GoDaddy CEO Scott Wagner: Protection, Security And Privacy At The Core Of What We Do | CNBC

Boy, well, Facebook and all the social media platforms, really, because their entire business is based on people's personal information. Just think about the utility that everybody gets on those enormous social media platforms. It's based on their information, and so is their business model. And when those things come in conflict, boy, you're seeing trust and people's trust in the platform. Really obviously come to the forefront. The nice thing for us as GoDaddy is our business isn't based on using people's personal information. It's actually protecting it. It's actually providing tools, software for not only your online name and brand and website and email, but all the software you use and actually protecting that information. So protection, security, and privacy is sort of at the core of everything we do, and obviously That's going to get more and more important, not just in the next couple of weeks, but in the months and years to come.

There's an interesting shift in the way that you guys are going about running your business, this partnership with Amazon, where over time a lot of the data that you guys have is going to— not the domain business, but a lot of the rest of it is going to be moving to AWS. Why do that? Why do that now?

Well, first of all, what we do for people is to provide applications and experiences. And we're a global company. We do it around the world. And AWS is going to allow us to provide our software and experiences all around the world in a faster and actually more secure environment. Now, the data specifically can rely and sit in an infrastructure, but when that's in the GoDaddy environment, we're protecting it, we're using it. That's part of the value we provide. So our reason to do it is to provide better, faster experiences for our customers all around the world. And, and this is a big and, Amazon is going to use some of our products. We're excited about the possibility of embedding more and more of GoDaddy's software into the Amazon experience and providing value for our customers, not just through their own website, but connecting it more and more to Amazon. So this is a partnership. Not necessarily a vendor relationship.

Scott, I want to go back to this conversation around data. I know you guys had 17 million customers in 2017. You said you're on the path towards 25 million customers. Strong growth trajectory, but also sounds like you do have access to a lot of data, even if it's not personal. I know you mentioned you're in the business of protecting it. How?

Well, again, how— boy, this is at the root of the company. For 20 years, you know, we provided domain names. A third of the world's domain name queries reside and run through GoDaddy servers and our software. So the core of all of our engineering is actually security and privacy. And there's all sorts of encryption and protection embedded in every single one of our products that keeps data secure within our environment.

Scott, back to this Amazon partnership and what you see as the core assets and the core value that GoDaddy itself delivers. What are the main drivers of your business? Is it small business health and small business growth, the transition to even taking payments digitally and doing e-commerce? Those are areas that you're expanding into. But I'm wondering, as we try to track your growth trajectory, what are the main metrics that we should be watching?

Oh yeah, thanks. 2 big ones: customers, the number of customers that, that we serve, and our engagement with customers. So today we have 17 million customers. 5 years ago we had 10, and we're going to continue to grow our customer count. You know, the market that we serve is enormous. There are 500 million not just small businesses, but organizations, nonprofits, political candidacies. All of those ideas need to be online. You know, just think about it. The most important thing, frankly, you can do for your idea is get it online and have it work and have it work great. And that's really the core businesses of GoDaddy. So if you think about 17 million customers, there's a heck of a lot of runway all around the world for us to grow our customer base. And then engagement with existing customers. Today, the average customer spends $139 a year with GoDaddy across products, particularly around getting an online presence— domain names, website building tools, email and productivity. There's a whole range of things that our customers are frankly asking us to do and provide for them to help their idea grow and thrive and have success in the world. And, you know, as we do that, it's going to translate into more spend per customer.

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