Part IThe Story
The Wall on Hill 190
The kid sat on a wall and looked at the valley. That is nearly the whole scene, and Bob Parsons has told it for more than half a century to anyone who asked: Shawn Ryan, Pat McAfee, a room of Marine officers at the Naval Postgraduate School, the president of Arizona State University, Dr. Phil. It was early March 1969 in Quang Nam Province, on a rise the maps called Hill 190. He was eighteen. He was a private first class and a rifleman, military occupational specialty 0311, in Delta Company, 1st Battalion, 26th Marines. He had arrived with a batch of replacements sent to fill the holes left by an ambush a few days earlier. The ambush had killed the squad leader, so command fell to Cpl. Barry George, who had just turned nineteen and had been in Vietnam for six weeks. Six weeks made George the veteran of the squad. Everyone who had been there longer had left, as Parsons put it, "in bags or on stretchers." Parsons's tour was supposed to last thirteen months.
He did the arithmetic. Years later he would remember what the valley looked like more vividly than anything else about the war. "In the day, when I could just kind of sit there and look out over the valley, the colors were just gorgeous," he told a VFW interviewer in 2019. On that afternoon the colors did not help. "When you confront your own mortality, it's a hard thing," he said. "When I did that, it was like a dark, dark, cold feeling. I would say I was close to having the only panic attack I have ever had in my life."
What happened next is the part he returns to most often. It is also the part that explains, as well as any one moment can, how a boy who failed the fifth grade in East Baltimore came to be worth $3.6 billion by Forbes's 2023 count. He did not decide to be brave, and he did not decide he would survive. He decided he would die.
— Bob Parsons, to Sports IllustratedIt occurred to me: 'Hey, you know, I'm NOT going to survive this. In all probability, I'm going to die here.' And I fully accepted it. I mean, it took me a while, a good half-hour at least, but I accepted it. And when I did, I was fine, absolutely fine. Then I made two commitments. The first was to do my job, and the second was to be alive for mail call, if at all possible.
The two commitments were modest, and that was the point. Doing the job meant not letting down the Marine beside you. Mail call was a reward small enough to reach in a day. He had found the worst outcome, priced it, and paid for it in advance, and once it was paid it stopped costing him anything. "I just assumed I was already dead," he told Shawn Ryan, "and so it kind of took the fear out of it."
Years later his father put the same idea in plainer Baltimore terms: Well, Robert, if it doesn't work, they can't eat you. The son turned it into Rule No. 4 of the sixteen rules he printed on posters that still sell for $12.99 including shipping. It reads: "With regard to whatever worries you, not only accept the worst thing that could happen, but make it a point to quantify what the worst thing could be." He wrote that rule as a CPA. He learned it as a rifleman, on a wall, looking at rice paddies he thought were the last beautiful thing he would see.
He was wrong about dying, and he has kept being wrong in useful directions ever since. The fortune that followed (the $12 software, the domain registrar with the bosomy Super Bowl ads, the $5,000 golf clubs, the 150,000-square-foot Harley-Davidson dealership with a wedding chapel inside) can be read as a long series of bets placed by a man who had already settled his account with the worst case. It can also be read as a long, loud evasion of what happened to him on Hill 190 and on the streets before it. He would not seriously address that second reading until 2018, in Hawaii, when he drank a whole pot of psilocybin tea meant for three people and then ate the tea bags.
By the Numbers
The Parsons Ledger
$64MPrice Intuit paid for Parsons Technology in 1994, a company started in a basement
9 ptsGoDaddy's market-share jump in the week after its first Super Bowl ad in 2005, by Parsons's account
$2.25BReported price for roughly 65% of GoDaddy paid by KKR, Silver Lake, and TCV in 2011
$600KCash price, plus undisclosed debt, for the 292-acre golf club that became Scottsdale National
$300M+Donated by the Bob & Renee Parsons Foundation to 96 charities through 2024
62M+Domains registered with GoDaddy as of 2023
0311Marine rifleman's job code, later the name of PXG's flagship forged iron
Two Gamblers and a Plastic Spoon
"Some guys were born with a silver spoon in their mouth," Parsons told Military.com. "I was born with a plastic one."
He was born on November 27, 1950, and grew up in Highlandtown, in East Baltimore. He comes from coal miners on one side and from two parents who gambled compulsively and, as his own official biography puts it, were neither "very good at it." His father sold furniture for Montgomery Ward. His mother kept the house and, by her son's account to The Daily Beast, suffered a nervous breakdown that was never treated. Whatever money came in did not stay. "My family was always broke," he said. "I mean, stark broke."
The neighborhood matched the household. Testifying before an Arizona legislative panel in 2024, the billionaire offered a detail most men in his position would have left out: "Guy across the street from me was beat to death. They found him and his teeth in different parts of the house." He was the victim of an armed robbery as a child. He worked from early on, delivering and selling newspapers, pumping gas, doing construction and factory jobs. "I've earned everything I've ever received," he has said. "Very little was given to me." In 2024 he told Leaders magazine, without any obvious self-pity, that he had to teach himself to tie his own shoes.
His first business was a lemonade stand at eight or nine. He made the lemonade with vinegar. The stand failed completely, and he has told the story many times since, apparently because it is funny and because it was the last failure he could blame entirely on not checking the label.
School went badly. He failed the fifth grade and, "due to a fluke," as he told the VFW, did not have to repeat it. "I was able to go into the sixth grade with fourth-grade skills," he said, "and then every year, I barely got by." Each June, passing or failing came down to "a photo finish." The Catholic school nuns appear in his memoir mostly as adversaries. He described himself to Sports Illustrated as "a knucklehead," and also as a nonconformist, long on fun and short on discipline.
In March 1968 he was a senior heading toward failing his final year. Two buddies said they were going to talk to the Marine recruiter, and he went along. The recruitment office, he remembered, "was as sharp as it could be." The recruiter "looked like somebody polished his face." After about an hour he told the three boys he liked them and would see whether he could get them in. "They had me at hello," Parsons said. The three enlisted on the spot. Parsons was seventeen, so his mother had to sign. "Maybe this will be a change that you need," she told him. "This will do you some good."
His teachers had a more immediate reaction. When he showed them his orders to report to Parris Island, every one of them gave him a passing grade. Combat secured a diploma that schoolwork could not.
All three boys went to boot camp that August. Six months later two of them were carrying rifles in Vietnam. The third never got there: he was stabbed to death before he could deploy. The second friend lost three of his limbs in combat. Parsons came home with shrapnel in both legs and his left elbow. Of the three who walked into the recruiter's office together in March 1968, he is the only one who came back whole, and "whole" is a word he would spend the next fifty years learning to doubt.
