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Posts by Rand Fishkin:

Seattle

A New Blog and a New Challenge

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Over the past few years, I’ve been tremendously impressed by a handful of bloggers in the field of technology, startups and investing. In particular: Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures Mark Suster of GRP Partners Brad Feld of Foundry Group Three qualities about each have impressed and inspired me: 1) They’ve all had a dramatic impact on their local environment…
Startups

Making Email More Scalable

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
UPDATE: This experiment in productivity didn’t work; more details at the end. If you’ve been referred to this blog post in an email reply, first off, hello! and second, I’m sorry. If I were a less busy or more efficient person, I would have (and should have) responded to your request individually, rather than through this post. You deserve more…
Startups

Fear of Ignorance

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
This past week, I was interviewing a candidate for a VP role along with two of our engineering leads. Everyone in the room excluding myself was classically “technical” – they could write code, had experience solving hard software problems and a background in computer science. I wrote my last line of PHP in 2004, and it had to be rewritten…
Uncategorized

Inflection Points: Bravery vs. Foolishness

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Inflection points in startup life technically happen every day, but in my experience, there’s a difference between the once-a-week variety and the truly BIG decisions – to sell the company, to raise funding, to pivot on business models, to expand into a new location or new product. Sometimes these happen organically as a result of turning the flywheel, but on…
Uncategorized

Just Keep Going

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
In 1997 I was just graduating from high school and started to design small business websites using Microsoft Frontpage and a variety of amateurish HTML hacks. In 2001, I dropped out of college, two classes away from graduating to work full time at a tiny web consulting business with my Mom. That didn’t go very well.   From 2001-2003, we…
Uncategorized

Sometimes VC Just Ain’t Enough

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
We’ve gotten a lot of interest from venture capital, private equity and other types of investment firms lately at Moz. Nearly every week features a phone call or two to answer some of that inbound interest. I suspect it’s due to multiple factors, but the current, hot investment environment and  upward slope of the search marketing sector combined with some…
Uncategorized

The Dangerous Hubris of the Startup World

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Students of history will almost certainly be familiar with the 7 Deadly Sins – the list of human vices that are,  purportedly, the source for much of humanity’s evil. Of these, one in particular stands out: In almost every list  Pride, or  hubris, is considered the original and most serious of the seven deadly sins, and the source of the…
Events Marketing Moz Startups

Why I’m a Conference Whore

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Mark Suster, whose blog and tweets I enjoy and whose investments strike me as innovative and smart wrote a blog post in October, Be Careful Not to Become a Conference Ho, that’s been grating on me. The central tenet seems wrong, or at the least, myopic. via XKCD Granted, the Internet is filled with content I find disagreeable. But, in…

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