YouSaid · the spoken record

Aman Bhutani

lines on the record: 65
first: 2024-11-25
most recent: 2024-11-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I don't think I get word. I think she actually went to one of the newer hosting platforms. Yeah. It might have been managed.”
2024-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani on the enduring power of the website · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know if you know how old Dream We Were been end of life for a very long time. Some designer developer built it for her. She would copy the new image to a certain folder, rename it to the name that was in the code, refresh the site and the new picture would get picked up. That's how she updated images. She didn't know how to change the code. And it took a couple of weeks, but we convinced her that she'd be much better off on a new platform. And she finally said, okay, I'm going to pay the $275.”
2024-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani on the enduring power of the website · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What I did was I talked to her three times on the phone. She said, This is really nice to talk to a CEO of a public company. I said, You're one of my biggest customers. You know how many people, like ARPUS 167, I'm asking you to pay $275 or whatever. I said, you're a big customer. You get it after the CEO. She loved it. She talked to some of the tech folks. I asked her how she updates her website.”
2024-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani on the enduring power of the website · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ask the customer X, Y, or Z. The goal is to first understand what the customer wants, solve their problem, and then we have sales motions to try to, you know, because we can end up spending a lot of time with a person serving them. Over the last five years, we don't talk about what our, we have a transactional NPS in care, and it was very, very high when I came from travel to GoDaddy. I was shocked. I was like, that transactional NPS is phenomenal for what I at that point call the call center. Today we've publicly said that our transactional NPS and care is 65 plus. So we're one of those rare companies. If you have a problem, we're going to work very hard to fix it. And we're going to fix it a very, very high percentage of the time. And when we fix it, a lot of customers become customers for life. And then you get the lower churn rate out of that.”
2024-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani on the enduring power of the website · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think people view this as a really tough customer. Retention or customer success vertical, we have a published retention rate for our customer that's 85%. And the way we think about it is that we really think about customer churn, not product churn, right? Because in our customer base, you actually see people who try to business, they got a domain name, it didn't work out. After nine months, 12 months, they need a new idea. They still got to put food on the table or they have the drive to do something. They're going to do something else. Are they doing it with GoDaddy? We want to keep that engagement with them. One of the biggest things I think a lot of businesses are not structured to provide a high level of care. You know, it's sort of treated as a cost center. In our case, the care organization is a true competitive differentiator. We call it guidance. So our care guides, yes, they have some targets for HD and stuff, but they don't have a script. They don't get...”
2024-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani on the enduring power of the website · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we have something called sort of the GoDaddy innovation model, which is based on it's like a staircase. The idea is that everything we do starts out magical. Some human knows how to do it, but none of us understand how it happens. So that's magic, basically. When it scales, you have to get it to be structured, which means it's going to be process powered rather than human-powered. If you can do better with that, you're going to be automated, which means it's machine-powered. And then the highest step in the staircase for us is that it's data powered, which we call it magical again. It's just AI magical. So a number of processes that the company actually, even our corporate functions have targets to drive processes up the staircase and get to that level. The simple idea is that as you go up the staircase, you gather more differentiation, more scale, more personalized experience, even for a process internally. So yeah, it's a big thing, whether it's in our care guides. We have better and better tools for our care guides to be super guides.”
2024-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani on the enduring power of the website · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you started your conversation around Jennai, you said you mostly use Jennai to build something for your customers. And then the kind of conversation shifted to margins and the financial plan. So have you evaluated areas within the organization where your cost to serve each customer can come down using Gen AI?”
2024-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani on the enduring power of the website · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that gives us a CAC advantage. And it is literally built, design, invested in with that view. We don't go out and try to tell the world that we have this offering. That would be prohibitive in terms of marketing. What that allows us to do is it allows us to build an offering, which of course is a multi-year journey to build a competitive commerce offering. It allows us to build it while maintaining a certain burn rate on it, but be able to get to scale because that's one of our competitive advantages. We have almost 21 million paying customers today in that base are a lot of customers that want commerce. In that base are a lot of customers that happily take GoDaddy. We have good conversion rates on it. You're right, you've got to find your angle, right? You've got to have angle or your view into it. Otherwise, it's just too hard.”