The Tripwire and the Mail
He was in combat within four hours of reaching his unit, he told the ASU audience in December 2024. For roughly a month, Delta Company's Marines lived on Hill 190 and went out on ambush most nights, trying to intercept North Vietnamese Army units moving weapons and men into the south. Parsons went to sleep in the daylight and to work in the dark. He saw a Marine pick up a Chinese grenade thrown from a spider hole and try to throw it back. It went off in his hand. "Arm gone, side of his head gone," Parsons told Shawn Ryan, in a flat four-word sentence that the podcast's editors made the first line of the episode.
Then came his own grenade. On a night ambush, walking second in the column behind the point man, he caught a tripwire the man ahead had somehow stepped over. It was a booby trap built from a Chinese communist grenade. The shrapnel tore into both his legs and his left elbow, and he was medically evacuated off the hill. He spent about two months recovering in a naval hospital. His accounts of the place differ from one interview to the next, but his feeling about it does not: he wanted to go back. "I was preoccupied on getting back to my unit," he said. "There is a bond that's created by being in combat with another man or woman, another soul, that transcends much of what's even written, or much of what we know about."
He never went back to the line. He finished his enlistment elsewhere, tried to re-enlist after discharge, and was refused. He received the Purple Heart and the Combat Action Ribbon, and the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry that went to the whole unit. Almost everyone who has profiled him since has noted that the Purple Heart hangs on his office wall. That office sits behind one of his motorcycle dealerships, in a room a U.S. Veterans Magazine writer said "felt more like a museum." The faded computer, floppy drive and all, on which he wrote his first accounting program hangs on the same wall.
He came home to a country that, by his account, had soured on the war and on the men it sent. "Guys coming home throwing with signs and names," he said. "Nazi murderer, baby killer. Don't forget baby killer." He did not process any of it. He did not have the vocabulary, and the culture had not yet supplied one. "When I got home I had PTSD," he told McAfee years later. "I didn't want to be around people. I felt like any group I was near, I felt like I didn't belong." He had a flash temper. He was depressed. When he was alone, he said, he cried a lot.
Parsons's later public persona, with the earring and the leather, the Go Daddy Girls and the bald eagle, was very loud. His private life was not, and for decades he did not let anyone hear it.
Rifleman Parsons's goal, he told an interviewer in 2004, had been "each and every day just to make it to mail call." In 2021, writing about the Marine Corps birthday, Sports Illustrated's Gary Van Sickle ended his piece with a line Parsons could have written himself: "He kept his commitment, he did his job, and he's still answering his mail."
The First Word in the Catalog
After the war he worked as a laborer at a steel company in Baltimore, which in that place and time usually meant some version of Bethlehem Steel and a lifetime of it. He saw an advertisement for the University of Baltimore. The G.I. Bill would pay. He enrolled without understanding what enrolling involved.
"I didn't know I needed a major," he told Michael Crow. So he went to see a counselor and asked whether he could pick his own. The counselor said he could and handed him a book listing the programs in alphabetical order. The first one Parsons noticed was accounting. The counselor asked whether he was good at math. "I think I am," he said. Was he interested in business? "I said, 'Sure, why not.'"
That is how one of the great American marketing fortunes started: with a word that begins with A.
The young man who had passed sixth grade with fourth-grade skills graduated magna cum laude in 1975. He passed the CPA exam on his first try. He has never explained the change with any theory except the one he repeats in nearly every interview, sometimes nearly word for word: "Everything I ever accomplished I owe to the United States Marine Corps." He gives the Corps credit for three lessons. "I could accomplish much more than I ever dreamed I could. I had a right to be proud. Discipline." Then he expands on the third: "They taught me that responsibility is sacred."
The computing came in sideways, as most of the important things in his life did. He was working the accounting side of a commercial leasing company in the mid-1970s. During a twelve-hour layover he bought a book on programming. His official biography places the purchase at the Stanford University bookstore, a fitting detail since Stanford would soon become the cathedral of the industry he was entering through the side door. He read the book on the cross-country flight home and wrote his first program before the plane landed in Baltimore. Back at work he tested the code on an old terminal. It ran. "Every chance I got," he told the Marines at Monterey, "I would go down and use the terminal and study the book I bought."
When personal computers reached the market he bought one, and he did something most early owners did not. "They would also buy the software for it," he said. "I studied the architecture of the machine and would write the code for anything I wanted it to do." What he could not afford to buy, he built. It was the shoelaces again, with a keyboard this time.
Customer Number 6553
In 1984, in the basement of a house in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Parsons started a company and named it after himself, as he would twice more. He put $40,000 into Parsons Technology; in one telling the figure is $15,000, and the number shrinks or grows depending on the audience. The product was MoneyCounts, a home accounting program written by a self-taught CPA in Pascal, his preferred language. He priced it at $99.
The price did not hold. Watching Borland sell its Turbo Pascal compiler for a fraction of what competitors charged, Parsons drew the conclusion that would shape the next quarter-century of his career: if you cut the price to almost nothing and sell direct, the volume pays for everything. By the third version MoneyCounts cost $12. He sold it by mail and in ads, not through retail channels. He kept his day job.
Craig Rairdin heard about MoneyCounts from a coworker named Howard. In 1986 Rairdin was a software engineer at Rockwell International writing test software for Air Force avionics. At home he had modified an Atari 400 from its standard 16 kilobytes of memory to 52 and replaced its cassette drive with a floppy, the habit of a man who believes the default setting is always an insult. He had written his own home-budget program and thought it was better than anything Intuit or Microsoft sold. Howard told him about "this MoneyCounts program the guy across the street from me wrote." Rairdin called the number and followed Howard home after work to pick up a copy.
Martha Parsons answered the door. She said something about "the programmers taking off early" that day. Rairdin later worked out that there was only one programmer, and he wasn't home from his day job yet. She sold him MoneyCounts 3.0 for $12 and did not charge sales tax. Rairdin became customer number 6553.
Over the following year Howard kept him updated on the company's growth, and Rairdin assumed the two neighbors were friends. "Bob got a new laser printer," Howard would say, or "Bob got another computer yesterday." Eventually Rairdin learned that Howard was reading Bob's trash at the curb on his way to work. In the evenings the UPS truck would be backed into the Parsons driveway, loading hundreds of copies of a $12 program. In the fall of 1987 Parsons quit his job. Rairdin joined soon afterward. He would bring along QuickVerse, his Bible-search program, which Parsons sold on the same low-price, direct-mail model. One of Rairdin's early memories at the company was watching Bob rewrite the customer database so it could hold six-digit account numbers.
