Category: Startups

Startups

So Why Do I Have the Platform & the Recognition?

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Louis C.K. is one of the most entrepreneurial and authentic self-marketers in the entertainment world. I want to write loads about his email campaigns, his online ticket-sales, and the consistency of his persona, but tonight, it’s very late, I’ve just spent 22 hours on planes and in airports, and so this will have to do. From the NYTimes’ interview with…
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…
Startups

Why I Never Want to Have a “For-Profit” Business

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Making money is an excellent side-effect of successful businesses. But, it’s a terrible core purpose. Last week, Fred Wilson wrote one of my favorite posts in a while on Short-Term Thinking vs. Long-Term Thinking. Here’s an excerpt: …Sure Samsung is making a killing on handset sales right now. So is Apple. That goes to their bottom line and then onto…
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…
Moz Startups Team

7 Ways We Try to Make Internal Emails Better

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Email is a tough communication medium. Conveying tone, voice, attitude and disposition are all stymied by the the format. Efficiency is a good thing over email, but it can lead to suspicion of dismisiveness or even contempt by a reader. And the cycle of misinterpreted emails leading to bad blood between people is something we’ve all experienced. So how do…
Moz Product Startups

Why Does a Big Funding Round Slow Down Your Pace of Innovation?

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
“Why can’t we build it faster?!” I’ve never met an entrepreneur in the software field who doesn’t ask themselves that question daily. For a lot of the past few years, I had an excuse: the constraint of capital. But, since April (when we raised $18mm), that argument’s invalidated. There’s an excess of cash on the balance sheet, and yet, from…

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