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GoDaddy to close both Austin offices and lay off hundreds of workers as pandemic impacts business

GoDaddy has offices across the country, including this one in Sunnyvale, Calif.
The tech company GoDaddy announced Wednesday it would be laying off more than 300 workers, including many in Austin, and closing both of its offices there as well.
The change comes as the company, which offers website-hosting services as well as social media management for businesses, has experienced revenue losses in the latter of the two offerings, formally known as GoDaddy Social. The office closings and layoffs were announced in an email to employees from the company's CEO Aman Bhutani.
Overall, GoDaddy's financial expectations for the second quarter have actually gone up despite the pandemic. This follows a trend seen across many tech companies in recent months, which have been able to maintain a firm economic standing even as other sectors have fallen drastically. Nevertheless, the decline in revenue from GoDaddy Social, which is heavily based in Austin, created the need for steep cuts to that part of the company.
"Even as our overall business continues to perform well and we are updating our revenue guidance for Q2 as evidence of that, we are still facing challenges in U.S. outbound sales, including GoDaddy Social sales," Bhutani said in the email, which was posted to the company's website. "The outbound sales teams have made many creative efforts over the last three months to reverse the impacts of COVID-19, but the results of these improvements are still far below what we need for the operations to be sustainable."
Shortly after announcing the layoffs, the company issued a statement saying its second-quarter revenue would exceed previous expectations by 1%. Purchases of website domains and marketing services led the rise, the company says.
The layoffs also come just a year and a half after GoDaddy purchased Main Street Hub, a social media management company based in Austin, for $125 million.
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Popular
(Tesla)
Giga Texas, the massive Tesla factory in southeast Travis County is getting even bigger.
The company filed with the city of Austin this week to expand its headquarters with a new 500,000-square-foot building. The permit application notes “GA 2 and 3 expansion,” which indicates the company will make two general assembly lines in the building.
More details about the plans for the building are unclear. The gigafactory has been focused on Model Y production since it opened in April, but the company is also aiming for Cybertruck production to kick off in mid-2023.
While there is room for expansion on the 3.3 square miles of land Tesla has, this move comes after CEO Elon Musk’s recent comments about the state of the economy and its impact on Tesla.
In a May interview with Tesla Owners Silicon Valley, Musk said the gigafactories in Berlin and Austin are “gigantic money furnaces” and said Giga Texas had manufactured only a small number of cars.
And in June, Musk sent a company wide email saying Tesla will be reducing salaried headcount by 10%, then later tweeted salaried headcount should be fairly flat.
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(Dullnig Ranch Sales)
You’ll have to leave city limits if you’re looking for a proper ranch property like 417 Acres Shipp Lake Ranch, aptly named for its acreage. The property comes built out with three farmhouses, one of which has bedrooms and two bathrooms and two of which have two bedrooms and one bathroom. The nearly untouched property, which surrounds the 100-plus-acre Shipp Lake, has remained in the same family since the early 1900s and gives you picturesque views for the making of a dream home. In fact, the previous owners ran a water ski camp on the property.
Sitting waterside on Lake Austin, this home gives you the unique opportunity to own a piece of the lush Hill Country with views of Mount Bonnell. The 2,750-square foot, three-bedroom, four-bathroom house allows you to integrate indoor and outdoor life with large windows opening to an outdoor living area. The crown jewel is the .76-acre parcel of land that tapers off to your own lakeside resort, featuring an covered outdoor kitchen, fire pit, stone boat house to store your water sports supplies and veranda sitting at the mouth of the water, perfect for an entertainer.
Got dreams of becoming a real Texas rancher? 7814 Brown Cemetery Rd. is the perfect place to start with 40 rolling acres of land and its very own swimming hole. Just east of Austin in Manor, the modest-on-the-outside home clocks at 4,412 square feet with five bedrooms and five-and-a-half bathrooms, but there are an additional two living structures on the property. The horseshoe-shaped pond sits in the heart of the property and comes equipped with a water slide, diving board and a fishing dock.