Every week another founder friend sells their tech business.
This week it was Joshua Strebel and Sally Strebel, co-founders of Pagely, who sold their managed WordPress business to GoDaddy.
I’m very happy for both of them. They did it their own way and built something big and valuable over 15 long years.
Josh and Sally started Pagely at Gangplank HQ in Chandler, Arizona in 2005.
It was one of the first scrappy WordPress managed hosting providers back then. Just after WordPress launched. Crazy early.
Now their 35 or so employees manage many of the largest WordPress websites in the world.
Totally bootstrapped. No outside funding in the beginning or after that.
I remember when Josh was trying to talk angel investors in Arizona but he didn’t getting any interest.
Maybe it was because he was young, energetic, and said “dude” and “fuck” a lot in every conversation. Kinda anti-establishment.
He also didn’t want to deal with old-school investors at the dawn of a new era in web software, blogging, and social media.
They just built something and start selling it to the growing tribe of WordPress fanatics. It grew and grew. A real adventure.
GoDaddy is also based in Arizona with offices in the Phoenix area.
GoDaddy was also self-funded by founder Bob Parsons at the beginning and was revenue-funded until they went public. Now GDDY is worth over $10 billion.
It will be a big change for the ninja Pagely team to be part of monstrous GoDaddy.
Sounds like an interesting challenge that can help them do bigger things.
Congrats Josh, Sally, and team Pagely.
#yesAZ