2024-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani on the enduring power of the website · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you know, entering an adjacency, especially a large one that's growing fast, is always going to be difficult because it's crowded. It's not quite white space, right? There's a lot of players in it already. Our positioning is very, very clear on the commerce piece. We actively market our commerce offering only to our existing basic customers.”
2024-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani on the enduring power of the website · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So now that you're moving into all of this adjacent white space, like you said, how do you compete against the likes of Shopify and all? Because they are coming at it from a different angle. And what's it that makes you unique and different as of now and kind of the plan ahead?”
2024-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani on the enduring power of the website · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And sometimes people say, why do you sometimes say you have no time? And then say you have all the time in the world. So it depends on the context, doesn't it?”
2024-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani on the enduring power of the website · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, if the question is is the rate of innovation continuing to accelerate, I think it is. There's this idea of gradually then suddenly and tech follows that cycle again and again and the suddenly parts are getting steeper and steeper, right? OpenAI had more users faster than the company before. I don't know about any one company. I think technology is moving so fast that it has a disruption cycle built into it. I think at GoDaddy we've worked very hard to make sure that we can enter new businesses and continue to grow the company and that's worked really well for us. The last few years to the team I often say that you might have time, I have no time at all. I got to make everything happen now. But at the same time, for the right idea, I got all the time in the world.”
2024-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani on the enduring power of the website · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We do. We're actually, depending on how you count it, we're either the second largest contributor or third largest contributor. You can go to Pi for the future and it's published data. You can look at it.”
2024-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani on the enduring power of the website · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I don't know how the lawsuit's going to resolve, but I do understand why it happens. And I think you got two big players in the WordPress space taking different positions. And it's got to play out over time.”
2024-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani on the enduring power of the website · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It makes some assumptions on what the models will cost, but actually, unlike some other people, that's a bit of a smaller expense for us if you compare to others. And the reason is that we have a number of ML models. They're not gen AI models, but a number of ML models internally that do a lot of the heavy lifting on what Arrow does. And we actually have try very hard to minimize how much we would have to pay somebody else. Because I always remind the team, I tell everyone I came to GoDaddy Arpu was 167. We crossed 210 last quarter in those $210. We got to pay the cogs. We got to pay our salaries. We got to market this product. We got to invest in it. We still got to have margin that starts with a three handle. So with a gross margin mid-60s and an operating margin with a three handle, you don't have a lot. You got to make every bit work.”
2024-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani on the enduring power of the website · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we're making good progress. It'll happen earlier. Yeah. Yeah. But when we did that presentation, things are changing so fast just between February and November, so much has changed in Ero, like the take rate, the uptake, the engagement, believe it or not, we've had 3 million people discover ERO. We've had over half of them engage with some part of Aero as that engagement deepens, we know that leads to monetization. So I think it'll happen sooner, a bit sooner than we expected, but we're going to keep driving that discovery and engagement number.”
2024-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani on the enduring power of the website · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, we're still in the investment cycle on Aero. We have really good early data for Aero. So we're going to continue to invest. In fact, I've publicly said in earnings calls that while we have significant monetization opportunities that are being tested, my primary metrics are discovery and engagement. I want people to discover Arrow all over the world. I want them to have engagement with the different pieces of AeroAir has a lot of different components in it. And those are the two primary metrics I'm focused on. And yes, we'll monetize as needed or as we see. And we did a three-year financial plan. We did investor day and we did that in February of 24. So it's not been a year yet. And in that financial plan, you'll hear me say there is no arrow in this. There's zero dollars for arrow in the three-year financial plan. There will be some return, but I didn't want even to have our CFO guide to it. Yeah.”
