Aman Bhutani, a self-taught techie, is CEO of tech-based GoDaddy

December 28, 2021.

In 2019, Aman Bhutani took over as chief executive of GoDaddy. The Scottsdale, Arizona-based U.S. company, enables businesses, organizations and individuals to register and own domain names for websites, as well as offers cloud-based hosting and data analytics of the sites, in collaboration with Word Press and others.

GoDaddy has more than 20 million customers, including more than 9 million outside the U.S. Through its online services, its customers own and register more than 82 million domain names. In 2013, GoDaddy launched in India, its first localized market outside the U.S. The company, with over 9,000 employees, has an enterprise value of $18 billion, including about $4.5 billion in debt.

Over the past two years, given the pandemic restrictions on in-person shopping and office work, numerous online businesses, from retailers like Amazon and Wayfair (Niraj Shah, co-founder and CEO) to video communication platforms like Zoom and Vimeo, (Anjali Sud, CEO) have seen sharp revenue increases and big gains in their stock prices.

GoDaddy, while a service provider to online businesses, was not a major beneficiary of this pandemic-fueled trend. In 2020, it had revenues of $3.3 billion, a relatively modest 11% rise over the previous year. In contrast, Vimeo’s revenues jumped 44% to $283 million in 2020, though from a much smaller base. Yet while many newer online businesses continue to lose money, in 2020 GoDaddy had an operating profit of $272 million.

In 2020, GoDaddy “introduced new tools, templates, and enhanced social media commerce integrations to make it easier than ever for entrepreneurs to quickly get online, create impactful content, schedule social media posts, track performance metrics, connect with their customers, and start selling their products online,” Bhutani, 45-years-old, stated in his 2020 annual letter to shareholders.

In the third quarter of 2021, GoDaddy began offering point-of-sale devices, integrated payments and other solutions for online and offline businesses. It priced these products aggressively, apparently given similar offerings from Squarespace, Shopify and other competitors.

The new business solutions, “combined with a consistent, cash-generative business, give us confidence in our ability to pursue new opportunities and drive profitable growth at scale" Bhutani said in a statement. GoDaddy has a major advantage since it has access to millions of potential customers, who already use its domain registry, web hosting and other services. So, assuming the new solutions are productive, easy to use and secure, they could bring additional, recurring revenue streams for GoDaddy.

From 2015 to 2018, prior to Bhutani becoming CEO, GoDaddy’s stock price quadrupled to around $80. Since 2018, the stock has traded between $60 to $80; it fell briefly to $40 in March 2020, as the pandemic lockdown began in the U.S.

This week, publicly filed share ownership documents revealed that Starboard Value bought a 6.5% stake in Go Daddy, at a reported cost of $800 million. Starboard, a New York investment adviser managing about $6.2 billion in assets, is known as an activist investor. It states that it invests “in deeply undervalued companies and actively engage with management teams and boards of directors to identify and execute on opportunities to unlock value for the benefit of all shareholders.”

Starboard has a history of buying stakes in companies and then seeking changes in board members, management, and strategy, aiming to expand profit margins by restructuring, cost-cutting, sale of assets and other actions, all with the focus of boosting the stock price.

From 2015 to 2019, prior to Go Daddy, Amanpal (Aman) Singh Bhutani, was the president of the Brand Expedia Group at Expedia, an online travel company. From 2010 to 2015, he was the chief technical officer, in charge of worldwide engineering, also at Expedia, which has a market value of $27 billion. Earlier, he was a senior vice president, technology, at JPMorgan Chase. From 2002 to 2008, he was the senior vice president of e-commerce technology at Washington Mutual, a bank which was acquired by JPMorgan in 2008.

From 2000 to 2002, Bhutani was the founder and technical lead of Critical Sense, a startup. Earlier, from 1996 to 1998, he was a senior engineer at ConneXions Technology, a human resources consultancy in New Delhi.  

Bhutani has an unusual background for a CEO of a technology-driven company like GoDaddy, as well as for his earlier senior roles in technology at major companies. Unlike many Indian CEOs of American technology and technology based companies, he is not a graduate of the renowned Indian Institutes of Technology. In fact he does not have a computer science or an engineering degree. Instead, he received a diploma in software engineering from Aptech, a Mumbai based vocational and skills training institute.

Evidently Bhutani has acquired technical skills and knowledge largely through self-learning, which have enabled him to rapidly climb the executive ladder at technology companies. He is guided by SOUL, a short form for insights from his father, who was a refugee in India, following the partition of British India in 1947. S is something you hunger for, he told Entrepreneur.com; O is opportunity; U is being unique, doing unexpected things that sets you apart from others; and L is learning.

Bhutani earned a B.A. in economics from Delhi University; he has an M.B.A. from Lancaster University in Lancashire, Great Britain. A member of the board of The New York Times Company, he and his family live in Seattle.

In 2020, Bhutani received a total compensation of $3.7 million from GoDaddy. In 2019, he was paid $14 million, mostly in stock. He owns $13 million of GoDaddy stock.  

Has Starboard invested in GoDaddy expecting the recent services it launched to boost revenues and profit margins? Or does it intend to try to control the board and change the company’s business strategy? So far, Starboard has not announced its intentions, as it sometimes does after making an investment. Starboard doesn’t mind a company’s CEO and board “being afraid of them,” Mark Gerstein told CNBC. Gerstein is a lawyer at New York-based Latham & Watkins, advising companies on their defense against activist funds like Starboard.

Since 2013 till this year, Starboard did not lose a shareholder proxy vote for a seat on a company’s board of directors, according to Reuters. But in September this year, Starboard failed in its attempt to oust the CEO and take control of the board of Box, a cloud content management business based in Redwood City, California. The Box management prevailed against Starboard with an investment and backing from KKR, a New York based private equity fund with a market value of $45 billion.

KKR was a former major shareholder in GoDaddy. Herald Chen, the former head of KKR’s U.S. technology, media and telecom investing, is a board member of GoDaddy. Chen is president of AppLovin, a software-based platform for mobile application developers. It has a market value of $35 billion and is roughly half owned by KKR. Will KKR assist Bhutani in fending off Starboard, if it seeks to change the board, management and strategy at Go Daddy?

Whether or not KKR backs Bhutani, he can rely on yet another insight from his father, which he mentioned to Entrepreneur.com. How do you ride a tiger - a metaphor for change, a constant part of life - his father asked when he was growing up in India. You ride on the neck to be “focused and aligned” with where it is going; not near its tail to avoid being thrown off.

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