Go Daddy locating new office in Hiawatha

The founder and CEO of Go Daddy - the Internet firm with a pretty race car driver as its face - is expanding to an office building in Hiawatha and not to downtown Cedar Rapids.

Bob Parsons, who formerly ran an educational software firm in Hiawatha, made the Go Daddy announcement in a teleconference call early Thursday evening.

The Go Daddy location is the former Hiawatha home of Parson's former firm, Parsons Technology. It sits at 1 Parsons Drive in Hiawatha.

Parsons said Go Daddy is immediately looking for 60 employees for the Hiawatha center and he said he expects a couple hundred more to be hired in the next year. The new jobs are a result of company growth, not the move of  jobs from other states, he said.

The job openings range from call center customer-service employees to those in network engineering, marketing, and development, Parsons said.

He said Cedar Rapids Mayor Ron Corbett, who made a late play to get Go Daddy to come to downtown Cedar Rapids, succeeded it making Go Daddy take a step back from its  previously announced plans to locate in Hiawatha.

At the end of the day, though, Parsons said the Hiawatha building is perfect for the company and so he decided to move ahead on those plans.

“Mayor Corbett gave it the old college try, and he certainly got our attention. But it was an uphill battle for him,” Parsons said.

Go Daddy, which bills itself as the world's largest Web host provider and domain name registrar, has its headquarters in Scottsdale, Ariz.,  employs over 2,600 people in the United States as well as in Amsterdam and Singapore, and already has 100 employees in the Cedar Rapids metro area. They had been working out of an office building on Collins Road NE, but already have moved to the Hiawatha facility, Parsons admitted.

Earlier this month, Hiawatha officials fumed that Corbett was trying to derail jobs headed to Hiawatha. In the end, Hiawatha was taking 100 jobs from Cedar Rapids, a fact that Go Daddy's Parsons acknowledged was the case.

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