake Irving, the new CEO, came onboard. A new leadership team was also put in place, and I was a part of it. A new strategy was put in place in terms of what we were going to do over the next three to five years. A part of that strategy was going global.

The company had already seen a lot of interest from around the world. People had been trying to come in from different countries to use the service, getting hit with a US website, having to pay in USD using US payment methods, signing up, and hearing about tax here in the US. It was really a US service.

So, we developed a plan to roll out GoDaddy Global over the next three and a half years. The plan entailed everything you could think of:

• What’s the right offering that we want to take around the world?
• How are we going to localize it?
• How are we going to ensure that we have a locally relevant suite of products that actually meet the needs of small businesses around the world?
• How are we going to transform the company, including all functions, to turn into a global company in a short time?

What is your strategy for Asia?