Chief Technology Officer, Godaddy
Search every verified Charles Beadnall interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. In a 2019 interview, Charles Beadnall, Chief Technology Officer at GoDaddy, described his role as overseeing the company's technical direction, engineering standards, and practices, including the migration of services to AWS and the implementation of machine learning. He stated that GoDaddy focuses on helping small businesses get online through domain names, website hosting, email, and search engine visibility. Beadnall emphasized the importance of diversity and inclusion, saying that a diverse workforce helps the company address the varied needs of its customers and that GoDaddy has been a leader in providing transparency on pay parity and diversity metrics. Beadnall discussed GoDaddy's approach to innovation, which he described as a continuous cycle of data-backed experimentation where teams form hypotheses, measure results, and treat unsuccessful experiments as instructive. He noted that the company uses a "horizon" model to prioritize work across steady-state businesses, up-and-coming ventures, and nascent ideas. Beadnall also said that GoDaddy has shifted its definition of customer success from product purchase to active usage, such as publishing content and generating traffic, and is using machine learning to tailor experiences to individual customer needs.
“I'm the chief technology officer at GoDaddy, which basically means I'm responsible for the technical direction for the company and also the engineering standards and practices that we use across the company — that includes moving our services to AWS and implementing machine learning.”
“GoDaddy is really focused on helping small businesses get online — we're probably best known for selling domain names but we also help with website hosting, email, and getting found through search engines.”
“Diversity and inclusion is a very important aspect for us — having a diverse and inclusive environment for employees helps us better address the diverse and unique needs that our customers have, and we've been a leader in providing visible information such as pay parity and diversity numbers.”
“What's next is making it even easier for customers to use the products we already have — we're the market leader in domain names and one of the largest hosting companies in the world, the largest WordPress host in the world, and we want to make the customer experience even better.”
“We've come up with a formula where we expect teams to come up with a hypothesis, have the data they're going to measure the result of that experiment against, actually build the experiment and then run it — it's a continuous cycle of data-backed experimentation.”
“Many times the unsuccessful experiments are just as instructive as the ones where the metric moves the way you want it to, because ultimately it's a data point that helps you identify what really does and doesn't resonate with customers.”
“We use a 'horizon' model to prioritize work — horizon one are steady-state businesses we invest in differently, horizon two is up-and-coming businesses, and horizon three is brand-new nascent ideas with different investment rates and success metrics.”
“We've moved from defining success as 'they bought a product' to 'they're using a product' and further to 'they have published content and are actively getting traffic' — we're also using machine learning to identify the uniqueness of each customer and what they will find valuable.”
Learn more about AWS Executive Insights at – https://amzn.to/2yoqVgu Miriam McLemore sits down with Charles Beadnall, CTO of GoDaddy, as we hear his perspective on innovation at scale when it comes to people, culture, and organization. This interview is the latest in the 'Conversations with Leaders' series, on AWS Executive Insights.
Sign in to search the full transcript archive, filter by topic, and access every quote from Charles Beadnall.
The summary and quote tags on this profile are produced with AI assistance from verified, first-person interview transcripts, then checked by our team to confirm the speaker's identity and the accuracy of every quote. See how we verify →