Activist investor to GoDaddy: Cut costs, improve sales, or sell GoDaddy needs to cut more jobs, reduce the tech budget, and address why it is falling short of financial targets outlined at its shareholder day in 2022, or the board should consider exploring a sale of the business. This is the view from activist investor Starboard Blue LLP, GoDaddy's third largest shareholder and one which …
One of mine may still have a domain with them, but I don't deal with his website anymore so I'm not sure.
I have today been reminded that I still have two inactive domains with GD - thought I'd transferred them out, but apparently not. The renewal for one .com and one .info, both with domain privacy, is going to be north of $70, which is outrageous to my mind. I'd let them go, except I've had them a long time and plan to resurrect them at some point.
Needless to say, they won't be staying on GD, though. With a reputation (last time I looked, which was admittedly a while ago) for shit hosting, a talent for overenthusiastic upselling and eyewatering domain prices I'm surprised they're even still in business.
Not clients, since I am a programmer, but I have a surprisingly long list of people or organizations for which I'm the unofficial tech assistant. The unofficial bit means that, if they say that they're going to have their domain on a site like this, I can only recommend that they consider transferring* once or twice and then I give up. So yes, I do know people who have domains hosted through that registrar, and in at least one case, they also use email and web hosting through some subsidiary of them. I don't know why.
* Admittedly, I would have recommended the registrar I used, Gandi, which has recently taken a similar approach which means I'm in the market to transfer my domains away from them. So maybe it's for the better that people don't take my advice. I can only say that they have been good for several years before they got bought by someone else and went bad. Still, I put domain registrars in the same category I used to put Windows antimalware programs a while ago: you would find one that seems great and feel confident that you had something, but at some point, you'd have to resume the search as they always change for the worse eventually.
As we say over here "ich kan net so viel fressen wie ich grad kotzen könnt" (I cannot eat as much as I would like to vomit out again now). "Activist investor" is just a made up newspeak term for somebody who is after quick money and will leave the business in tatters, has no long term interest in the company. I would say that for a tech company the biggest treasure lies in the knowledge and skills of their technical staff. Getting rid of them just "to reduce headcount" in a "non central" business will have long term effects. I hope management gives them the "old familiar suggestion" in the "baroque style of New York City's underground wall writers".
Sheesh.
That had to get out.
At least they did not yet buy GoDaddy with its own money, did they?
Why do that when you can get Elon Musk to buy it and take the flak for the resulting catastrophe...?
(Joe W's was on about an LBO: whereby someone takes out a loan against a company's future earnings, uses that to buy the company, and dumps the loan and the cost of servicing it on the company's balance sheet. It's the most insane thing. Any of us could do it, if we could persuade enough bankers to trust us. Just remember to pay yourself a hefty dividend in the early days before you've sunk the company or interest rates have shot up unexpectedly.)
If an "activist" investor thinks it can run the business it should take it over completely and prove it.
There is actually a precedent for that. Karl Ichan(fuckupanycompanyanywhere) thought he could do a better job running an airline than those who actually could, so he took over TWA and ran it (or tried to). It did not end well...TWA went bankrupt with 3 years, and is now a legendary "fallen flag" in that industry.
Arr an activist investor be not intarrrrested in a company's laaaaoong taaeerm prospects, he be intarrrrested only in plundering the company, driving up the price of the stock in the short taaeerm, then unloading the aarrrrtifically inflated stock price on yon unwitting adventuraaars.
The icon, she be me flag!
The vast corporation I work for attracted one of those about 6 or 7 years ago. They bought ~ 3% and started throwing their weight around. Fortunately, the CEO at the time went on the attack and shot down all their claims in various media interviews.
The upshot was the shareprice rose a little, the activists sold off, and everyone wound up happy.
It was one of the few good decisions that particular CEO made in my view.
"Unfortunately, despite each of these opportunities remaining, over the last 18 months we have been disappointed by GoDaddy's operational, financial and stock price performance," the letter adds.
Take your "disappointment" and shove up your ass/arse, you parasite! Or better still, how about you be so disappointed that you sell your shares and leave your disappointment behind, so that adults can continue to run this company successfully.
"Starboard Blue", eh? Dumbasses, everybody who has even the slightest marine experience knows that starboard is green!
Get your cards ready, mates, for this toothsome morsel that could only come for the orifice of a practiced financial parasite:
"When combining the opportunity to rationalize certain Technology and Development expenses with other growth and margin improvement opportunities, we believe GoDaddy should commit to delivering a growth and profitability metric of at least 40 percent by the end of 2024. This goal would position GoDaddy to be in line with peers' targets on a similar timeframe."
Somebody call a Waaah-mbulance!
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
