TEMPE, Ariz. — Less than two minutes after entering GoDaddy’s new engineering center in Tempe, I was taken aback when an employee whizzed down a slide from the second floor into the cafeteria. Then, once arriving upstairs, I was riding a green and black pedal cart around the outskirts of the office. A half hour later, I basked in the Arizona sun on the concrete basketball and sand volleyball courts.
Yes, this does seem like a pretty fun place to work.
GeekWire was in the desert for Phoenix Startup Week and made a pitstop at GoDaddy’s new 150,000 square-foot “Global Technology Center” in the Arizona State University Research Park that opened late last year. The building — just off the newly-renamed street GoDaddy Way — has room for 1,100 engineers, developers, corporate staff (HR and legal), along with GoDaddy’s “small business consultants.”
Highlights include the giant slide, a rock climbing wall, pedal carts, outdoor basketball and volleyball courts, a small skate park, putting greens, a fitness gym and yoga room, and a full-service kitchen with on-site chefs.
GoDaddy, which employs more than 4,000 worldwide and has more than 12 million customers, is one of the larger tech companies in the Phoenix area. Its headquarters is actually 20 miles north of the new Tempe office in Scottsdale, where a majority of Thursday’s Phoenix Startup Week events were held. The company has 13 other offices, including a Seattle location, which opened in November 2013.
GoDaddy has been expanding its business in recent years under CEO Blake Irving, the former Microsoft and Yahoo executive who spoke at the GeekWire Summit in 2013 and has turned GoDaddy’s attention to offering a broad array of online services to small businesses. The company filed for a $100 million IPO this past June.
Check out more photos of space below:
