Bob Parsons

Bob Parsons

Robert Parsons who is more commonly called Bob Parsons is an American entrepreneur. He is the founder and executive chairman of ‘Go Daddy’ which is a group of companies including Blue Razor Domains, Domains by Proxy, Starfield Technologies and Wild West Domains.

Parsons was born on 27th November 1950 in Baltimore, Maryland. He belonged to a middle class family that struggled financially most of his childhood. He admits that not much was given to him in a silver spoon rather he earned almost everything that he has today. He did several small jobs such as selling newspapers, work in a factory, construction companies and even gas stations. He barely graduated from high school after which he enlisted in the US Marine Corps where he was attached to the 26th Marine Regiment. Parsons was a rifleman in 1969 for the Delta Company during a tour of duty in Vietnam. He suffered some injuries while on duty and had to spend two months in a hospital until his wounds had healed. Parsons received the Combat Action Ribbon, the Purple Heart and the Vietnam Gallantry Cross.

After his experience in Vietnam, Parsons became a changed man and decided to gain a college degree. So he attended the University of Baltimore and in 1975 graduated magna cum laude with a degree in accounting. After graduation he took the CPA exam, passed it and thus became a certified public accountant. Parsons worked in many companies mostly at accounting and management positions. Learning how to program a computer was merely by chance and his good luck. Eventually Bob Parsons’s interest in programming increased. He bought a Radio Shack TRS 80 computer and spent hours programming. Parsons took his hobby and turned it into a successful business. He wrote an accounting program and decided to sell it. Soon he launched a software company which he called ‘Parsons Technology’. The company which had started in the basement of his house grew to have 1000 employees and covered 4% of the software market in North America. In 1994 he sold the company to Intuit for $64 million.

He founded Go Daddy in 1997. It was a web hosting company and an internet domain registrar. Today the GO Daddy group of companies, which is accredited by ICANN, has three domain registrars under it that are GoDaddy.com, Wild West Domains and Starfield Technologies.   There is a new domain name registered on it every second and it has more than 5 million customers all over the world. Parsons’ blog is one of the most frequently visited blog on the web. He also hosts an internet radio show called ‘Go Daddy Live with Bob Parsons’. He stepped down from his position of the company’s CEO in 2011. Parsons’ entrepreneurial career clearly exhibits his business philosophy which was to make low price products with rich features along with an excellent customer support system. This is what made his business ventures into great successes.

Parsons received the ‘Ed Denison Business Leadership of the Year’ at the Governor’s Celebration of Innovation and Arizona Corporate Excellence Award in 2007.