GoDaddy Doesn`t Go to Wall Street - Bob Parson’s Big Mouth
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Sometimes you can’t take a reason seriously. Honestly, what can you say about a company and a CEO that points to the inability of said CEO to keep his mouth shut as one of its three reasons for pulling its IPO? Oh, I’m not saying he ever slipped during the actual quiet period, but he did get many tongues wagging when he confessed to feeling “suffocated.”
For those who don’t know, the quiet period is the time between when a filing for an IPO is made until one month after the stock hits the market. During this period, the company is not permitted to say or do anything that could even remotely be construed as an attempt to hype its stock. This rule forced Bob Parsons to discontinue his weekly radio show during GoDaddy’s quiet period, since radio and TV communications are covered.
Another thing a company is not allowed to do during the quiet period is make forward-looking statements. As an example, Bob Parsons mentioned a conversation with his co-host Nima Jones on the last broadcast of his radio show before the quiet period. They got to talking about the old song “I ain’t gonna bump no more with no big fat woman!” When Nima closed the show by asking him what he was going to do next, he joked that “I just might go bump with a big fat woman tonight.” After the show, GoDaddy’s General Counsel Attorney informed Parsons that if he’d said that after filing the S-1, it would have counted as a forward-looking statement.
On the other hand, many consider GoDaddy’s and Bob Parsons’ outspokenness to the point of having difficulty with a quiet period to be a good thing. Paul McNamara of Network World noted that he has “acquired a certain respect for Parsons born of his unflagging leadership in documenting and publicizing the systematic abuse of the .com domain name registration process. Where the likes of VeriSign and ICANN have inexplicably abdicated responsibility, Parson has kept a steady drumbeat of enlightening criticism on his blog.”
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