Top female executive leaves Yahoo to become Go Daddy’s CTO (updated)

Elissa Murphy, a top female executive at Yahoo, is leaving to become CTO at Go Daddy.

Murphy joined Yahoo in November 2010 as the VP of engineering for cloud services. Murphy was poached by Blake Irving, Yahoo’s former chief product officer, who became CEO of Go Daddy on Jan. 7, according to a report in AllThingsD. In that short time period, Irving has already taken another Yahoo employee, SVP of consumer and global platform group James Carroll, who is now in charge of Go Daddy’s international efforts.

“From my perspective as a product guy, Go Daddy is not yet a world class platform, but we have the opportunity to build the largest scale platform for tiny micro-businesses in the world,” said Irving in an interview with VentureBeat. “What you saw today is Elissa Murphy saying she thinks this is an amazing story and different from other companies. You can be a cog in a company that has already changed the world in a significant way, or you can come to a company that is poised to do it and be the reason that happened.”

With two defections in two weeks, Irving has quite the track record. Go Daddy is the world’s largest provider of web hosting, domain name registrations, and SSL certificates. He joined Go Daddy to fuel growth at home and abroad, and change the way people view the brand. Irving said recruiting top people with expertise at building global technology companies is a priority, and he has also hired employees away from Google, eBay, and Microsoft.

“Go Daddy is a sort of unknown quantity within the technology community, few people know what we really do,” he said. “We are doing something huge and making that apparent through hiring right now. I am looking for people who have done big things and are taking on things that are important. Every person I have hired shares a passion for customers and wants to do something good. You will start seeing us make that apparent to marketplace over next months.”

Photo Credit: Life at Yahoo blog