2024-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani on the enduring power of the website · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think it's a fact of life than what we tell customers all the time is that, yes, you should use the platforms to reach people and reach new people, but ultimately you should bring them to whatever is your website or your experience or your store that you want, because that allows you to do that. And the internet offers this amazing capability where now if I start a brand, let's say it's the same example homemade jewelry, if there are 100,000 people in the world out of 7 plus billion who are interested in my jewelry, they can all reach me through my website and transact with me. And technology allows us to do all of that. One person can run that whole thing. And I think that's just continuing to happen. Yes, the platforms and many of them don't allow links out, but that need for the person buying to be able to see your full. If I see an article from you on a platform, yes, it's interesting, but if it engages me, then I want to see the full picture of what you've got to offer. And I'm going to get that on your way.”
2024-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani on the enduring power of the website · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Google is between Google search and YouTube is very large for traffic. I think social is continuing to grow for sure, but I think Google still has the dominant position.”
2024-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani on the enduring power of the website · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think the more you see this data, you see this AI, the more important it's going to be what the human element is. And I want to believe that, and I do believe that.”
2024-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani on the enduring power of the website · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Believe me, I can't do anything too exciting about it. Maybe give the mom a few ideas on how to structure it. But that is a real business. It may put food on the table. It might just give her joy and satisfaction in life. But that's a real thing. And I think it's very hard to replace that. And I think it's only going to make it more popular. PR line at GoDaddy, I'm gonna mess this up because I didn't read it carefully enough. But it says something like welcome to the smallest Black Friday ever. This Black Friday, our services show that more customers in the US want to buy from small businesses, in fact, and get this, they're willing to pay more to buy from a small business than buy it from the big business. You don't hear that way often, but this year in Black Friday, that's where customers, consumers are saying.”
2024-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani on the enduring power of the website · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My fundamental belief, and maybe I want to believe it rather than prove it, my fundamental belief is that AI can generate data, platforms can keep trying to take more and more of the data, and they're definitely creating supply and demand. It's not like they're just eating everything, they're creating the supply too. They're creating content that lead to people using a lot of data or bandwidth. But my fundamental belief is that the more AI grows in that, the more important your words are going to be on the verge because you are involved with it. And no AI is doing what you're doing. And the same thing is true for our customer. If you look at the micro businesses, if a mom decides to sell jewelry online,”
2024-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani on the enduring power of the website · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So I worked in another business where the large platform companies, including Google, are very large. And the hypothesis has existed for over a decade that the large platform companies will continue to take more and more of the traffic which they have, it's true, or the data suggests so, and that it will lead to fewer website or fewer domains and so on. And that will be a loss for the open and free internet. That will be a big loss because the internet was built around this idea that anywhere in the world, of course, if you're not on the great firewall or something, but anywhere in the world, you can reach any piece of information in the world in a very, very flat manner. You just have to type a URL and HTTP takes care of it. It's amazing. It's unbelievable what happens on the internet, right?”
2024-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani on the enduring power of the website · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But the idea that the internet will be full of AI generated content that will go into LOM training data and that our search behaviors will change because OpenAI will just tell us the answer in search GPT or Gemini will just tell us the answer. There's an incredible pressure on the very notion that actually those platforms will continue to send traffic to websites as opposed to all of our app-bound marketing is on video platforms. And the last step is you come to my website to convert.”
2024-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani on the enduring power of the website · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The guy from Rumble is like, I'll buy from him. I mean, it's every market. I think, so a little bit, let me bring you to that example I took since you talked about the tool we just launched. You know, you may not be a technologist. By the way, lawyers are like coders. Contracts are sort of my own show. Yeah. You are. And so there's a logic mindset to it. And you're absolutely right that those things in Google and search is changing. But you are a very sophisticated person when it comes to understanding that those things are changing. I'm talking about a customer that builds a website. Cells, pressure washers, but does not put the word pressure wash in the title or the H1 tag. If you know coding, those are really important if you want to rank. That's no secret. That's not exposing some secret Google algorithm.”
2024-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani on the enduring power of the website · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, that Google is static, which it is not, and that Google search will continue to be a reliable source of traffic over the long term. And all of those things seem very like Google, will Google be a going concern in the Trump too administration? It's like a little bit up in the air, right? Like that's. I think it was yesterday the Department of Justice is like, we're going to make you sell Chrome.”