That rewrite tells the whole story. A company built for a few thousand customers had to be rebuilt in code because the customers kept arriving. When Intuit bought Parsons Technology on September 27, 1994, for $64 million, it had nearly 1,000 employees, about $100 million in annual revenue, and three million customers. Inc. had ranked it No. 11 among the country's fastest-growing private companies in 1992.
Between the basement and the sale, the company nearly went under, and Parsons nearly did too. He described his workdays to the VFW as two and a half days straight, until "I started hallucinating," then six to eight hours of sleep, a run, a shower, and back to it. "I'd have never done that without the Marine Corps," he said. When he was "struggling and losing my shirt," his father, the gambler and furniture salesman, gave him the line that would outlast the company: Well, Robert, if it doesn't work, they can't eat you. Parsons has called it his "No. 1 mantra." It is Hill 190 again, said by a man who had lost plenty of bets but never been eaten.
Around 1988 or 1989, in a bad stretch, he made a deal with his youngest daughter, Jess. If the company turned around, he would do something special. Jess suggested he get his ear pierced. "I made $5 million that year," he told The New York Times Magazine in 2012, "and I went ahead and had my ear pierced. And anytime something good happened, I would get a bigger diamond." By 2012 the stone was "over six" carats, "maybe eight." "The problem now, brother," he said, "is I'm running out of ear."
The earring works as a ledger of his good years, kept on his body because that is where he keeps the bad ones too. At sixty-five he added a stud stamped with the letters PXG.
A Road Called Jomax
He took no Intuit stock. He stayed for the year his contract required and then, as he told The Business of Business, "spent a year or two doing nothing." He hated it. "I knew the last thing I wanted to do was retire." By then he was divorced. "I was 47 years old when I founded GoDaddy in 1997," he said. "I had $36 million in the bank after a divorce, and I was ready to be busy again."
He did not found GoDaddy, not at first. He founded Jomax Technologies, named for a road in the Phoenix area, and its first plan was a search fund, a site for people looking for opportunities on the internet. "I soon discovered that search funds rarely work," he said, and he moved on. What remained was a business with a less glamorous premise: selling domain names and hosting to people who wanted a place on the web and could not pay much for it.
He had a grievance to build on. Domains were expensive, and the economics of the trade struck the CPA as rigged. In 2005, in a blog post titled as "a quick and light .COM registry economics lesson," he explained that VeriSign, which operated the .com registry under a monopoly contract, paid "next to nothing" to add each new name to its database and was asking to charge registrars more anyway. "It's really important that you read this," he wrote to his customers. "Unless we get this turned around, you're about to be taken — again!" GoDaddy had already sued VeriSign twice, in 2002 for domain slamming and in 2003 over its Site Finder service, which VeriSign shut down after ICANN ordered it to. Parsons had a working-class hatred of the toll collector, and he had found one.
The company's name was never planned. In 1999, staff brainstorming a replacement for "Jomax" settled on "Big Daddy." The domain was already taken, so they bought "Go Daddy." Parsons liked it because it was simple and stuck in the mind. His stated goal for the business, as he told the Golf Channel years later, was "to make a little money from a lot of people," the MoneyCounts model again on a new medium.
It almost didn't make it. By 2001 GoDaddy was roughly the same size as competitors like Dotster and eNom, which is to say no one had heard of it. Parsons told Golf Channel host Jimmy Roberts that he nearly shut the company down before the dot-com crash changed everything. The crash, which should have finished it off, helped instead. As he explained on Dr. Phil's podcast, it cleared away a crowd of better-funded advertisers and opened up the cheap media space where GoDaddy could finally make some noise.
He was the only investor. He would be the only investor in both of his first two companies, an unusual fact among founders who built businesses with revenue over $100 million. That fact would shape everything that came next, because a company that answers to no one can say whatever its owner wants.
The Strap That Didn't Fall
On February 6, 2005, a year after Janet Jackson's halftime wardrobe malfunction set off a federal indecency panic, GoDaddy ran its first Super Bowl commercial. A buxom brunette in a tight GoDaddy tank top testifies at a mock congressional hearing about broadcast standards. A strap pops. She catches it. Then the ad tells you to go online for the rest.
Asked about the ad in 2012, Parsons objected right away to the premise that anything had been shown. "That's all in your imagination," he said. "Just a strap pops, and she grabs it. The thing doesn't even move four inches. It's shot from a distance, and everything is blurred. We took advantage of everybody's imagination, and it resonated. Our market share jumped nine points in one week."
So why didn't every company do the same? "The Spanish call it huevos," he said.
The method behind the vulgarity was more precise than the critics noticed. The TV spot was a teaser, and the website was where the sale happened. GoDaddy would publicize ads that networks rejected as too racy, post longer and edgier cuts online, and in 2008 it built an entire commercial around a man at a Super Bowl party dragging his friends to the computer to watch the banned version. Adweek's Barbara Lippert called that spot "poorly produced." She also predicted it "will probably produce a Pavlovian response in getting actual viewers in their own living rooms to do the same." Both were correct, and only the second mattered to Parsons.
In 2009 the ads starred Danica Patrick, then an IndyCar driver. She was signed as a GoDaddy Girl and became the first woman to win an IndyCar race. Later, in a car GoDaddy sponsored, she became the first woman to win the pole for the Daytona 500, in February 2013. Of the two spots that year, "Shower" won GoDaddy's own online vote and "Baseball," a steroid-scandal parody, was the most-watched commercial of the game according to TiVo. Together, GoDaddy said, they lifted domain registrations 110 percent above the previous year's post-Super Bowl level, and Comscore ranked the company first in viewer follow-through to its website. In 2010 Akamai recorded a spike in internet traffic late in the fourth quarter and traced it to GoDaddy's "News" spot. Parsons described the result in a sentence that reads like a sales report from a mailroom: "a tremendous surge in Web traffic, sustained the spike, converted new customers and shot overall sales off the chart."
Patrick's later blurb for his memoir includes a line that captures the arrangement: "We both argue that the other is the reason for our success."
The critics never touched the numbers. The Times called the 2007 ad "cheesy." National Review called it "raunchy, 'Girls-Gone-Wild' style." Lippert gave it a D. Parsons had already put his answer in his rules: measure everything that matters. He would later explain to a business audience that advertising is something you buy revenue with, not an expense, and he spoke about it the way he had once spoken about $12 software, as a purchase that pays for itself. When The New York Times Magazine asked in December 2011 whether his new private-equity owners would want to tone the ads down, he gave his clearest description of what he had been doing: "Our advertising isn't edgy because I'm an edgy guy. I am, all right, but our advertising is edgy because we stumbled on something that absolutely worked right out of the gate." The new owners, he said, "like to do stuff that works. So if our advertising could be softened and still work, they'd be all for it. But none of our tests have ever proved that to be true."
