Blake Irving

Blake Irving playing the drums in grade school

Blake Irving is the Chief Executive Officer and Board Director of the GoDaddy group of companies, the world’s largest domain name provider and web host. Before coming to GoDaddy in 2013, Blake served Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer at Yahoo! where he expanded monthly users to nearly one billion. He also launched 180 new Yahoo! websites worldwide and rolled out products in 23 languages and 30 new markets. Before Yahoo!, Blake spent 15 years at Microsoft creating world-changing consumer products, like NetMeeting and MSN Messenger, and growing Hotmail to the largest mail service in the world. He is a graduate of San Diego State University and received an MBA degree from Pepperdine University.

Early life

Blake Irving was born on August 8, 1959, to James Scott Irving and Patricia Ann Irving in Ohio. Blake’s dad was in the FBI and consequently moved the family around the country until they settled in California when Blake was 7. He lived there with his brother, Scott, and his sisters, Lisa and Lori. Blake’s parents met in the Los Angeles, California area. Both were involved in the jazz music scene while Jim attended school at UCLA. Patty worked at Rand Corporation and put Jim through law school. Both parents continued to foster their passion for music.

Education

Jazz percussion and leading the school drumline were definitive elements of Blake’s high school years

Blake continued to play drums and create art through High School in Southern California, playing in high school bands, jazz quartets, big bands, college bands and competing in Percussive Arts Society (PAS) competitions in jazz and rudimental drumming. Because of his parents’ connections with the Southern California jazz scene, and Blake’s involvement in PAS, Blake was able to play with the Coasters, the Drifters, the Platters, the King Family, Buddy Collette Red Callender, Gerald Wiggins, Kei Akagi, Gary Lefbvre and Jim Ladiana as a teenager.

Blake also privately taught music lessons, as well as wrote music for high school drum lines. He also skateboarded, surfed and often cruised Van Nuys Blvd. on Wednsday nights. He had several favorite drummers at that time, including Steve Gadd, Dave Garibaldi, Louis Belson, Buddy Rich and Terry Bozzio.

Blake with his SDSU collegiate “big” jazz band.

At SDSU and later at Xerox, Blake designed type by day and at night performed live and as a session drummer in Southern California.

Following his parents’ path of “music as avocation,” in 1977 Blake attended Cal State Northridge as a business major. He quickly changed to art with a focus on typography and continued to play in jazz bands.

Career

Xerox

Blake started his professional career at Xerox. In 1980 during his Junior year, Blake was asked to interview and took employment at Xerox Corporation where they had formed an early digital typography group called “The Font Center” as a Digital Typographer. Taking a brief sabbatical to finish up his schooling at San Diego State University Blake continued to play Jazz in SDSU’s stage band and Combos. He lived mostly in Mission beach, surfed, played music, air brushed surf boards, took odd jobs until he graduated. He returned to Xerox in 1983 with a degree in fine art. He was apart of the team in the early PARC days of WYSIWIG,^[1] where he was designing early display and printer fonts. During his time at Xerox he was involved in numerous products and services including: typography, communications on the personal computer, subscription services and back end online advertising. Within Xerox Blake transitioned from designing fonts for displays and printers to working as a PM on printers, then multimedia PCs. While working at Xerox Blake attended Pepperdine University receiving his MBA in 1988 while still playing gigs on weekends. After receiving his MBA and receiving the Chairman’s award for innovation at Xerox Blake took a role at Okidata in Mt Laurel New Jersey as a product manager. Blake left Okidata after receiving a strong offer from Compaq computer one year later.

Compaq

Blake was originally recruited to Compaq to start their printer group but a financial downturn just as he was hired Compaq co-founder Rod Canion to cancel the initiative. From their Blake moved to their multimedia group instead. During Blake’s time at Compaq he Delivered the world’s first on-motherboard sound capability (DeskPro i). This was the company’s first multimedia music and voice capable PC called the DeskPro i. This computer used a chip from analog devices to convert digital to analog and vice versa—this component of an enabling technology that greatly contributed to the tech revolution during this time. The computer had a 16-bit D/A A/D converter and was reasonably inexpensive. While he was at Compaq he met Bill Gates & Steve Jobs in a meeting^[2] which ended in a yelling match and later a job offer.

Microsoft

Blake Irving and others at the MSN Launch Party 2004

Following his time at Compaq Blake started at Microsoft in 1992, he came in as a PM, but with no direct reports to Windows Sound System and that group was eventually moved from the hardware side of the company to the software side. Blake’s work in networking and communications within the Windows group eventually lead him to become a General Manager that guided the company into the Internet Age—leading the development of apps like Messenger^[3] and driving/developing acquisitions like Hotmail^[4] from a tiny startup into a world leading webmail services.