2024-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani on the enduring power of the website · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Warned you that this would be a therapy session for me about the web before we started. You brought up Google. This is where I think I have existential fears about the internet that we live in. And what I specifically mean is the idea that you can do automated SEO implies one, that there's a right answer to SEO. It's not automated.”
2024-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani on the enduring power of the website · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of giving enough for free that everyone values it and holding something really important back that the percentage that's willing to pay for pays for it and we can value base price that and make it work for everyone.”
2024-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani on the enduring power of the website · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The reason she emailed me and called me was because that little delta in the air was a big deal for her. It was a huge deal. It may not, other people may say, what's $50 a year for this customer. It was really a lot of money. So I would say the customers, the micro-business customer is very, very sensitive. What I will tell you, we have a test right now where Aero scans your website and tells you what you should change in that website. It'll do it for you too, but you can do it manually yourself. Then this is on managed WordPress, and it tells you how to improve your SEO or improve your labeling, improve your navigation, improve your content, make your pictures lighter so it loads faster. It will go through your site and give you the top recommendation and order them. And we have a price tag on that right now that's being able to be tested. And I would tell you so far the signal is encouraging. And that's just one of many paywalls we're testing right now, where it's really AI functionality that has real price tag. And look, not everyone's going to pay for it, so we're going to have to find some balance.”
2024-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani on the enduring power of the website · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, no, there is consumer sensitivity, especially for our consumer. I'll tell you quick story. The first customer I really talked in depth was an HR person at roofing company. Her husband had two barbershops and she was a webmaster. She was upset because her $200 a year subscription was now going to be increased because the dreamweaver instance we supported for her, that was end of life 15 years when I talked to her was not working anymore.”
2024-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani on the enduring power of the website · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They know something I don't know because I think it's too early to say. I think it's changing so fast. I think this is going to change a lot over the next year or two.”
2024-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani on the enduring power of the website · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The way we use it on our platform is that we have a single API that whether I want to write a review for my directs or GoDaddy's system is writing something for its customer, every goes through one common set of APIs. It's easier to do moderation and things. And behind that API, all the models connected. So we have a connection to OpenAI. We have a connection to Gemini. We have a connection to the Microsoft Azure version of OpenAI, right? And that allows us to do some testing at the API tier to see where we're getting a better response and frankly often a cheaper response that's just as good. Because we can pass signal to the API tier and the API tier can decide, okay, I'm going to use this model instead of this one. What's the response just as good or not?”
2024-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani on the enduring power of the website · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Still using those cables, even those companies went away. We're using that cable today, and they put in so much cable. They didn't imagine there was going to be video on the internet back. Or maybe they did imagine and invested really early. But I think that's the cycle of technology. In many cases of technology, I don't know from electricity to mobile phones to satellites to now AI and the internet. Large investments have to be made to make it available to everyone. And then sometimes the usage comes over time.”
2024-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani on the enduring power of the website · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“didn't really meet a true need for the customer. Yeah, you gave something away, and maybe some people use it. But the real breakthroughs are when you create something, get the customer to use it, and they're actually willing to pay more for it. And we have that data, right? We are able to see that data in a year. In terms of the very large investments in AI, typically what I say to people is I remember when the internet came along and there were some very big companies putting cables all over the world.”
2024-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani on the enduring power of the website · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, so the investment level in Aero is much smaller than building a 500 million dollar model. It's nowhere near that, right? And because ARO is way, very close to the customer, within one year we can test 100 tests to see whether it's actually creating value or not. And by the way, does it actually move customer willingness to pay or not? Because if you gave the customer something and they're not willing to pay more for it,”
2024-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani on the enduring power of the website · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I guess what I'm at that's the general AI case. I've heard that from everybody. I'm saying specifically for GoDaddy, you had to invest in the aero platform. And when I talk to the big companies, there are big investments in foundation models and H100s. Yeah. It's hazy how you get from that to what they think will happen. Is it hazy for you? We're going to invest an arrow and that's going to drive growth. No.”