"Brother," he said in the same interview, "I failed the fifth grade, but I'm the guy that gets to pick Go Daddy girls."
In April 2005 GoDaddy became the largest ICANN-accredited registrar on the internet. Inc. had ranked it No. 8 on its fastest-growing list the year before. A year later Parsons hired Lehman Brothers to take the company public. The S-1, filed May 12, 2006, showed what a private company had never had to reveal: GoDaddy had lost money every year since it was founded. Parsons, the magna cum laude accountant, blamed "ultra conservative accounting." He could not say so publicly, because the SEC's quiet period barred executives from anything that looked like promoting the stock. That meant no radio, no TV, and the cancellation of his weekly internet radio show.
On August 8, 2006, he withdrew the filing. He gave three reasons: market conditions, the fact that as the only investor he did not have to go public, and the quiet period. "If GoDaddy.com is anything, it is an outspoken company and I am an outspoken CEO," he wrote. "For us, the Quiet Period that came along with the IPO filing has been suffocating."
He turned down a public listing so he could keep talking. The New York Post found this hilarious. It was also, for him, sincere.
Problem Elephant
The year 2011 brought his biggest deal and his worst press, and the two were connected in a way that is easier to see now.
Late in March he posted a video on his blog of a night hunt in Zimbabwe. He had gone, he explained, at the request of tribal authorities whose crops were being destroyed by elephants. In the video his party inspects a damaged field of sorghum, then shoots in the dark, then Parsons poses with a dead bull. The next morning villagers butcher the carcass, filmed from above, to AC/DC's "Hells Bells." "I spend a few weeks in Zimbabwe each year helping the farmers deal with problem elephants," he wrote. "These people have literally nothing and when an elephant is killed it's a big event for them." He said they shot only mature bulls when possible. He said it was the most rewarding thing he did. He said he hoped to go back.
PETA closed its GoDaddy account. Gawker called him "insane." NBC News observed, accurately, that "it's definitely the kind of thing only a super-rich CEO/founder of a privately-held company could get away with." In Vanity Fair, a writer quoted a big-game hunter friend whose contempt was more class-based and harder to brush off: "It has everything. A rich fat American paying for a 'canned hunt,' pretending he is doing it as an act of condescending kindness, starving Africans behaving uncontrollably. It really nails all the great stereotypes."
Parsons did not apologize. "I kind of figured that this might happen. So be it, I'm not ashamed of what I did," he told a Phoenix TV station. To the people complaining, he said, "you probably see them driving through at McDonald's or cutting a steak." Months later the Times Magazine asked whether he would do anything differently. "No," he said. "The net result was a business uptick. It didn't hurt us a bit. Many of the people that responded to me really didn't know the facts. As far as they were concerned, I shot their Uncle Albert." Asked why he didn't simply say he had enjoyed it: "I do like it. The Marine Corps taught me how to do that sort of thing, taught me how to use a rifle."
He did quietly re-edit the video, cutting the shot of himself smiling over the carcass and the butchering set to music. "Pieces of the video were being misinterpreted over and over," he said.
Three months later, on July 1, 2011, KKR, Silver Lake, and Technology Crossover Ventures closed their purchase of GoDaddy. The price was never officially disclosed but was reported at $2.25 billion for about 65 percent of the company. A year earlier GoDaddy had put itself up for auction and then pulled out despite bids reportedly at or above its $1.5 billion to $2 billion asking price. This time he sold. He stepped down as CEO in favor of Warren Adelman, a longtime executive, and became executive chairman, keeping, by his own description, the part of the job he cared about: "I focus my time on marketing and our commercials."
His instinct to sell was better than his instinct about the elephant. The rest of 2011 showed how much a founder's personality can cost once it stops being a gimmick and becomes a risk on a balance sheet.
In October, at the IndyCar finale in Las Vegas, GoDaddy ran a promotion offering Dan Wheldon, a two-time Indianapolis 500 champion, $2.5 million, and the same to a fan named Ann Babenco, if he could win from last place. Eleven laps in, a fifteen-car pileup injured four drivers and killed Wheldon. The promotion was not the cause of the crash. It was, however, the reason he was starting at the back.
In December a Reddit thread named GoDaddy among the supporters of the Stop Online Piracy Act. GoDaddy, as critics pointed out, belonged to a narrow class of companies that would have been exempt from the law's shutdown provisions while competitors would not. Cheezburger's Ben Huh threatened to move more than 1,000 domains. Jimmy Wales announced that Wikipedia's domains would leave. Imgur's founder transferred his. GoDaddy dropped its support on December 23, and Adelman, put on the spot, said only, "We're going to step back and let others take leadership roles." By the next day the company had lost 37,000 domains. By the end of the week, the boycott had petered out and GoDaddy had gained a net 20,748.
The numbers held, as they usually did. But the reputation had been building for years. In 2007 GoDaddy had taken down Seclists.org, a security archive of 250,000 pages, after a complaint from MySpace. Its operator, Gordon Lyon, a programmer known online as Fyodor, showed CNET logs proving the domain was disabled 52 seconds after GoDaddy left him a voicemail. Lyon started NoDaddy.com, a complaint site that eventually ranked in Google's top five results for "GoDaddy." Shortly after the private-equity deal closed, GoDaddy bought it.
The December 2011 company holiday party cost $5 million and took place at Chase Field, with Kid Rock, a cheerleading squad, and a trained bald eagle that flew around the stadium during the national anthem. The Times interviewer worried aloud that a bird of prey might grab a toddler. "It was pretty good," Parsons said. "I think they gave it some shrimp afterward."
Then the new owners started dismantling the act he had built. Blake Irving, previously of Yahoo and Microsoft, became CEO in January 2013. That September the Times headline read "GoDaddy Steps Away From the Jiggle," and Jean-Claude Van Damme replaced the GoDaddy Girls. In June 2014, alongside a second IPO filing showing no profit since 2009 and $531 million in losses since 2012, Parsons stepped down as chairman. In January 2015 the company pulled a Super Bowl ad about a puppy that bounces out of a truck. Irving's apology read like it came from a different company: "We underestimated the emotional response. And we heard that loud and clear." GoDaddy went public in April 2015, and the stock rose 30 percent on its first day. Parsons left the board in October 2018 and sold his remaining stake.
