GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani on the enduring power of the website

Today’s episode of Decoder is a little different: I’m talking with GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani, and we did this one live onstage last week at an event hosted by AlixPartners in Palo Alto, California, so you’ll hear the audience in the background.

GoDaddy is one of those companies that feels tied to an earlier era. In this case, the company had a hugely controversial reputation in the web 1.0 days, when it built a huge business selling domain names and ran a bunch of pretty sexist ads — but all of that is long in the past. The company still runs a huge domain name business, but Aman has been CEO since 2019, and he’s been building out what he calls adjacencies — basically, helping the very small businesses that run websites on GoDaddy grow their operations. You’ll hear him talk about a barbershop owner that runs a couple sites as one of his biggest customers — one he personally handled customer service for.

But the business of the web has really changed in the past few years: the walled garden social network era really took over in the past decade, and now huge changes to Google Search and the addition of generative AI have put a massive strain on the very foundations of the open web.