“Go Daddy” — the world’s largest provider of web services like registering domain names and hosting websites — has opened a new facility in eastern Iowa that could eventually employ 500 workers.
Warren Adelman, the company’s chief operating officer, says they’re immediately hiring 60 new workers for the facility in Hiawatha. “Over the next couple of years we’ll be probably 200 and then we expect 500 over five years, but I believe that we’ll outdo that,” he says. “We tend to grow faster than we think we are.”
The company provides services to eight million customers worldwide and this year “Go Daddy” is managing more than 40 million domain names. The company is expanding in a facility in Hiawatha that has a connection to “Go Daddy” founder Bob Parsons.
“We’re coming back to a building we occupied many, many years ago when Bob Parsons had his company, Parsons Technology, on this very road in this very building,” Adelman says.
Parsons Technology started in Hiawatha in 1984, selling accounting programs to manage household expenses. In 1987, Parsons founded the company which has been going by the name “Go Daddy” since 1999.
You may have seen a “Go Daddy” ad on T.V. during this year’s Super Bowl. Viewers were invited to go see more online, for what was billed as “too hot for TV.” The company’s founder has said “Go Daddy” advertising is sometimes so sexually-suggestive as to be inappropriate. Lieutenant Governor Patty Judge spoke at today’s groundbreaking, and joked with company executives about the ads.
“At this point I’m supposed to tell you thank you, but I want to do is leave a little cliffhanger and tell you: ‘You can see the rest of this speech at http://www.godaddy.com/,” Judge said, to laughter and applause from the crowd.
Adelman, the company executive, waved a skimpy “Go Daddy” shirt in the air during today’s event, joking his public relations crew wanted him to seek out a volunteer from the audience to wear it.