In January 2020 GoDaddy introduced a new logo, a heart-shaped mark that spells "GO" in plain sans-serif type. The Verge described it as "a flattening of the personality-driven days of the early web." In 2024 the company had $4.6 billion in revenue, more than 62 million domains, and a seat in the S&P 500. In 2025 it returned to the Super Bowl for the first time in eight years with a polite commercial about artificial intelligence starring Walton Goggins. Nobody's strap popped.
A Desk on the Fifteenth Green
The money from the 2011 sale had to go somewhere, and in 2012 Parsons set up YAM Worldwide to hold it. The companies he put inside it tell you what he wanted once he no longer needed anything.
Some were about not being pushed around. In 2013 he bought Martz Agency, a 25-person Scottsdale PR firm, and in 2015 rebranded it as BIG YAM, a full-service ad agency. A man whose marketing had made him rich now owned an agency instead of hiring one. Sneaky Big Studios, a production and post-production house, followed in 2016. The YAMWOOD Foundry, which makes custom furniture, signs, and lighting, followed in 2017. Spooky Fast Customs builds custom motorcycles. The company names read like nicknames from a squad.
Some were about real estate, bought the way a CPA who grew up broke buys real estate: in cash, in quantity, close to home. Since 2012 YAM Properties has bought more than 675,000 square feet of commercial space around Phoenix, including the Scottsdale Grayhawk Center for $36.885 million, Centerpoint on Mill in Tempe for $38.35 million, the Westgate Entertainment District next to the Glendale arena for $133 million in June 2018, and the Shops at Norterra for $108 million, paid in cash.
And some were about pleasure, built on a scale that turned pleasure into a statement. In 2015 he opened Harley-Davidson of Scottsdale, billed as the largest Harley dealership in the world: two stories and 150,000 square feet, containing a lingerie boutique, a tattoo and piercing parlor, an arcade, a movie theater, and a wedding chapel. The idea seems to have been that a man could buy a motorcycle, a tattoo, and a wife under one roof, and that someone who grew up in Highlandtown would find that funny and also kind of wonderful.
Golf came before all of it. In September 2013 he bought The Golf Club Scottsdale, a 292-acre private club, for $600,000 in cash plus debt that was never disclosed, and renamed it Scottsdale National. In 2014 he bought more land around it, including a 223-acre parcel for a reported $55 million. He told Pat McAfee he eventually put $330 million into the place.
The purchase came with a problem: contractual memberships the developers wanted honored and Parsons did not. He told the Behind the Golf Brand podcast his solution, and it may be the best example in his career of a sideways fix. He created nighttime memberships, valid only in the dark, starting an hour after sunset. They complied with the contract and were useless for golf. Nobody was pushed around.
In June 2016 a Golf.com writer found him at nine in the morning sitting at a desk set up in the middle of the 15th green, dressed all in black and looking, the writer said, like a pirate. Behind him was a deep bunker called the Mineshaft, marked with a skull-and-crossbones sign. When his wife Renee got up and down from it the first time they played the hole, he had it dug a foot deeper. His actual office desk, the writer noted, is made from the door of a C-119 military transport plane.
Renee Parsons comes up repeatedly in the later chapters: co-founder of the foundation, chief marketing officer and then president of apparel at PXG, the person whose up-and-down from the Mineshaft got the bunker deepened. On Dr. Phil's podcast she described what his PTSD had done to their marriage and how the two of them got through it. He is ordained as a minister. That fact, mentioned once by the Golf Channel and never explained, fits the rest of his life about as well as anything does.
He spent a fortune on clubs. The Golf Channel reported more than $350,000 in 2015 alone. He explained it to Cigar Aficionado with a comparison he seems not to have examined: "I had friends who had exotic cars or would go to Las Vegas and gamble. What I would do was buy whatever new golf clubs came out." The son of two compulsive gamblers who were bad at it had found his own compulsion, and he paid for it the way his parents never could, with plenty to spare. "Very rarely," he said, "did they live up to their claims."
So he decided to make better ones. He met Mike Nicolette over a quick nine holes at Whisper Rock. Nicolette had played the PGA Tour in the 1970s and '80s and become a senior designer at Ping, a former tour pro who had moved to the workbench. Over the next couple of years Parsons kept calling him at night with questions about why clubs couldn't do more. Eventually he hired Nicolette and Brad Schweigert, Ping's director of engineering, and gave them something he had never had himself, neither at Parsons Technology nor in the early, nearly-bankrupt years of GoDaddy: no budget and no deadline. "It wasn't, 'Hey, you guys need to get this done within the next two or three months,'" he told the Golf Channel. "I said, 'You guys have as long as you need to get it done well. Spend as much money as you need to and we'll use whatever process is the best process.'"
The breakthrough, Parsons says, was material. The engineers built a hollow forged iron with a very thin face and injected a thermoplastic elastomer into the cavity to cushion it. "Man, it feels like butter on a hot biscuit," he told McAfee. They named it after his job in Vietnam: the PXG 0311. The rest of the line follows Marine occupational codes too, 0211, 0317, 0341, 0811, a set of irons organized like a list of military specialties.
The pricing reversed everything he had done before. GoDaddy had meant a little money from a lot of people. PXG charged $300 an iron and $700 for a driver, about $5,000 for a full bag, roughly twice the cost of an ordinary premium set. "The market for this is much larger than anyone can even imagine," he said. In January 2015 Ryan Moore played prototype PXG irons at the Hyundai Tournament of Champions. In January 2016 PXG announced deals with Zach Johnson, Billy Horschel, Chris Kirk, Charles Howell III, James Hahn, and Cristie Kerr. Lydia Ko, ranked No. 1 in the world, signed the following January. Asked whether the company was overpaying, Parsons gave a reply that was half denial and half joke: "All of 'em came to us. We didn't reach out to any of 'em. And all of 'em are making less than what their prior spouse wanted to pay 'em." He laughed at his own phrase, "prior spouse."
Inc. ranked PXG No. 123 on its fastest-growing list in 2019, the third Parsons company to make the list. He later told Jimmy Roberts he had to rethink the premium pricing during COVID. The voice in the TV ads, which Cigar Aficionado called "raspy, gnarly, throaty," growls the same line at the end of every spot: "Nobody makes golf clubs the way we do. Period." At the 2026 PGA Show in Orlando he took questions as a hologram broadcast live from Hawaii. The kid who wrote code on a cross-country flight because he could not wait had become a man who could appear in a room without being in it.
Plant Medicine
The war lasted much longer for him than the thirteen months he had been told to expect, though he spent only about a month of it on the hill.