2024-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani on the enduring power of the website · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, if generative AI can start them off on an about us page, that makes sense or give them an image for a logo that they're like, oh, this is pretty good and I'll customize it from here. That's a fantastic start. Because a lot of people are not going to start this side hustle or their micro business because even if they have a template and everything, when they actually have to choose the images or type in the text, they may not be as proficient in English, frankly. Or they're just not able to bring it together. They're really good plumber. Just not so good at writing about how good a plumber they are. If Gen AI can do that, I think it's a fantastic thing, right? We don't look weirdly at people who use calculators to do math, do we? And I think Gen AI does that work for text for our customers.”
2024-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani on the enduring power of the website · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so in our business, the piece we're really focused on is kind of that last mile on how generative AI adds value to our customer. And one of the things we always say at the company is, yes, we are going to take some of the friction out for the customer to build something, but we're always going to make sure that the customer is in control of their brand. That it's ultimately their decision. It shouldn't just automatically happen. It should happen magically and then they should decide whether they like it or edit it. And what we find is that for the customer that we have, they don't have copywriters. They were saying you started as a copywriter. They don't have those people. They don't have lawyers to advise them. They don't have marketing people to advise them. They don't have a webmaster.”
2024-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani on the enduring power of the website · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't really quite know what it means. I have some ideas. Do you see the scale of that investment, the decision to go after we're going to use generative AI to make things for our customers at the same scale or return on investment as the big players are seeing?”
2024-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani on the enduring power of the website · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's like you can get to, I want to buy a donation all the way to I'm interfacing with the government to tell them I have a business. It's a lot. We played a few tests in that. You can set up the website for you. This is a big investment. Today, as we speak, we're competing with Sachin Adela, who's on stage at Microsoft Ignite talking about scaling laws. But all the big companies are telling me this is a platform shift.”
2024-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani on the enduring power of the website · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As you want to test, you have a test you've designed and you've got the result. When you run it, you put it there. If the data makes the decision, maybe 0.1% of the time we're going to go against it, but normally the data is leading us and the decision is delegated because the metrics are clear, the prioritization is clear how you track that metric is clear. In the 1% of times, let's say it's one way to orse, let's say you need a HIPO decision, HIPO being highest paid, person's opinion wins, right? It's kind of the anti in my mind of data-driven decisions. But if it has to be a HIPO decision, well, then let's reduce that number to as small as possible. And then whoever's the best person to make it, you know, if I'm the best person to make it, let it come to me. If the chief architect should make it, then he should make it. But you try to reduce those decisions to the fewest possible.”
2024-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani on the enduring power of the website · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So at the company, we have two large transformations over the last five years. The first is that it's about evolving our software platform, and that's really about GoDaddy being our domains and hosting company and margins when your domain player or your gross margins. But when you're a software player, you have much higher gross margins. So let's build software, which was transition for the company. But your question is really about our second transformation, which we call that we make decisions based on evidence. So I'm a big believer in belief. I want to believe in things that are not there yet, but I'm also equally big on the scientific method. The approach for us very much is if you have an idea, I don't want to spend a lot of time talking about it. If it can be tested, just test it. Once you've tested it, there's a Slack channel at GoDaddy. You can just put it in GD experiments and anyone in the company can see it. You have the same thing that's now taught to first graders or kindergartners. You have an observation of the world. You have a high-level.”
2024-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani on the enduring power of the website · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“His job or her job. Your CLO is always going to do that. That is their job. What I want to do is create an environment where I have the head of the independence business there, the head of the partners business there, the head of the commerce business there, and I'm there and the CEO is there. And now suddenly there's five, six, seven of us that want to lean in into the risks and want to explore it. And of course, we can use our judgment and take a step back and say, maybe this is the risk we don't want to take, but we're not going to get stuck in a room where the minority because then this majority will win. And you don't want that.”
2024-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani on the enduring power of the website · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Set up because those corporate leaders, it's designed to be in the productivity zone and productivity zone's job is to reduce risk. So at GoDaddy, the leadership team is called the GoDaddy Leadership Team. It is specifically weighed where the leaders of the rooms, the verticals, the business unit leaders are part of the group. So, in any room where we're making an assessment at my level on whether we should take a risk or not, in the number of people, there are more risk takers than not. Your CFO is always going to tell you to be more conservative.”