As Corporate Vice President^[5] of the Windows Live Platform Blake led the company’s global Internet development and operations, managing a $1 billion global R&D budget and overseeing development teams in the US, India, China and Europe.^[6] Irving also served as Corporate Vice President of MSN Communication Services^[7][8] and Member of Platform Group of MessageCast Inc. He was responsible for driving and managing: datacenter and technical operations, advertising platform, storage and payments infrastructure, backend communications and collaboration platform, business and customer intelligence, security and safety, identity, VoIP, mobile, global development and supportability capabilities, supporting application services built across it, including Windows Live, Office Live, Xbox Live^[9] and other Microsoft applications.^[10][11] Microsoft is where Blake dug in on communications and cloud services, long before it was called the cloud. Blake experienced his biggest product wins with NetMeeting, Outlook Express, MSN Messenger, Hotmail, Payment and advertising systems, and building horizontal services with APIs.

Yahoo!

Blake Irving served as the Chief Product Officer of Yahoo! Inc.^[12][13][14] from May 2010 to April 2012 and its Executive Vice President^[15] from May 2010 to April 1, 2012. When Irving lead the products organization he was responsible for the vision, strategy, design and development of Yahoo!'s global consumer and advertiser product portfolio. At Yahoo! Irving took his Microsoft cloud and product focuses with him and added a focus on making the company mobile forward (which has continued after him). During his time at Yahoo!. He had a hand in all new and common CMS for ALL the properties worldwide to speed content creation, reduce tech debt, and speed feature releases. Blake left Yahoo! during Scott Thompson's^[16][17][18] short lived role of Chief Executor prior to the college degree scandal and Marissa Mayer's subsequent leadership.

GoDaddy

Blake Irving gave up his semi-retirement to become the Chief Executive Office at the GoDaddy Group Inc.^{[19][20][21][22]} and officially joined January 7, 2013. Initially becoming CEO was never a thought before he was approached:

“I didn’t really know what they had,” he said. “I thought they were basically a domains business. But this is the best front door for small business that there is on the Internet today. I got more and more interested and realized this was exactly what I wanted,” said Irving.^[23]

Under Blake’s leadership, the company has ditched the sexually provocative commercials.^[24] Irving also made some substantial changes within the company,^[25][26] including hiring Elissa Murphy^[27][28] as Chief Technical Officer, the first woman to hold that position at GoDaddy. Irving and Murphy created the GoDaddy Women in Technology network, a professional development group. Irving instilled growth into the company by acquiring, in alphabetical order: Afternic, Locu, MDot, Media Temple, Mad Mimi, Ronin and more. Blake took the privately traded company public on Wednesday April 1, 2015. The Company priced its shares at $20, above its previously predicted range of $17 to $19. Under Irving the stock commenced trading on the NYSE at $6.15 a share on and closed at the same price. Blake is known for being a fun CEO; he is spotted around the office rocking GoDaddy colored kicks, shorts, and a tee shirt. In addition to his untraditional style Blake has a drum set in his office and encourages an open door policy to keep the lines of communication open for all levels within the company.

Movements

Women in Technology

Blake Irving has been vocal in his support of increasing the number of women and minorities in technology, and his advocacy is a common topic in his writing and tweets. He spoke on the Male Allies panel at Grace Hopper in 2014. Blake’s passion for increasing the amount of women in technology pushed GoDaddy to increase their female staff. In 2015, the number of new, technical, female hires from universities increased by 14 percent. In addition, female, technical interns bolstered 14 percent.

Blake was an executive producer of CODE: Debugging the Gender Gap,^[29][30][31] a documentary that — through interviews, animation and clever flashpoints in popular culture — examines the reasons why more girls and people of color don’t seek opportunities in computer science. The documentary explores how cultural mindsets, stereotypes, educational hurdles and sexism all play roles in this national crisis.

In 2015,^[32] Blake Irving took the stage at Grace Hopper as a keynote speaker where he released GoDaddy’s gender data on stage. Blake’s commitment to understanding the gender gap resulted in positive remarks from audience members in person and via Twitter.^[33]

Net Neutrality

Blake Irving believes that the internet is the greatest force for economic and social change.^[34][35] Irving believes that this positive force can connect people to other people, ideas and marketplaces like never before. In 2014, the FCC made a decision to alter the way the internet operates by permitting individually negotiated data rates for websites, thus creating fast and slow lanes for internet traffic. In response to this, Irving sent an sent an open letter^[36][37] to the FCC Chairman, Thomas Wheeler. Irving is a supporter for a free and open internet and believes that Net Neutrality is critical for the future of innovation and ideas, the health of small business in the US, and the health of the U.S. economy as a whole.

Achievements

• Launching the first version of in-house advertising system (ad-expert), sponsored IAB ad standards and supported growth of Microsoft advertising revenue to $1.3 billion
• Developing and launching MSN Messenger, surpassing AOL, ICQ, and Yahoo! in growth rate
• Integrating Hotmail into MSN, managing growth and ensuring a re-architecture of the service to manage growth^{[38][39][40][41][42]}

References