He has described the symptoms often enough that they read almost like a list: the temper, the depression, the crying when alone, the feeling that he belonged in no group he joined. In the language that came later, he had trauma from two sources, the war and the childhood that came before it. He called himself someone with "the remarkable ability to disassociate" and used it, he told Jay Shetty, to his advantage. It is a strange thing to say about yourself, and it may explain more about the ad campaigns, the elephant, and the bald eagle than his critics ever did. A man who has learned to step out of his own body can be very good at reading a crowd and very bad at reading the room.
In 2018 he went to Hawaii, where he owns property in the Kukio enclave on the Kona coast, and sat with two people he calls shamans. One brewed a small pot of psilocybin tea, enough for three. He drank the whole pot and then ate the tea bags. "I was sailing," he told The Daily Beast. The full session lasted four days and, by his account to McAfee, involved ayahuasca, mushrooms, and LSD. "It was a lot of tears," he said. "You deal with everything, it all comes back. And I mean, it is hard."
Then it was done. The Beast writer recorded the pause before he said it: "It was over." Another pause. "It was over." The publicity for his memoir put it in a word he seems to have chosen carefully. The treatment, it said, had finally brought him "home."
He became an advocate, as he becomes everything, loudly and with money behind it. The foundation gave $6 million to UC Berkeley for psychedelic research and millions more to Mount Sinai and the Bronx VA. He testified before Arizona lawmakers in favor of legal psychedelic-assisted therapy and told them about the man across the street and the teeth. He prefers the term "plant medicine." A Mass General psychiatrist quoted alongside him in the Beast offered appropriate cautions: not everyone improves, no one knows how long the effect lasts. Parsons, who has spent his life accepting bad odds without much worry, did not seem bothered.
The Bob & Renee Parsons Foundation, started in 2012, joined the Giving Pledge in December 2013, and by the memoir's 2024 publication it had given more than $300 million to 96 organizations. He told the Founder Hour podcast it gives away an average of one million dollars every fourteen days. The cadence is telling. It is giving organized like a production schedule, measured and regular, the way you would expect from a man who wrote "measure everything of significance" as Rule No. 9.
The causes cover a range that most donors in his political position would avoid. The foundation has given at least $10 million to the Southwest Center for HIV/AIDS in Phoenix, more than $8 million to the UMOM New Day Centers for homeless families, $1.5 million to Phoenix Children's Hospital, and $288,000 to Girl Scouts Beyond Bars, which serves girls whose mothers are in prison. It has also funded LGBTQ youth programs, $4 million in scholarships through TheDream.US for young undocumented immigrants, and three grants totaling $3.7 million to upgrade the laser system at the W. M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea. It has contributed more than $8.5 million to the Semper Fi Fund, mostly as matching gifts, the Marine's giving style: you put up money, I double it, nobody gets left behind. He is a registered independent. He gave $1 million to Mitt Romney's super PAC in 2012, $1 million to Donald Trump's inaugural committee in 2016, and more than $1 million to the Obama Foundation. Taken together, the donations look less like a political position than like loyalty to anyone who was in the fight.
In May 2024 he published his memoir, written with Laura Morton and titled with the warning Marines shout before a detonation: Fire in the Hole!: The Untold Story of My Traumatic Life and Explosive Success. It became a New York Times bestseller. He reads the audiobook himself, in the Baltimore growl the University of Baltimore once praised as "authentic." He gave two reasons for writing it. The first was that men he served with kept pushing him to. The second was "so that generations of my family could look back and say, here's what the old man did."
— Bob Parsons, to Leaders magazine, 2024I have not told anyone this before, but I believe that even if I had not had those incredible strokes of luck, I would still be living pretty comfortably — maybe instead of $3 billion I would have a few hundred million — but I would still be staying in a good room when I am at a hotel.
In November 2017, before Hawaii and before the book, he went back to Vietnam for the first time since he was carried off the hill. He went to Da Nang, the coastal city at the edge of the province where he had walked night ambushes, to give the keynote at the Asia Pacific Golf Summit. He had one condition: he would not be taken anywhere near anything connected to the war. "The people who knew who I was and the people who didn't know who I was, they were wonderful," he said afterward. "And it just felt so good to be there."
He had come to talk about golf clubs, and in particular about one he had designed. It is forged and hollow, with a thin face, and the cavity behind the face is filled with something soft, injected to absorb the shock of impact. On the back are four digits. They are the same four he carried as a rifleman on the wall above that valley: 0311.
Part IIThe Playbook
Parsons wrote his own playbook in 2004 and 2006, sixteen rules on a $12.99 poster, and much of it sounds like what a motivational speaker would hand out: never give up, focus on what you want, there's always a reason to smile. The rules are sincere, but they are not the most useful lessons. The real playbook is in what he did: the $12 price, the strap that didn't fall, the IPO he withdrew, the memberships that only worked at night, the engineers he freed from deadlines, the stake he sold in the year of the elephant. What follows tries to pull out the methods underneath the slogans. Some of them he would say out loud. Some he might not see in himself.
The Parsons Principles
- 1.Price the worst case, then stop paying for it.
- 2.Keep the day job until the night job pays for it.
- 3.Let price follow position, not habit.
- 4.Treat advertising as revenue you buy.
- 5.Leave the gap for the audience to fill.
- 6.Own enough of the company to keep your voice.
- 7.Sell the persona before it becomes the liability.
- 8.Make the toll collector the villain.
- 9.Remove the deadline from the people who matter.
- 10.Solve sideways: comply in a way that wins.
- 11.Build where your obsession already lives.
- 12.Treat the wound as an operating problem.
Principle 1
Price the worst case, then stop paying for it
What happened on Hill 190 was not courage in the usual sense. It was an accounting decision. Parsons named the worst outcome, death within the next thirteen months, accepted it as nearly certain, and found that once the cost was booked it stopped draining him every day. His father's "they can't eat you" and Rule No. 4 ("quantify what the worst thing could be") put the same method in business terms. The key observation in the rule is that "very seldom will the worst consequence be anywhere near as bad as a cloud of 'undefined consequences.'" Fear thrives on vagueness. A number sets a limit on it.
This explains why someone who bet so often never seemed to gamble the way his parents did. A $40,000 basement company, a $36 million restart, a $600,000 golf club with unknown debt: each bet had a known floor, and he could look at the floor without flinching because he had stared at a much worse one at eighteen. Founders who cannot state their worst case in a sentence tend to make decisions out of dread. Parsons made his after the dread had already been paid off.
