Category: Team

Product Startups Team

Launching Adventure Teams at Moz

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Like many software companies moving from the early to growth stage, we’ve experienced our fair share of challenges and pains. At the start of 2012, there were ~50 Mozzers, a very flat management structure, and things like process, communication, and planning were fairly simple. But over the next 12 months, we more than doubled to nearly 120 (today 130+) and…
Events Moz Team

Vision-Based Framework

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Some companies exist primarily (or exclusively) to make money. Others exist for a variety of non-financial (or pseudo-financial) reasons. But in much of the research about companies that have gone from startup to scale to world-changing status, observers found a common architecture. This architecture is vision-based, and mission driven. It starts with a core purpose and core values, then builds…
Moz Psychology Startups Team

Generosity & Entitlement

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
I’ve been trying something new at Moz. I schedule 90 minutes every week or two for “office hours,” and invite anyone from any team at the company to come visit and chat about whatever’s on their mind. So far, attendance has been sparse (only 1 person the first week, ~10 the 2nd week, and 4 each of the last two…
Moz Startups Team

Well, He’s Not Going to Get Very Far

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Company culture is incredibly fragile. It’s hard for founders/CEOs/execs to understand how little faith and trust people have in us when we stand up at a meeting and say “we believe in our culture” or “we put values first.” That skepticisim has often been built up over years or decades of being let down. People joined companies that claimed to…
Startups Team

Scaling Teams and the Fight Against Human Nature

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
I’ve talked to a lot of founders about their startup experiences and one of the more consistent topics we eventually get to is that, somewhere around 80-100 people, the team dynamics get really hard. So hard, in fact, that many founders opt to leave their companies at around this size and bring in more “professional” management. (via Ana Teresa on…
Moz Personal Team

The Expectation of 100%

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
It’s 4:36am. I’ve been awake for an hour, stumbling through email and catching up on reading. G and I flew back from London two nights ago, and although I slept great last night, I crashed at 10pm tonight and only managed 6 hours before the jetlag kicked in. Casey, who runs the inbound engineering team at Moz, and I had…
Hiring Startups Team

What Company Culture IS and IS NOT

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Frustrated. Disturbed. Disappointed. That’s how I feel after reading a recent article that appeared in Bloomberg Businessweek called “Job Applicants’ Cultural Fit Can Trump Qualifications.” I don’t typically like to rant against stuff on the web, but I’m worried this is a case where the popularity of the piece (note the thousand upvotes, 600+ comments, and hyper-negativity in the Reddit…
Hiring Startups Team

Startups Cannot Afford to Have Indispensable Employees (and not for the reason you think)

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
“Become indispenable to your employer.” That’s the advice I see from job training and professional coaches all the time. And I can empathize with why it exists. Many employers are not supporters of their teams, and treat human resources as, well, resources that just happen to be human. That fleshy cognition thus imbues them with all sorts of problematic and…

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