The Good People of Go Daddy And Arizona

Several months ago I was invited to speak to the development organization at Go Daddy about Web 3.0 and the future of the Internet, and last week I had the pleasure of delivering my talk.

I was in Arizona from Wednesday to Sunday, and Friday through Sunday was a little mini vacation. Giving the talk was great fun and I came away with an extraordinary respect for what Go Daddy has grown into. But what was most striking to me about my trip was what I saw in the people I met.

The interesting thing to me was that everyone I met at Go Daddy, but more broadly, everyone I met in Arizona was extraordinarily nice. First, everyone at Go Daddy was incredibly gracious, from the audience, to the President, to the events coordinator. Now you might discount my perspective on Go Daddy since cordiality would be expected from your hosts. But I have certainly interacted with people who were not nearly so nice despite being hosts. So from my perspective the graciousness of the Go Daddy folks was particularly notable.

But what is perhaps a more compelling argument and less situation specific is the response I got from people who had no idea who I was, and who had no particularly specific reason to be nice. This included people on the street in ghost town of Jerome, Arizona, shopkeepers in Sedona, and service workers everywhere along the way that would make extra efforts to say hello, to smile, and to provide unsolicited help, when their peers in New York, or Boston, or the Bay Area would almost certainly not.

I am not one of those people that complain about people not being nice. I think people are generally nice enough. And so it is particularly striking how extra nice Arizonans were. Of course the truth is I have not traveled to that part of the country very often. I have been to Colorado once, but really didn’t have much of a chance to interact with people off the resort we were at. But beyond that I haven’t traveled much to the mid-west or mountain states. I have spent much time on the coasts and in the south, but this is a very different area for me.

This got me thinking about how big this country is and how we develop parochial perspectives about everything. It is so hard to really understand what “Americans” are collectively about. We are so regionally diverse and are driven by so many competing local as well as national factors that it is difficult to really get a clear picture.

All in all it was incredibly energizing to get out and meet and see people outside my regular sphere of interaction. It is so easy to forget how big the world and even the country really is, and so refreshing to occasionally be reminded of that fact.