GoDaddy CEO explains why it delayed its IPO
Instead, it waited until today.
In an interview with Fortune's Dan Primack, GoDaddy CEO Blake Irving - formerly of Microsoft and Yahoo - explains it was a combination of the Alibaba IPO sucking up a lot of tech investor attention, followed by general economic uncertainty over things like the direction of interest rates and oil prices.
Irving said:
As for timing, a lot of companies sat on the sidelines waiting for Alibaba's IPO, and then the next couple of months were pretty choppy in the markets....In fact, we went so far as to make sure we'd hit the road after the FOMC meeting happened, so that we'd know the results. There was a lot of noise around oil prices and unemployment and the strength of the dollar. If Janet Yellen was going to provide language that would strongly indicate something like significant and imminent rate hikes, we wanted to know about it....We didn't want to be on the road show with investors who are thinking about what they're going to sell rather than what they're going to buy.
It looks to be the right move. GoDaddy's stock raced out of the gate with a 30% gain this morning.