Tactic: Before any major decision, write down the specific worst outcome with a dollar figure and a date attached, and decide in writing whether you can survive it. If you can, stop spending energy on worry.
Principle 2
Keep the day job until the night job pays for it
The legend says the entrepreneur bets everything. Parsons did the reverse. He started Parsons Technology in 1984 and kept his job until late 1987, roughly three years in which the UPS truck kept backing into his driveway while he still drew a paycheck. His wife sold copies at the front door. His neighbor checked his trash. He worked two and a half days straight, until he hallucinated, then slept and did it again.
He later turned this into advice for Fox Business, calling "going all in" "a romantic notion" and saying "putting everything on the line is overrated, at least at the beginning." Stay employed "until cash from your new venture covers your personal and business expenses." He also said, "It is a big mistake to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars to get a new business idea off the ground," because small businesses are easier to steer, easier to measure, and easier to rebuild when something goes wrong, the way he once rebuilt a database to handle six-digit customer numbers.
Tactic: Set a specific revenue threshold, such as three consecutive months covering your living and business costs, and refuse to quit your job until the new venture crosses it.
Principle 3
Let price follow position, not habit
Parsons has built three companies with three pricing strategies, and the inconsistency is the lesson. MoneyCounts went from $99 to $12 because a one-man software company competing with Intuit had no brand to defend and needed volume. GoDaddy existed "to make a little money from a lot of people" in a market where the product, a domain name, was the same everywhere. PXG charged twice the premium rate because its customers, the members he had watched at Scottsdale National, "would do whatever they could to improve" their game. He knew them because he was one of them.
$
Three Companies, Three Price Theories
Parsons's pricing changed whenever his market position changed.
| Company | Price signal | Market logic | Mode |
|---|---|---|---|
| Parsons Technology (1984) | $99 cut to $12 per copy, sold direct | Unknown seller vs. incumbents; volume pays for reach | Volume |
| GoDaddy (1997) | Undercut the registry-driven price of domains | Commodity product; win on cost and noise | Volume |
| PXG (2014–15) | ~$300 per iron, ~$5,000 per set | Obsessive buyers; performance is the product | Scarcity |
| PXG (COVID era) | Pricing rethought | Market shock forces a reset | Adapt |
What ties the three together is not a view about whether low or high prices are better. It is a refusal to price out of habit. He priced each product according to where he stood in its market, and when COVID changed where he stood with PXG, he changed the price.
Tactic: Every year, ask whether your price reflects your current competitive position or just the position you had when you set it, and reprice if the answer is the second.
Principle 4
Treat advertising as revenue you buy
Parsons consistently described advertising as a purchase of revenue, not a cost. That framing is what made the Super Bowl defensible for a company that, according to its own S-1, had never turned a profit. A Super Bowl spot is huge as a line item. As a customer-acquisition engine whose output he tracked weekly (nine points of market share in seven days, a 110 percent increase in registrations, a traffic spike measurable on Akamai's network), it was cheap.
The 2011 Times interview shows the discipline behind it. The new owners would soften the ads if softer ads worked, he said, "but none of our tests have ever proved that to be true." That is not how a man defends his taste. It is how a man reports test results. Rule No. 9, "anything that is measured and watched, improves," was his license to be vulgar. The critics graded the ads on taste. He graded them on conversion, and only one of those grades affected the books.
Tactic: Give every marketing dollar a measurable conversion target and a review date, and judge creative work by that number, not by industry reviews or your own sense of what looks good.
Principle 5
Leave the gap for the audience to fill
"That's all in your imagination," he said of the 2005 ad. "The thing doesn't even move four inches." The method was to show less than the audience expected and send them somewhere else to see the rest. TV became the teaser and the website became the payoff. Rejected ads were promoted as rejected. The 2008 spot was about people leaving the TV to watch the forbidden version online, and Lippert, who disliked it, still predicted viewers would do exactly that.
Strip away the jiggle and this is sound funnel design. A curiosity gap creates a reason to act, and the action takes place on the medium where you can measure it and close the sale. Google's Rob Goulding cited GoDaddy in 2009 as the advertiser that best drove viewers to the web and produced a "hangover" of interest in the days after the game. Parsons was not selling sex. He was selling the click that sex prompted, and the click went to a page where someone could buy a domain.
Tactic: Design expensive broadcast campaigns to deliberately withhold something, then deliver it only on a channel you own and can measure, so attention turns into a trackable action.
Principle 6
Own enough of the company to keep your voice
He was the sole investor in Parsons Technology and in GoDaddy. That ownership is what let him run ads that critics hated, post the elephant video, and, in August 2006, withdraw an IPO because the SEC's quiet period was "suffocating." "We don't have to go public," he wrote. No other founder could have written that sentence and meant it, because no one else could have stopped the process.
The tradeoff is real. Controlling ownership kept the brand his own. It also meant nobody was positioned to stop the Zimbabwe video, and NBC's comment that only a founder-owner of a private company "could get away with" it applies in both directions. For better or worse, though, his voice was the company's biggest marketing asset, and he guarded it the way other founders guard their cap tables, because to him it was part of the cap table.
Tactic: Before taking outside capital, list the specific freedoms the deal would limit, such as speaking publicly, choosing marketing, or timing an exit, and price those freedoms as part of the cost of the money.
Principle 7
Sell the persona before it becomes the liability
The timeline of 2011 is the most useful thing in this profile for any founder whose company is identified with them.
!
2011: The Year the Persona Peaked
Parsons sold control in the same year his personal brand reached its most dangerous point.
Sept 2010
GoDaddy is put up for auction, then withdrawn despite bids reportedly at or above the asking price.
Mar 2011
Parsons posts the Zimbabwe elephant video; PETA closes its account.
Jul 2011
KKR, Silver Lake, and TCV close their purchase of roughly 65% of GoDaddy at a reported $2.25 billion.
Oct 2011
Dan Wheldon is killed in the Las Vegas race tied to a GoDaddy promotion.
Dec 2011
SOPA boycott; 37,000 domains leave in a day; Parsons says the ads will stay because tests say they work.
2013
New CEO Blake Irving; the company "steps away from the jiggle."
2015
IPO; stock rises 30% on its first day.
It is impossible to know whether Parsons saw the risk coming or simply got lucky in 2010 when he walked away from the auction. But the result is clear. He sold at a price that capitalized everything his persona had built, and the buyers paid for the work of removing it: a new CEO, new advertising, a new logo that The Verge found "flattening." He kept his marketing role briefly and then left. GoDaddy became a $4.6 billion S&P 500 company without his voice. The persona built the company. It could not have run the public company GoDaddy became.
Tactic: If your company's brand is your personality, decide in advance what conditions will trigger a sale or succession, such as institutional customers, regulatory scrutiny, or a public listing, and act on them when they appear.
Principle 8
Make the toll collector the villain
The 2005 VeriSign post, "you're about to be taken — again!", and the lawsuits in 2002 and 2003 gave GoDaddy an enemy higher up the supply chain: a registry monopoly that added names "at next to nothing" and wanted to charge registrars more. Parsons explained it to customers like a CPA teaching a class, with four players and a cost structure, and in doing so turned a supplier dispute into a story about the customer's own wallet.
This is a strong position for any middleman. Making a competitor the villain looks petty. Making the toll collector above you the villain makes you the customer's advocate, and GoDaddy's low prices became proof of good intentions instead of just a pricing choice. The working-class grudge was sincere, which is why it persuaded people.
Tactic: Find the cost your customers pay that you do not control, explain its economics to them plainly and specifically, and position your own pricing as the counterweight.
Principle 9
Remove the deadline from the people who matter
Parsons spent most of his career working under scarcity: a $40,000 basement, a near-shutdown before the dot-com crash, workdays that ended in hallucinations. When he finally had the money, he gave his key engineers what he had never had. "You guys have as long as you need to get it done well. Spend as much money as you need to." Nicolette and Schweigert used that freedom to find the material that made the 0311 work, the elastomer in a hollow head behind a very thin face.
The broader point concerns where constraints help. Tight budgets were useful for distribution and pricing, where they forced creativity in how to reach customers. In product engineering at the top of a market, where the only claim that matters is being "noticeably and significantly better," his phrase for PXG, deadlines produce small, timid improvements. He told Jimmy Roberts that most companies let accountants control innovation. He said this as an accountant.
Tactic: Identify the single product your entire position depends on and protect the team building it from schedule and budget pressure, while keeping strict limits on everything else.
Principle 10
Solve sideways: comply in a way that wins
The Scottsdale National nighttime memberships are the cleanest example of a habit that runs through his career. Faced with contractual obligations he didn't want, he did not fight or sue. He complied, in a form that made the obligation harmless. Memberships valid only after sunset satisfied the contract and allowed no golf.
The same instinct shows up elsewhere. Facing the networks' censors, he made being censored part of the ad. Facing a quiet period that made him silent, he dropped the IPO and kept his voice. Facing a gripe site that ranked high in search results, his company bought it. Rule No. 14, "solve your own problems," usually reads as advice about self-reliance. In practice it meant reading the rules more carefully than whoever wrote them, finding the opening, and going through it.
Tactic: When you are stuck with an obligation, before negotiating or litigating, write down every literal requirement and look for a compliant way to meet them that costs you almost nothing.
Principle 11
Build where your obsession already lives
"You always should do what you love because when you love something, it tells you all its secrets." He has credited the line to his father. It sounds sentimental, but Parsons's actual practice was very specific. He was customer, owner, and manufacturer of the same thing. He spent $350,000 a year buying every new club and found that "very rarely did they live up to their claims." He owned the club where he could watch his members buy clubs. He called Nicolette at night with complaints only an obsessive customer would think of. PXG did not come from a market analysis. It came from years of disappointment with products he bought for himself.
The same pattern explains MoneyCounts. A CPA who bought a computer and refused to buy software ended up writing the software. The Harley dealership was a motorcycle rider's idea of a store. His best businesses solved his own problems first and then found millions of people who had the same ones.
Tactic: List the products you buy compulsively and are consistently let down by, then ask whether your frustration is specific and well informed enough to be a product specification.
Principle 12
Treat the wound as an operating problem
For roughly fifty years Parsons ran companies while carrying untreated trauma: temper, depression, the feeling of not belonging. His own explanation is that the ability to disassociate helped him in business. Maybe it did. It also probably contributed to some of his worst public decisions, which made sense to him in isolation and looked terrible to everyone else. The elephant video is what a man who can step out of himself produces when no one around him can step in.
The change came when he treated the trauma the way he treated a struggling business, with a willingness to try unusual remedies and then pay to have them studied. He supported research at Berkeley, Mount Sinai, and the Bronx VA, testified in Arizona, and gave on a schedule of a million dollars every fourteen days. After four days in Hawaii he said, "It was over." The general lesson is not about psychedelics. It is that a founder's inner condition is part of how the company operates, and Rule No. 10, "anything that is not managed will deteriorate," applies to the founder too.
Tactic: Put your own mental health on your management agenda with the same seriousness and budget you give a key business metric, and get professional help well before it shows up in your public decisions.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Bob Parsons, 16 Rules for Success in Business (and Life in General)With regard to whatever worries you, not only accept the worst thing that could happen, but make it a point to quantify what the worst thing could be. Very seldom will the worst consequence be anywhere near as bad as a cloud of "undefined consequences." My father would tell me early on, when I was struggling and losing my shirt trying to get Parsons Technology going, "Well, Robert, if it doesn't work, they can't eat you."
— Bob Parsons, to The New York Times Magazine, 2012Our advertising isn't edgy because I'm an edgy guy. I am, all right, but our advertising is edgy because we stumbled on something that absolutely worked right out of the gate.
— Bob Parsons, on withdrawing GoDaddy's IPO filing, 2006If GoDaddy.com is anything, it is an outspoken company and I am an outspoken CEO. For us, the Quiet Period that came along with the IPO filing has been suffocating.
— Bob Parsons, to CNBC, 2016It's hard to be brave, and when you're being brave, it's the loneliest spot in the world.
— Bob Parsons, to Cigar AficionadoI had friends who had exotic cars or would go to Las Vegas and gamble. What I would do was buy whatever new golf clubs came out.
Maxims
- They can't eat you. Name the worst outcome, put a number on it, and once you can survive it, stop paying for it in fear.
- Two commitments are enough. In a crisis, cut the mission down to doing your job and reaching the next small reward.
- Security is for cadavers. Comfort is where companies and the people running them start to decline.
- Moonlight before you leap. Keep the paycheck until the side business is paying for itself.
- Price from position. Sell cheap when you are unknown and expensive when your buyers are obsessed, and reprice when your position changes.
- Advertising is a purchase. Judge every campaign by the revenue it brings in, never by the reviews.
- Show four inches, not more. Leave the audience a gap to close, and make them close it somewhere you can measure.
- Your voice is equity. Do not sell the freedom to speak without pricing it as carefully as the shares.
- Sell the act at its peak. A founder's persona can build a company that the same persona cannot run once it is grown.
- Manage the founder too. Anything left unmanaged deteriorates, including the person at the top.