2024-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani on the enduring power of the website · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the way I think about this exact comment about risk is that I think it's a function of who is in the room when the decision is made. And the challenge, and this is one of the reasons I don't use the operating model that's fully functional, I think if you have a lead, and it works great for many companies, it just happens to be that I prefer it different or what we have works for us well. But in the functional structure, you end up at the CEO table, people who are leading a lot of corporate functions. So let's say that you have somebody that's chief revenue officer or somebody that's CTO, somebody that's chief legal officer, chief people officer, chief risk officer maybe. And I think the numbers matter. If there are four corporate leaders in a room and two people that are accountable for what is the performance zone for the business and making money, you're going to end up with a lower risk decision making.”
2024-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani on the enduring power of the website · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, inside of that, and that's fairly common, we were joking before that I'm a journalist, I just spend money. I don't make a dime. That's one of the great perks of being on the editorial side of the house. But what you find often is those models don't have risk, like priced into them. If I take a riskier bet, I might get an outsized return, but inside of that dynamic, it's hard to quantify the risk. It's hard to say, okay, there's actual real growth here, but we have to stop doing this. So we can use AI as an example. We're going to forward invest a bunch into AI because we think that's really useful and everyone's talking about it. Actually, if you look at the whole of the AI industry right now, no one knows how this is going to make us some money at the scale that the investment is currently driving.”
2024-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani on the enduring power of the website · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I said, look, if it's pain, bring it to me and I will help you resolve it. If it's pressure, just realize that it's designed to do that. If you feel pressure talking to the other tier, it was built that way because you want the accelerator brake model. Cars run better with an accelerator and a brake.”
2024-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani on the enduring power of the website · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have to depend on somebody to get it. And the horizontals that we have, especially as you get lower down into the tech platform or the marketing, it works in an accelerator brake model. The business unit wants to spend as much as possible, as quickly as possible for their customer, but now they have to talk to a CMO who says, hey, wait a minute, actually this other business unit will get a much better return on this investment. So why are you getting this? Somebody else should get it. That same marketing team that was the break on the business unit is an accelerator because marketers want to spend as much as possible, but then you've got the tech organization under it that says, hey, here's the media mix model. It runs on ML, and here's what it's saying. Here's the returns. You want to spend in this channel, but actually the data says you should spend on this other one. So you have this accelerator brake model through the structure, and that causes what a lot of people call pain in the organization. I call it pressure.”
2024-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani on the enduring power of the website · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the biggest thing about our structure is by building a customer back model that goes into the same brand. We have dedicated people that focus on solving a certain customer's problem because as the company grows and addresses the needs of different types of customers, the same group can't really at the same leadership table divert their attention to two different customers. The people in the company, and because we're the world largest domain player, this is a bit of a niche thing, but we serve the largest group of domain investors in the world. The people who serve independence should not be thinking about domain investors. That should not happen. And that's what the operating model does. It puts the customer population first and then the business unit and then the business unit worries about the go-to-market, the product, the P&L, and so on. So that's the positive part. The trade-off is that anytime you have a many-to-one relationship, you're going to have some friction, you're going to have some prioritization conflict, you're going to have people saying, I'm not getting my part enough.”
2024-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani on the enduring power of the website · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Annual HR report. Every person would raise you gave them all the money for everyone. What do they get and send me a link to the code base? Because if your code is structured a certain way, I can tell you which two leaders don't work well with each other, everything about it. Your code base actually tells you, and it's Conway's law. Conway's law says that the structure and organization is the function of the relationship of the organization that design it. So it's absolutely true. Your org chart should tell you or your operating model, not just your org chart, because you want ORC chart, you want accountability structure, you want culture, you want your OpMex, you want a few things. If you have the operating model, if it doesn't tell you 80% plus, you basically don't have an operating model.”
2024-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani on the enduring power of the website · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT