Sramana Mitra: Switching a bit, there’s a tremendous amount of innovation that you have to probably keep your eye on. The pace of startups has picked up tremendously. The number of companies that got seed-funded in 2013 was about 70,000. Since then, now there are 700,000 seed funds. These vary. Some are pre-seed, seed, post-seed,
Sramana Mitra: There’s an interesting question that comes up in that context. About a couple of years ago, Xerox PARC did several days of brainstorming with about 44 Fortune 500 Chief Innovation Officers. This point of hackathons versus business cases of innovative ideas came up. I did a half-day session with this group. One of
Sramana Mitra: This workflow that you described are ideas that are coming from customers and have been picked up and identified by the product organization. Do you have any kind of internal innovation or intrapreneurship program that nurtures grassroots intrapreneurship within the organization? Steven Aldrich: We don’t have a separate team. We have a framework
Steven Aldrich: We started to realize that our view of identity and digital identity needed to be expanded not just around the domain but we also needed to think about the phone number as a part of the identity. We then talked to customers, looked at the existing products in the market, and looked at
Sramana Mitra: It sounds like the narrative around which you’re building the product portfolio is increasingly getting online and getting the word out about the fact that you’re online. Steven Aldrich: From the small business owner and the folks who are getting ready to start their business, that is the number one outcome that they
This conversation delves deep into the nuances of how a sophisticated product organization thinks about new products through customer-driven innovation, internal innovation, as well as external ecosystem-driven innovation. Sramana Mitra: Let’s introduce you and GoDaddy a little bit so we can set context that frames our conversation today. Steven Aldrich: I have been very fortunate